Highball

My mother's highball was a bourbon, Jim Beam or something cheaper, and 7-Up or Coke. My best memory of it is when we drove the Santa Fe Trail together on one of my trips back home, going the full length from Independence, Mo. to Santa Fe. We'd check into the motel each evening and repair to the swimming pool with the bourbon, the mixer and ice.

Turns out, however, that the original highball is whiskey and ginger ale -- and that's a heckuva a good drink. I used Crown Royal and Fever Tree ginger ale and it made a refreshing, balanced drink, not too sweet and very smooth. Even in this day of craft spirits and homemade mixers, sometimes that's all you need.

Zombie

A Hurricane would have been the drink of choice for Mardi Gras, but the local market didn't have passion fruit juice, so I got some pineapple juice and went for a rum alternative -- a Zombie.

It was appropriate enough because I've been binge-watching The Walking Dead, the cult-hit zombie series on AMC. It was predictable that my brother would like it -- hero a sheriff, lots of gun play -- but when our mild-mannered, Chevy Chase bridge partners also confessed their addiction, I knew I had to give it a chance. So I've been bitten.

Rum was the order of the day because I've been reading Wayne Curtis's And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails. The book itself was a suggestion from a nice culinary travel article that appeared recently in the New York Times, "On a Caribbean Rum Trail" by Baz Deisinger. He is identified as a journalist and associate professor of English at John Jay Criminal College, go figure. Wayne Curtis is a contributing editor at The Atlantic who writes a regular column on the cocktail culture. What am I doing wrong?

The Curtis book is a well-written, entertaining account of rum, from its origins, presumably in Barbados, through now. He has a short list of premium rums at the end and, the point of this post, recipes for several rum cocktails.

The Hurricane is relatively simple, but requires passion fruit juice. The Zombie is the most complicated drink I've ever made, but, once I had the pineapple juice, I had all the ingredients. Curtis's version, which he credits to Don the Beachcomber, uses apricot liqueur instead of passion fruit syrup. He calls for 1 ounce white rum (Flor de Cana), 2 ounces amber rum (Mt. Gay), 1 ounce dark rum (Myers), 1 teaspoon simple syrup, 3/4 ounce lime juice, 3/4 ounce pineapple juice, 2 teaspoons apricot liqueur (Orchard), dash of Pernod, dash of angostura bitters. This all gets shaken and strained over ice, garnished, he says, with fruit, mint leaves and a dusting of powdered sugar.

I didn't fool with the garnish but managed to keep all the ingredients straight for the drink. It was of course very tasty, much like a Planter's Punch a bartender mixed for me on my first trip to New Orleans decades ago. I still think of rum as a summer drink, but it was nice enough on a cold winter night.