Today’s drinks of the day are a pair of fixes.  The first one is the New York Winter Fix, found in the 2010 book, Speakeasy: The Employees Only Guide to Classic Cocktails [sic] Reimagined by Jason Kosmas and Dushan Zaric.  They called the drink a smash in the source — but never mind that.  The apple liqueur in the drink is suggestive of the ‘big apple’ — an informal name for New York City.

This past Fall, Elemental Mixology was honored to have chef Tony DiSalvo (formerly executive chef at the famed Jean-Georges in New York, and now at the Viceroy Hotel in Santa Monica) as a student in the Standard Drinks Course.  The New York Winter Fix was one of the drinks made during the sessions on punch, and it was, of course, well-received by all.

Chef DiSalvo later reported to me that he had made the drink, but without the apple liqueur.  He used Cointreau (the most famous triple-sec Curaçao liqueur) instead.  As Tony pointed out, orange peel goes very well with both cranberry and ginger, and so his variant of the drink makes perfect culinary sense.  It is quite good.

I felt that the new drink deserved a name of its own.  The bitter orange peel used in making Cointreau is actually from the island of Curaçao in the Netherlands Antilles.  Furthermore, before it was New York City, the settlement on the tip of the island of Manhattan was called New Amsterdam and was the capitol of the New Netherlands Territory.  Given those facts, the name ‘New Amsterdam Winter Fix’ seemed to suggest itself for the Curaçao-liqueured version.

Here are both drinks from my book:

Thank you, chef DiSalvo!