The Worst Recipe I’ve Ever Published — and How to (Kinda, Sorta) Fix It
Transforming the Blood and Sand into a Scotch-based fruited Manhattan/Rob Roy variation.
Is there a cocktail recipe I regret publishing? And can that recipe be rescued?
Well, yes, sort of — if by “rescued” you mean “transformed into something quite different but much better.”
In this week’s newsletter, that’s what we’re going to do: We’ll start with what I believe is the worst recipe I’ve ever published, and then we’ll look at how to take that recipe and use it as the basis for a different cocktail altogether.
Specifically, we’ll take a weird, shaken, Scotch-and-orange juice sour, the Blood and Sand, and we’ll transform it into a rich, satisfying, easy-to-make Scotch-based variation on the fruited Manhattan (or, if you want to be precise, fruited Rob Roy) formula.
Somehow, this also turns out to be a theme cocktail inspired by the recent Dune movies. Look, I am aware that this is sometimes an odd newsletter.
It’s a bit of a shaggy dog story, but I promise there’s practical value too:
further tips and tricks on designing and thinking about theme cocktails
advice on how to rethink and rework frustrating/not working cocktail recipes
and of course, a delicious cocktail recipe at the end
Regrets, I’ve Had a Few
So. Somehow I have been writing this newsletter for about three and a half years now, and I’ve published a lot of recipes — several hundred, at least.
Some are inevitably better than others, and some end up half-forgotten, but many remain in something like a regular rotation in my cocktail repertoire. The drinks in this newsletter are the same drinks I make for friends, frenemies, colleagues, guests, and, yes, myself.
But there is one drink that I think I was just wrong about — partly out of a combination of inexperience and over-ambition, and partly because it’s a really difficult drink to execute well.
That drink is the Blood and Sand, which I first wrote about all the way back in 2021, when this newsletter was still quite young.
The Blood and Sand is an old cocktail that came back into circulation in the early days of the cocktail renaissance. It returned to cocktail menus and home bars partly because of how it looks on paper: It’s a shaken drink that combines equal parts Scotch whisky, sweet vermouth, orange juice, and Cherry Heering.
Which is to say, it’s weird. Fascinatingly, intruiginly weird.
Here’s the recipe I published all those years ago.
Blood and Sand
¾ ounce fresh orange juice, strained through a coffee filter
¾ ounce Cherry Heering
¾ ounce sweet vermouth, preferably Cocchi di Torino
¾ ounce blended scotch, such as Famous Grouse or Monkey Shoulder
INSTRUCTIONS
Combine all ingredients in a shaking tin.
Add ice, then shake until thoroughly chilled.
Strain into a coupe or Nick & Nora glass.
Well, if nothing else, that does sounds interesting.
The always alluring 1:1:1:1 ratio suggests some potential adjacency to the Last Word, another equal-parts shaken drink that was popular during the 00s in cocktail nerd circles. Like the Last Word, the Blood and Sand employs some unusual ingredients in unusual roles: There aren’t many shaken Scotch entries in the classic-drinks canon, and while lemon and lime juice are quite common in old recipe books, orange juice is not. Similarly, sweet vermouth is a common ingredient, but it rarely appears in shaken, juicy concoctions.
And then there was the Cherry Heering: Sweet — so sweet! — syrupy Cherry Heering. Who even had a bottle? Who knew what to do with it? I made my first Blood and Sand around 2016 or so, and even then, well into the cocktail boom, it was somewhat difficult to find a bottle of Cherry Heering.
In fact, I ended up mail-ordering multiple bottles from out of state, which turned out to be a bit of a mistake since
I eventually found local sellers and
this left me with multiple bottles of Cherry Heering, and what in the holy name of the Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV was I going to do with multiple bottles of Cherry Heering?
Let’s table that question for a moment.
The Blood and Sand, in other words, was all sorts of intriguing on paper. But a weird fascinating recipe does not always make for a delicious drink. And in the glass, it was a mess — notoriously so, to the point where some bartenders argue that it basically can’t be made well.
Now, others argue that there are little tricks to improve it: fresh juice, clarification, a slightly Scotch-forward ratio, and so on and so forth. And my recipe called for straining/clarifying the orange juice using a coffee filter. This resolves some of the drink’s texture issues. But it doesn’t really solve the fundamental problem, which is that the sweet/spice/sour/bitter balance is way, way off.
The recipe stacks three sweet to very sweet ingredients — orange juice (which is sweet enough that it can effectively be swapped for sugar syrup), sweet vermouth (which is sweet enough that it acts as a primary sweetener in Manhattans and a co-sweetener in Negronis), and Cherry Heering, which is syrupy even compared to most other sweet fruit liqueurs — on top of go-along-get-along blended Scotch whisky. The sweet elements end up muddled and mushed together. The mellow blended Scotch doesn’t provide enough of a foundation.
It’s an odd drink with a funky structure that doesn’t really work. And thus, unlike most of the recipes I’ve published over the years, it’s not in my regular rotation. Indeed, it’s not a drink I make at all. Despite my initial enthusiasm for the coffee strainer method, I have yet to discover a version of the Blood and Sand that I think works well enough to become a go-to.
Dune 2 Others As You Would Have Them Dune 2 You
This became a bit of a problem earlier this year when I decided I wanted to host some friends for a Dune watch party with themed cocktails priot to the release of Dune: Part Two.
For this sort of get-together, I like to create menus with funny, thematically relevant cocktail names.
One of the first ideas I came up with was Blood and Sandworms. Very funny, Suderman. Hilarious.
Now, typically, I’d just rework the name and then serve the underlying drink without any further modification. But in this case that wasn’t an option because, as I said, I don’t currently have a go-to Blood and Sand recipe that I think is good enough to be worth drinking, which means it’s not worth serving to friends. I like to serve drinks I genuinely believe are, you know…actually good!
But I really liked the gimmick name, and I wanted to keep it on the menu. So I decided to rethink the drink’s structure from the ground up.
This might sound difficult. But there was a fairly straightforward logic chain that led to the final recipe.