For tonight’s cocktail hour, we sampled the Clover Club Cocktail and the Sidecar, two classic cocktails. For now, we will stick to the Clover Club. We’ll look at the Sidecar next time.
The Clover Club
For the Clover Club cocktail, combine with ice:
- 1 1/2 oz. gin
- 3/4 oz. simple syrup
- 3/4 oz. fresh lemon juice
- 1/2 tsp. grenadine
- 1/2 of an egg white
Notice the last bullet there: an egg white. Most people haven’t made a cocktail with a raw egg in it, and some of the stay-at-home cocktail drinkers won’t drink one, even if it is made for them (you know who you are!). It’s like tiramisu, though: everyone loves it until they find out that it’s made from raw eggs. It never hurt you before, so why start worrying about it now that you know what’s in it?
Why put a raw egg in a cocktail anyway? It’s the texture. A drink made with either a white or a yolk has a much smoother texture. It actually stays on the tongue. It’s almost like when you make a pan sauce after cooking a steak and you have to reduce it by half until it starts to actually stay on the back of the spoon. A drink made with raw eggs stays in the mouth like that.
The only thing you want to make sure of when you drink something with a raw egg in it is that you shake it, always, and that you shake it hard. The egg needs to be fully emulsified so that you don’t get any kind of weird egg pieces in your drink. That would definitely ruin the cocktail.
The egg in the Clover Club cocktail sets it apart. This drink is good. Sure, it’s basically a sour with grenadine, but the color is nothing to sneeze at, either. It is a pleasing pinkish color with a frothy rim around the top from the emulsified egg. No garnish is needed because the egg froth is beautiful on top of the pink drink itself. I admit that I added a bit too much grenadine to one of mine, and adding too much made it almost taste like medicine. But the others were good. There’s hints of cherry, and it reminds me of a fruity red wine with a lot going on. It’s sweet at first, but then the sweetness stops rather abruptly, kind of like a lot of wine does. As the drink reaches the back of the throat, it loses it’s sweetness.
In another post, maybe we will talk about why combining sweet and sour is so pleasing, but for now, don’t be afraid of the egg and make yourself a Clover Club.