You Should Strengthen Your Shirley Temple
When I was a kid, my dad had a sports bar that opened every day at 6 am. I have no idea how he became the owner of this bar, it just was. When I asked him a few years later about the obscenely early opening hours, he dryly replied, “That’s when a lot of truckers finish their shift.” Oh right.
The bar was largely owned by Joe, a pre-diabetic with cataracts who seemed to tolerate the arrogant hypocrisy of my father’s apparent contempt – and total dependence on him. My father had Tony Soprano’s patented lack of self-awareness: no amount of blatant discrepancy could turn him away from his own arrogance. He considered himself a high-level executive, not to mention the fact that he was a dive bar owner and could not keep his corporate job. Plank was his pragmatism in a nutshell (or a pint), as was his way of outsourcing parental control – my beliefs of right and wrong had to be reinforced by a private Christian school, not an example set at home.
Although my dad liked to think of himself as a guy who loves children and loves being a father … “I’ll have two, three! If I could, there would be more children, ”he exclaimed in his Balkan baritone – in fact, he was not particularly well adapted and was not inclined to the banality of raising children. He seemed to flinch every time one of us approached him, the act of his father’s presence was as seductive to him as a root canal. As a child, I desperately wanted to get to know my father and please him. Many of our exchanges were reminiscent of dialogue on a painful first date, where one side was clearly more invested in establishing the connection:
Me: Dad, what do you think is your favorite food?
[Long pause]
I’m a father?
He: [long, measured exhalation] Uh, I don’t know, it’s hard to say.
Me: I love spaghetti.
He: Spaghetti is good.
Me: Yes, but it’s a little messy. [He shines a wide, jagged smile]
He: [Faint chuckle, looks around the room awkwardly.] Heh. Yeah. I think so.
[Silence].
I was overjoyed when he sometimes took me to the counter late in the morning after kindergarten when he was given parenting. The two of us sat in the back of his office, and I enjoyed my task of sorting and counting coins in their designated trays and placing them on the appropriate paper rolls for the weekly bank statement.
If the bar was closed for my shift in the afternoon, my presence in the bar would no longer be a hindrance, I would sit in the bar, and Joe, trying to sparkle in his eyes, said: “What will it be? “And I said,” Shirley Temple, on the rocks, do it in half, right? ” to the laughter of the staff; my reward for being a child and saying the worst things. Shirley Temple Joe made me essentially just grenadine knocked down by a soda gun sprite, a somewhat more egregious imitation of the original recipe that calls for orange juice, ginger ale, and grenadine, but I swallowed the mouth-inducing concoction. in glorious oblivion, munching on his maraschino cherry. Perhaps that is why whenever I find myself in a place that smells of chlorine, stale beer and cigarettes, where hardworking and barely alive people live, I cannot help but think: “Ah, my people.”
Presumably, the Shirley Temple cocktail was invented so that the young starlet it was named after had something festive but child-friendly to drink at many of the adult events she often attended. In the end, the curly-haired prodigy with the famous dimpled cheeks grew up and left Hollywood. I think I grew up too. So the Shirley Temple cocktail, everyone’s up.
Ms Shirley Temple
- Ounces of fresh lime juice
- Ounces of Sweetened Ginger Juice * and Grenadine
- 2 ounces of white rum
- Soda Club
- Optional: orange wheel and / or maraschino cherry for decoration.
Add all ingredients (except soda) to a shaker. Place one small piece of ice in a shaker and beat for about eight seconds. (This is essentially a dry shake, but pebbles of ice stir the mixture to beat it.) Pour into a tall, chilled glass filled with ice and top with soda.
How to make sweetened ginger juice:
If you have a juicer, juice the ginger (on the peel) and then add 4 parts fresh ginger juice to 3 parts white sugar granulated white sugar. It takes a minute to add sugar, so make sure you beat / beat vigorously and patiently. If you don’t have a juicer, you can make one with fresh ginger juice from the store. There will be a sticky white sediment that will accumulate on the bottom as it adheres; you can add it to the syrup or leave it alone. Store in a refrigerator for up to 4-5 days. (Honestly, I kept it longer, but after a while the spice of the ginger diminished noticeably.)
Be sure to make your own sweetened ginger juice. If you like Dark ‘n’ Stormy’s, Penicillins, Moscow Mules and more, then having this in your cocktail arsenal is game-changing. You also don’t have to do much, most recipes require ½ to ounce of product.
Additional credit:
If you drink a real tear for syrup, why not make your own grenadine as well? Add 8 ounces of pomegranate concentrate and 2 ounces of rose water to 1 1/4 liters of simple syrup.
Refrigerated in an airtight container; most syrups have a shelf life of about a week, although, again, I have been known to push them beyond that.