Friday Cocktail for Friday the 13th - Corpse Reviver

DSCF1721, originally uploaded by Lokis world.

Wanted to share something a little ghoulish for Friday the 13th. The Corpse Reviver shown here is the darker cocktail in the back. There are at least 3 radically different Corpse Reviver recipe's, but this is regarded as the original created by Frank Meier at the Ritz Bar, Paris, in the 1920s.

Corpse Reviver #1
1 oz brandy
2/3 oz sweet vermouth - Vya highly recommended, I think it makes the drink
2/3 oz Calvados or Applejack

Stir with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

The lighter cocktail is the Dubonnet Cocktail. If you like gin martinis with a twist over vodka and/or olives, this is heavenly.

Dubonnet Cocktail
1 1/2 oz Dubonnet
1 1/2 oz Gin

Stir with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

Dubonnet is an aromatic wine, so it's in the vermouth family, but it is very light and crisp, with a little sweetness to it. I like olives, but I've always preferred my martini's with a twist. Now that I've found Dubonnet, I'll have this instead everytime at home. Dubonnet is not very expensive. I think I picked up my 750ml bottle for about $12. Store it in the fridge with your other vermouths.

So, you might be asking, why 2 cocktails, and what's with the eyeball. Well, the photo is from the recent Decadent Sunday party we hosted with the theme of surrealism. The "glasses" are actually a salt and pepper shaker set, sans caps. The eyes were printed on sticker paper and stuck on the caddy. The afternoon was filled with classic cocktails, mostly from when the surrealists were peaking (between WWI and WWII), though these both date to the 20s. We also played a number of surrealist games.

One of the games had us making poetry using opposites. Each person wrote a sentence at the top of the page, then passed it to someone else. The second person wrote a sentence with an opposite meaning, then folded the paper so the first sentence was not visible and passed the paper again. After a while, we'd decide the round was over and read the complete "poems." I paired these drinks with this game because of the opposite natures of the colors of the drinks.

I'll post more of the recipes and photos from this afternoon in future Friday Cocktail posts. If you want to check out some of the photos, the participants started a flickr group: http://flickr.com/groups/decadentsundays to share our photos. They're a little out of order, and I haven't added my shots from Surreal Sunday yet, but Loki has several and I have to thank him for this shot.

Cheers!