Here’s an “oh-crap-I-need-a-cocktail” cocktail that shouldn’t require a panicked sprint to the store. It’s adapted from the new book Slow Drinks by New Jersey–based bartender Danny Childs. The book’s focus: Helping folks find and use seasonal ingredients around them. In many cases, that means foraging for local fruits and plants, and in others it’s simply about using what you already have on hand. In the case of this drink, it’s both.
Childs’ original recipe centers on a homemade cranberry jam made from fruit foraged from an abandoned bog, but if you have leftover cranberry sauce chilling in the fridge, he says, it’s a suitable sub. The concentrated crans sweeten up an herbaceous mix of gin and amaro, and it all gets dressed with a sprig of evergreen you can easily snag from an obliging tree.
Pine Barrens
Yield: 1 cocktail
Ingredients:
1 ½ ounce London dry gin
½ ounce piney “Alpine” amaro
¾ ounce freshly squeezed lime juice
2 tablespoons cranberry jam (or sauce!)
Evergreen sprig, for garnish
Procedure:
To a cocktail shaker, add the gin, amaro, lime juice, and cranberry
Shake and strain over fresh ice in a rocks glass.
Garnish with an evergreen sprig.
Notes and Substitutions:
Braulio or Pasubio amaro are recommended here, but if you ask us: Any amaro is better than no amaro. If Campari or Aperol is all you’ve got, give it a whirl.
No need to be super precious about your dry gin of choice. Bombay Sapphire, Sipsmith, Beefeater, Plymouth, Tanqueray—they’ll all do.
Excerpted with permission from Slow Drinks by Danny Childs, published by Hardie Grant Publishing, October 2023, RRP $32.00 Hardcover.