Main ingredients
Citrus recipes
Acid that makes everything taste more like itself.
Citrus gives a kitchen three separate ingredients from one fruit and they are not interchangeable. The juice is acid and water. The zest is aromatic oil and almost no acid. The pith is bitter and is almost always a mistake. A dish that tastes flat usually wants zest, and a dish that tastes heavy usually wants juice, and confusing the two is why lemon is so often added to no effect. Bottled juice is a different product from fresh and is detectable in anything where the citrus is the point. The recipes here say which part of the fruit is doing the work, and they call for unwaxed fruit wherever the peel goes anywhere near the food.
25 recipes
Whisky Sour
Whiskey, lemon and sugar shaken with egg white until it wears a thick pale collar, with bitters dotted across the foam.
Singapore Sling
Gin, cherry brandy and pineapple built long over ice — the hotel-bar drink that survived a century of people getting it wrong.
Painkiller
Dark rum with pineapple, orange and coconut cream, shaken rather than blended, and finished with far more grated nutmeg than seems reasonable.
Daiquiri
Three ingredients and nowhere to hide: white rum, lime and sugar, shaken hard and drunk cold and straight up.
Cherries Jubilee
Cherries in a light syrup flamed with kirsch and spooned burning over vanilla ice cream, which is a dish and a performance at once.
Caribbean Rum Punch
A jug punch on the old sour-sweet-strong-weak ratio, spiced with nutmeg and Angostura and made to sit on a table rather than a bar.
Zombie
Three rums, two juices, falernum and absinthe over crushed ice — the strongest drink on any tiki menu, and built to taste as though it is not.
Mojito
Mint pressed rather than pounded, with white rum, lime and soda over crushed ice, so it tastes of the leaf and not of the stalk.
Mai Tai
Aged rum, lime, orange curaçao and almond orgeat, shaken over crushed ice — a rum drink with no fruit juice in it beyond the lime.
Grilled Pineapple with Rum Syrup
Pineapple wedges charred over high heat and spooned with a dark rum, lime and brown sugar syrup reduced until it just coats.
Ti' Punch
Rhum agricole, cane syrup and a squeezed disc of lime, served without ice and mixed by the person drinking it.
Sidecar
Cognac, orange liqueur and lemon shaken cold and served up, sharp and clean, in a glass with a sugared rim if you want one.
Rum Swizzle
Two rums, two juices and bitters churned with crushed ice until the glass frosts and the drink turns cloudy and cold.
Planter's Punch
One of sour, two of sweet, three of strong, four of weak — the old rhyme, built on dark Jamaican rum and drunk long over ice.
Paloma
Tequila lengthened with grapefruit soda and lime over ice — the drink Mexico actually orders, rather than the one it exports.
Michelada
Cold lager with lime, hot sauce and a salted rim — savoury, sour and far more refreshing in heat than it sounds.
Margarita
Tequila, lime and orange liqueur shaken hard and served in a glass salted on one side only, so you can choose.
Hurricane
Dark and light rum with passion fruit and citrus, sweet and red and considerably stronger than it looks.
Frozen Strawberry Daiquiri
White rum, lime and frozen strawberries blended to a thick slush that holds a straw upright.
Frozen Melon Colada
White rum, melon liqueur, pineapple and coconut blended into a thick pale-green frozen cocktail with a clean lime finish.
French 75
Gin, lemon and sugar lengthened with champagne — a sour that arrives in a flute and drinks far more easily than it should.
Dark and Stormy
Ginger beer and lime with dark rum floated on top, so the first sip is rum and the last is ginger.
Caipirinha
Whole lime muddled with sugar and cachaça in the glass it is drunk from, with the peel oils very much part of the drink.
Bahama Mama
Two rums with coconut, pineapple and grenadine, shaken and poured tall over ice so the red sinks through it.
Aviation
Gin, maraschino, lemon and a measure of violet liqueur that turns it the pale grey-blue the drink is named for.