The Singapore Sling

Colorful, Exotic, Legendary — Yet Most of Us Have Never Tasted It

You’ve probably heard of this classic cocktail, but have you ever tasted one?  No?  Well, you’re not alone.  It’s a drink people rarely think to order these days.  That’s a shame, because the Singapore Sling is a tall looker with an enticing flavor.  Perfect for summer sippin’.

The Singapore Sling originated in the Long Bar at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore (natch) sometime between 1905 and 1915.  The whiz who created the drink was one of the establishment’s bartenders, Ngiam Tong Boon.  It was an instant hit, and earned the hotel worldwide fame.  Over time, however, the cocktail — and the Raffles Hotel — fell out of favor.  The hotel even lost the recipe.

A wide variety of recipes for the drink have sprung up since then, many claiming to be “authentic.”  We may never know the precise ingredients and proportions of the original recipe.  But cocktail sleuths and historians have done yeoman’s duty researching the composition of the drink.  So today we have a good “standard” recipe.

And what a drink that recipe produces!  Once you taste it, the Singapore Sling just might become your favorite summer cooler.

Summer Pasta Salad

A Riff on Bert Greene’s Famous Ziti Salad

Cold pasta salad is almost a food group of its own in the United States.  It’s a dish we can eat year round, but particularly love when the weather turns hot and sultry — as it does every July and August in my part of the US.  And there’s something about a pasta salad made with mayonnaise that’s particularly satisfying.

My favorite main course pasta/mayo salad is Tuna Pasta Salad. But when I want to use a cold pasta salad as a side dish, this dill-heavy delight is the one I often turn to, particularly when homegrown tomatoes are in season. It’s a riff on the pasta salad made famous by the late Bert Greene at his gourmet food store (appropriately called “The Store”) on Long Island in the 1960s. This single recipe put his shop on the map — people would line up to buy the stuff.

Make this dish and your family will be lining up at dinner time with happy and hungry faces. And they’ll probably bring friends.

Fog Cutter Cocktail

A Tiki Charmer from Trader Vic

Trader Vic didn’t invent Tiki.  Credit (or blame) for that goes to Donn Beach (founder of the Don the Beachcomber restaurants), as discussed in our posts on The Zombie and Planter's Punch. But these days, Trader Vic (a/k/a Victor Jules Bergeron, Jr.) is probably better known than Beach.

Don the Beachcomber restaurants have mostly died out (the 3 that currently bear the name were revived in 2001), but Trader Vic’s moniker is still on restaurants in the US and throughout the world. And he invented perhaps the most famous Tiki drink of all time — the Mai Tai.

Trader Vic also concocted other popular (and flavorful) Tiki drinks, including today’s special: The Fog Cutter. It’s a smooth potion with delightful citrus flavor. The Fog Cutter lost some luster in the 80s (when mixed drinks in general, and Tiki specifically, fell out of favor). But its tremendous taste has been rediscovered in the past decade or so.

Take a sip of this beauty, and you’ll wonder how anyone could ever stop drinking it.

Hungarian Cucumber Salad

Fresh Dill Adds Flavor Magic

Throughout much of the US, local cucumbers are plentiful and inexpensive in our markets.  And if you’re growing them in your garden, you may be looking for new ways to use them.

This simple cucumber salad has a cool, refreshing flavor that mates well with grilled and barbecued meats, fish, and poultry — all the staples of the summer table.  But it also works with hearty stews and casseroles, so you can keep serving it when the weather turns cooler.  It makes a tangy side dish, but it has enough eye- and taste-appeal that you can serve it as a first course.  And because the dressing contains no oil, each serving has very few calories — so eat as much as you like! 

It’s inexpensive, healthy, and takes just minutes to prepare.  Best of all, the flavor improves if you make it a few hours ahead of time.  Perfect. 

The Zombie

The Bad Boy of Tiki Drinks

There are zombies and there are Zombies. We all know the zombie that Wikipedia calls “an animated corpse brought back to life by mystical means, such as witchcraft.” They’re a staple of horror flicks. That’s not what we’re talking about here.

We’re talking about the Zombie Cocktail. Wikipedia says it “was concocted to help a hung-over customer get through a business meeting” — but the customer returned a few days later complaining that the drink had turned him into “a zombie.”

Which wasn’t surprising. Because as originally mixed, this was one potent drink — so potent that its originator, Donn Beach (founder of the Don the Beachcomber restaurants) instituted a limit of two per customer.

Of course, that policy probably served as marketing hype, since it almost guaranteed that a fair number of customers would try to order more than their allotted quota of these bad boys. Given the popularity this drink achieved, it sounds like the marketing worked.

But what really worked was the taste. This is one outstanding cocktail — and it’s largely responsible for launching the Tiki craze.

By the way, you don’t have to worry about becoming a zombie when you drink a Zombie. There’s a less potent version that still retains the great taste of the original.

The Ultimate Chocolate Brownie

Moist, Luscious, and Irresistible

If you like chocolate, you like brownies.  There’s no better vehicle for bundling maximum chocolate flavor into an easy-to-eat package.  Brownies combine chocolate with fat and sugar in a delicate balance that seems to make chocolate even more chocolaty.  And this recipe does it better than any other.

OK, so I haven’t sampled every brownie recipe known to mankind (there are thousands!), but I’ve had more than my share.  And if there’s a better recipe out there — one that delivers deeper, richer chocolate flavor — I’d like to know about it.  Until someone demonstrates otherwise, I can confidently say that this recipe is the champion.

How appropriate!  With the Olympics going on right now, you can bake a batch — and win your own gold medal.

Planter's Punch

The Great Grandaddy of Tiki Drinks 

Let’s begin by acknowledging that Planter’s Punch originally had nothing to do with Tiki.  How could it?  It started out in Jamaica about 200 years ago, while Tiki is an American invention that was born in the 1930s.

Still, if Planter’s Punch had not existed, Tiki might not either.  I’ll explain that later.

But first we need to introduce today’s drink:  It’s tall, cool, rum-laden, and delectable.

Anything this refreshing has got my number, especially with the miserably hot summer we’re having.