Scotch For Breakfast. Wait...Scotch For Breakfast???
The Morning Glory Fizz is a boozy, eggy breakfast drink. But you should probably wait until cocktail hour.
Want to experience this newsletter in podcast form? The good folks at The Dispatch invited me on their podcast to talk debate-night cocktails. There’s some discussion of politics, but at the end, we make some cocktails and provide recipes. We also discuss how cocktails can make difficult events more fun and bring people together. Non-subscribers can watch a preview of the show here.
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In general, I try not to police other people’s life choices. Have fun. Use good judgment. Think about what you’ll want to have done, not just what you want to do. Don’t hurt yourself or others.
Still, I am reasonably comfortably saying: Don’t drink two ounces of Scotch for breakfast.
Yes, yes, I hear you. It’s always 5 o’clock somewhere. There are no rules when you’re in an airport on a trip that’s taken more than 24 hours. There’s a time and a place for everything.
But there are not many times or many places for a couple ounces of whisky first thing in the morning.
And yet — long ago, in the boozy days before Prohibition, there were quite a few such times and places. All over the country, men would wake up, leave the house, stop by the bar, and then head off to work. And sometimes, at that bar, they drank two ounces of Scotch whiskey, plus some other stuff, in cocktail form.
Specifically, they sometimes drank something called a Morning Glory Fizz, a foamy, fuzzy, eggy, Scotch-absinthe concoction that, like last week’s Silver Fizz, comes to us via one of the old masters of cocktaildom, Harry Johnson, whose late 1800s-era Bartender’s Manual continues to inspire bartenders today.
The Morning Glory Fizz is, indeed, glorious. It’s deceptively light, sweet and sour, with a frothy head an herbaceous wink thanks to the inclusion of a few drops of absinthe.
It’s a whisky (not whiskey!) forward extension of the fizz cocktails we looked at last week, and it’s a great, surprisingly satisfying drink. Once you make it, you will understand how it could be satisfying at the crack of dawn before a long, hard day of physical labor — or even, perhaps, a day of emailing and meetings and Zoom calls.
But I think I’ll wait until cocktail hour to have mine.
In any case, this is a drink that is fairly easy to make once you have the ingredients. But it does present a few potential challenges for home bartenders, such as:
What can you use as an egg white substitute if you don’t want to make a cocktail with a raw egg element?
What do you do if you don’t have absinthe on your bar cart?
For that matter, what do you do if you don’t have a bottle of Scotch handy?
So this week, we are going to make a Morning Glory Fizz.
And then we are going to discuss how to swap and substitute our way through the recipe so that you’ll be able to make something Morning Glory Fizz-esque even if you don’t have the precise ingredients in the recipe. Steve McQueen and the 1968 Thomas Crown Affair will be invoked. I promise it’s relevant.
This is fundamentally a bubbly, light, summer-friendly whisky drink. It’s great as is. But a big part of what I want you to understand is how to plug in other ingredients to transform the drink and make it your own.
And for the super fans — and, yeah, well, for me — there will even be just a little bit of Cynar action toward the end.
The Best in the Fizzness
In last week’s newsletter, we looked at the Silver Fizz, a late 1800s, gin-based, fizzy, eggy drink with a bubbly bite and a great big head of foam from an egg white. That drink needed just a little bit of restructuring for its modern form.
The Morning Glory Fizz is essentially a variation on that drink, so you won’t be surprised to discover that modern versions have basically the same structure, but with Scotch instead of gin, plus one more small-but-crucial difference.