Flight Savor Fare

I’m always looking for new cocktails for Flight’s Thursday night martini night. The other day I found one in the Wall Street Journal called “Sherry Cobbler.” WSJ columnist Eric Felten always has an interesting story to go with his drinks, so I’m never sure if I’m sold on the story or the drink itself.

Charles Dickens came to the United States back in the day and decided we were a nation of barbarians and deplored most everything American from spittoons to slavery. There was one thing, however, that he found absolutely wonderful — the Sherry Cobbler. He wrote about it in his novel “Martin Chuzzlewit.” It soon became the drink of undergrads at Oxford even though the only ice to be had in England came from fishmongers whose frozen water was “taken from stagnant ponds and noisome ditches.” Felten says, “It is a testament to just how good a Sherry Cobbler is that the cocktail flourished despite being made with fishy ice.” There’s more about the “hollow reed with which the drink was consumed” but that’s another story you’ll have to follow the link for.

See what I mean about the story? Now here’s the recipe:

3 oz oloroso sherry

1/4 oz orange curacao

1 lemon wedge

orange slices

Squeeze the lemon wedge into a shaker with ice, and add the spent rind along with the sherry, strain into a tumbler filled with finely crushed ice. Garnish with pineapple and whatever else you can find. Serve with long straws, the only way to achieve Chuzzlewitian Cobbler ecstasy.