Winter Sun Cobbler

Jenna Rycroft

2 oz Amontillado Sherry

3/4 - 1 oz winter orange oleo-saccharum

1/2 oz Pierre Ferrand Curacao

3 dashes Angostura bitters

Serve over crushed ice; top w/mint and fruit

Interview by L. Valena

March 4, 2022

Can you please take me back to the beginning and just describe the prompt that you responded to?

It was a picture and it was kind of cool. It had a black background and a white vessel or statue or something. And then in contrast, what seemed to be cast as its shadow were these colorful creatures or energies or something. Specifically with the dark and the light was a vibrant reddish color, and a bluish color and a greenish color. I remember those all standing out.

What was your first reaction to that?

Honestly, I looked at it and thought it looked like a tiki drink personified. The cup was like a figure and inside it was this brew or potion of little colorful demons. I was like, Ah man, I couldn't have said it better myself. That's exactly what it looked like! I thought it was right on point. “I've had that one before,” you know?

Where did you go from there?

As usual, that process starts with a lot of thinking. First I thought I should like make a tiki drink, but tiki has a complicated legacy. I'm Hawaiian, but I was also a bartender. It's not really something I’ve figured out yet. And that's too big for this project, to reconcile all my feelings around tiki culture appropriating Polynesian culture. That’s too much.

Then I wondered what else it could mean to me. I thought, I can make a punch, which a lot of tiki drinks in essence actually are, but punch still has its own very distinguished history. I was thinking about what flavors I wanted to do. You know, I grew up in Southern California with a lot of sunshine. Coming to New England, the winters can be a little hard. One thing that I really start to crave in the winter is fruit because it tastes like I'm eating sunshine, even though I don't get any sunshine. Anyway, often right now in the stores, you'll see a variety of different citrus. If I'm going to make a punch, first I should try to make an oleo saccharum. I decided to use a mélange of oranges. As that was happening and I was deciding what else to put in my punch, it started feeling complicated. I thought, I really just want a sherry cobbler. So I just went with that. All those orange flavors would taste really good with the nuttiness of a sherry and then I could just put a fruit salad on top. All the flavors work together and it really checks all the boxes. So I just did a pretty simple riff on a sherry cobbler.

That's cool. What is this “oleo saccharum”?

It's traditionally used as a sweetener, often in punches, which is why I started there. I don't really know the history of it more than in American cocktail history. Imagine an era when we weren’t quite as wasteful as we are today, so you preserve things in different ways. You peel the fruit, put the peel in sugar, and let it sit for a while. Sugar sucks out moisture, almost like salt does. Specifically in citrus fruit, the skin holds a lot of oil, which is very flavorful. That’s why your bartender squeezes a peel and expresses the oil over your drink. You put that in the sugar, which draws out the oils, so it gets all those flavors that you'd get from zest in a recipe. And then you juice the fruit that you peeled and use that juice with the sugar to make a syrup. I think people are more commonly familiar with simple syrup, which is typically water and sugar, right? And you just use the water to dissolve the sugar. In this case, you're using the actual fruit juice to dissolve it. So it’s this potent, punchy, citrus-flavored sweetener.

I’ve got to make that. That sounds amazing.

Yeah, it can be really good! And it's different. It adds a little bit more depth of flavor. It actually turned out way better than I thought it was going to. I didn't think it was gonna turn out bad, but I was like, Oh this is delicious! I just said to use a winter orange oleo saccharum in the recipe, but I think I used tangelo, navel, and blood orange.

In case people aren’t familiar, tell us about sherry cobbler.

Let's see. Sherry cobbler is a very, very old cocktail. It's probably a couple hundred years old. I just love it, which is fitting because my music choices date me, and actually my cocktail choices do too. But you have to really enjoy sherry. Sherry is a Spanish fortified wine. There are different styles of it and I just think it's really delicious. I love it a lot. A sherry cobbler at its most basic is typically just sherry with some sugar and fruit over ice. It's one of the cocktails, along with the mint julep, that popularized the use of a straw, because that was also around the time that ice was becoming widely available and was starting to be put in drinks.

This drink is pretty much just a sidestep from a basic sherry cobbler. I didn't go crazy with it. In its essence, it’s just very simple and very delicious. If I were still bartending and making this cocktail for a menu, this recipe isn't done, but for this purpose it’s as far as I got. I haven’t made oleo saccharums a lot and I think I would tweak it because it was a little too sweet. I couldn't decide if I wanted more orange flavor or less sweetness, which was more important. I would probably play with that. But this is a kind of drink that can be super informal and you just make at home however you like it. It doesn’t really matter.

There's a transportive quality to cocktails that's very unique. Confectionery might be the only other thing that I can think of that has that effect. Does the flavor of this cocktail take you to a certain place or time in your life?

Not exactly. Maybe like right now, actually. It has that brightness that, to me, embodies these really beautiful sunny days when the world is covered in snow. This feeling at this time. To me, the drink goes with it perfectly in sort of a weird, synesthetic kind of way. I imagine that kind of day having a certain blue quality to it, which feels like the complementary color of the orange quality that I taste from the drink. I know it may be weird because it's a completely icy drink at this time of year, but it just feels like it matches up. If I didn’t know better about how dirty my yard is, I could’ve taken a handful of snow and just plopped it into the cup and made the drink that way!

You know, bartending has gotten to a point where all these young, little, baby cat bartenders all want to put their stamp on the world. They come up with different cocktails that are super-über-micro-nuanced-complicated. And I still honestly gravitate toward the simple classics. I think that's also why I like this drink. It's simple, but I probably wouldn't do that much more with it for myself because that's what I prefer. It has everything that I need from it.

Well, you've done this a few times now. Do you have any new advice, or evergreen advice, for another artist approaching this project?

Maybe just reinforcing what you always say, too: it doesn’t need to be your magnum opus. I think that because of my bartender background, there was a point when I was stressing about the drink, worrying if I was getting it right, chasing these versions of it. And then I remembered that it doesn't matter. It's a creative exercise. I sort of forgot because I got wrapped up in it. And I probably said something to the same effect before, but I think it's not really about the finished product, it’s about the experience and allowing yourself the room to react to something. Whatever you have, you have. “It's the journey, not the destination,” you know, that sort of thing.

So you're going to serve this drink to Carrie. [Carrie is Jenna’s wife and the respondent to this Switch.] Have you done that yet?

No, I haven't. In fact, I didn't even work on it when she was around. I said, “Oh, I'm kinda stressed about the drink.” She asked, “Do you want to talk about it?” And I was like, “NO!” [both laugh] She was like, “Oookay.” So no, she has not had it.

I love that. Do you have any anticipation of what her experience is going to be of this, or what it's going to be like to serve it to her?

I mean, to be honest, I serve the girl cocktails all the time. So that's not any experience. I think she’ll taste it and like it. What she does with it, I have no idea. Honestly, that'll be my surprise.

I'm curious to see where she goes with it.

Call Number: Y74VA | Y76FD.ryWi

Jenna Rycroft lives on the North Shore with her wife and most handsome cat. You'll likely find her reading on the beach, finishing a puzzle, or playing guitar.