I got this recipe from Crazy Edouard—he’s … IN-SEINE!!!

I know. I’m showing my age, and references to 1970s tri-state area electronics retailers and divey pop-culture icons don’t really belong in a sophisticated cocktail blog such as this, but … Simon Difford created and named this drink, so don’t blame me! (You kids just click on that first link for a little cultural enlightenment, and if you wonder what that was all about, it’s on Wikipedia. I’m dying to know if Harvard B-school ever made Crazy Eddie a case study. ) But I digress.

Let’s play a party game: Each of you write the name of one spirit on a piece of paper, fold it up, and throw it into this hat. We’re going to draw out four entries, and those spirits will go into tonight’s cocktail. 

Wait … where are you all going? I was just kidding …

My immediate reaction when I saw this recipe was that these are four ingredients I would never have thought to combine on my own, so it had to have been created in a party game. The bourbon especially seemed random, but trust me—this is a great mix. Simon knows exactly what he’s doing.

The name refers to the river-side Parisian neighborhood of St. Germain and, more obliquely, to the popularity of absinthe in Paris before The Great War, and before it was banned in the mistaken belief that it made people insane. Turned out that, with proof strength as high as 148, it only made people chronically drunk, with all of the health effects chronic drunkenness can produce.

IN-SEINE
1 oz Cognac
1 oz Bourbon whiskey
1 oz St. Germain elderflower liqueur
3 dashes Absinthe*

Combine the ingredients in a mixing glass, stir with ice, and strain into a rocks glass over fresh ice—preferably a big hunk of clear ice. Garnish with white grapes on a stick. 

Of note, we have no white grapes in the house tonight, so I passed on the garnish. The ice is beautiful enough in a pinch. I’ll try some other garnishes on succeeding copies of this great drink, but on the first pass I wanted to stay close to the cookbook. It is delicious, and it’s so easy to make.

*Absinthe, of course mostly comes in bottles that tend to dispense in glugs, not dashes, yet most recipes that call for it specify dashes unless they call for rinsing a glass with it and discarding. From bitter experience, I’ve learned to funnel several ounces of absinthe into a dropper bottle and/or a bitters bottle with a dasher top. That makes those kisses of absinthe far easier to deliver.