The Jezebel Cocktail.

After a thoroughly enjoyable time hosting Mixology Monday, we are back to our regular weekly cocktail. Although in this case our weekly cocktail is really just a holdover from our MxMo experiments. And while it didn’t make the cut (for purely technical reasons- we had no photos) the Jezebel is a delightful cocktail that we will make any time we have some blood oranges on hand.

The Jezebel is a riff on the classic cocktail the White Lady, a simple combination of gin, lemon juice and Cointreau (some recipes include egg white for extra body). But for this drink we substitute blood orange juice for a bit of both the lemon juice and the Cointreau. And the extra berry notes, acidity, tartness and color of the blood oranges makes big difference (better than the original, IMHO).

Yes, we are on a bit of a blood orange kick (we are a seasonal food blog, after all). But it has been a tremendous season for blood oranges here in California, and we simply can’t resist one of our favorite fruits (and a number of MxMo participants seemingly agreed and used blood oranges in their recipes- very cool). And what makes this even more fun is that orange juice is traditionally a difficult citrus ingredient for cocktails. Flavors and acidity vary, and oranges are often just too sweet (and watery) to balance the base spirits. There are some classic exceptions like the Bronx cocktail, the Monkey Gland (horrible name) and the Screwdriver, but generally oranges are a difficult cocktail ingredient. Blood oranges are a whole different story, the only bummer is limited availability based on the season. But if it’s winter, go get some and start making drinks (the juice is great on its own, btw).

As for the name of the drink, we have the MxMo theme of “inverted” and one of our favorite blogs, Silver Screenings (a fantastic blog about classic movies, we can’t recommend the site enough) to thank. We wanted to invert the White Lady and decided that blood oranges would work, and the drink tasted great. Happily we were looking at Silver Screenings and asked, “what about using a classic movie name” and, of course, we immediately thought of the 1930’s Bette Davis movie “Jezebel“. We won’t give away much of the story, but we will say that respectable young ladies in the 19th century shouldn’t wear red to the ball when all the other bells wear white. In the 21st century, we may have cut Jezebel a little more slack, or maybe even bought her a drink….

The Jezebel Cocktail:

Ingredients:

• 2 oz. dry gin
• 1/2 oz. Cointreau (or quality triple-sec)
• 1/2 oz. blood orange juice
• 1/2 oz. lemon juice.

Assemble:

1. Put all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well-chilled. Strain (or even better, double-strain) into a chilled cocktail glass, coupé or flute. Serve.

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• Max’s Mocktail (putneyfarm.com)
• Cocktail Party: Blood Orange Jalapeno Margarita (thejunkdrunk.wordpress.com)
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