Photo Credit: Punch Magazine
We’ve got a fun cocktail idea for Easter.
Hopefully, we don’t seem insensitive suggesting such a thing. We just can’t help ourselves. We’re all about cocktails, after all.
But it’s not just an irrepressible urge that has us suggesting a cocktail for Easter. It’s also a belief that everyone, should they be able, benefits from taking a moment to mark the holiday. Doing so helps slow down time in a favorable way (in contrast, the days can feel undesirably long during these weeks of sheltering at home!), making an otherwise regular day something special and something memorable, perhaps even joyful.
You can do this even if you are on your own for Easter, or you’re missing your regular crew at the dinner table or if you’re--gasp!-- fed up with the crew you’re stuck with. All you have to do is find some small way to make the day just a bit different from every other day of self-isolation.
For me (Diana) who is completely alone for Easter, this means baking some special treats on Saturday and delivering them on Sunday morning to some friends in the area, including Paul, to whom I can easily bike: tahini-sesame bread, hot cross buns, and pecan sticky buns. It’s my hope that these baked goods will in turn help them mark the day as something different and special. I mean, how often are pastries delivered to your home by bike? Once I’m back home from my bike ride, solo again in my apartment, I'll cook myself a dish that I only prepare on Easter, croxetti with marjoram and pine nut sauce. Why this Ligurian pasta dish? It seems right for the holiday, as the word croxetti derives from the word “cross.” Each year, the accompanying vegetable dish changes, but it’s always something evocative of spring. This year it will be honey-mustard radishes with mustard greens.
There will be a cocktail too, of course, even though it will be a drink taken alone. I don’t have a problem doing that. Like the pasta dish, this cocktail is the same every year, a Corpse Reviver #2 (recipe below). My line of thinking is a bit cheeky, I confess, but I can’t help but believe that the name of the drink is just right for the holy day that celebrates the mystery of the Christian faith, of Jesus rising from the dead. The name actually comes from an historic category of cocktails that we’d now call “hair of the dog,” an alcoholic drink to revive you in the morning after an evening of heavy drinking, to call you back from the dead, so to speak.
It’s not just the name that makes a Corpse Reviver fitting for Easter. Its flavor profile is spot on for this time of year, bright from the lemon, herbaceous from the gin, floral from the Lillet, and invigorating from the touch of absinthe. It’s spring in a glass.
So, let’s raise that glass in these trying times and create as best we can a little bit of joy in our lives, whether alone or in the company others.
Happy Easter!
Corpse Reviver #2
Recipe adapted from Death and Co.
3/4 oz gin, preferably Beefeater
3/4 oz Cointreau or orange curacao
3/4 oz Lillet Blanc or Cocchi Americano
3/4 oz fresh lemon juice
2 dashes absinthe
Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker and shake with ice. Strain into a chilled coupe or cocktail glass.