ENDANGERED COCKTAIL OF THE MONTH-THE CANNONEERS HAVE HAIRY EARS COCKTAIL

Excerpted from So Red the Nose

By Pink Lady

Nowadays, most drinks enthusiasts find their way into the world of cocktails via TikTok, Instagram, or a highly aesthetic drink photography blog. I found my way here through vintage cocktail books. However you arrived at the world of cocktails, I celebrate it!

For those of us who travel back in time by poring over vintage cocktail books, I present So Red the Nose, or Breath in the Afternoon by Sterling North and Carl Koch. My compatriot in the blogosphere, Robert Dimmock — aka the Etiqueteer — recently sent me a recipe from this book, a pleasant reminder of how fun these vintage volumes can be. Published in 1935, So Red the Nose is a collection of humorous cocktails created by celebrity authors. “It was one of those ideas . . . but even the next morning it sounded feasible,” write the authors in the introduction. “Ask several of the literati to concoct original holiday drinks! Name these drinks after their books. Entitle the entire batch So Red the Nose, with apologies to Stark Young.” And so the book was conceived. Popular authors of the day contributed, with Ernest Hemingway being the most famous among them.

Many of these vintage cocktail books fetch thousands of dollars on eBay and from antique sellers today. For this reason, I can’t say enough about the good folks at the EUVS Digital Collection, who are digitizing thousands of these wonderful old books for current and future generations to access for free (visit http://euvslibrary.com). Having access to them online in their original visual format is almost as fun as paging through them in real time.

The drink the Etiqueteer brought to my attention is Robert J. Casey’s The Cannoneers Have Hairy Ears Cocktail, named for the unedited journal Casey kept — and later published anonymously — about his experiences as an artilleryman serving in World War I. It’s considered a vivid and sometimes brutal portrayal of the Western Front. Casey would go on to work as a columnist and war correspondent for the CHICAGO TRIBUNE and publish novels and other books.

Brutal as his book may be, Casey describes this drink as “smooth as milk but stronger. You can drink a quart of it without noticing anything except the cop who arrests you for throwing rocks at your grandmother’s funeral.”

Please enjoy responsibly!

THE CANNONEERS HAVE HAIRY EARS COCKTAIL

Champagne (1 bottle, preferably good and cold)
Chablis (1 pint – vintage of no particular moment)
Vin Haut Barsac (1 bottle, and be sure to have it haut)
Raspberries (1 liter box)
Sherry (2 jiggers)
Worcestershire sauce (none)

MIX this mess in a large bowl. Don’t CRUSH the raspberries. Let them SOAK for a while. ADD enough sugar (powdered) to take the curse off the raspberries but not enough to destroy the fine bouquet, if any, of the Champagne, POUR into a tall, tapering glass and DRINK with the raspberries floating.

Thus, if you are a connoisseur, you combine scent with taste.