Do They Know It's Thanksgiving?
What do we do with the best/worst holiday and why does it not exist in pop culture? Oh also a drink
I don’t do Halloween. It’s too long to get into right now, but it’s not my jam. I’ve joked off and on if I had to go to a Halloween party in recent years that I would wear a Christmas sweater and a Santa hat and get a bunch of candy canes and go as Christmas Creep. But it’s certainly real, I saw my first egg nog of the season in September this year? October? Can’t quite remember other than TOO EARLY.
And I don’t even really care that much, but I find part of what makes something special is its limited nature. Love or hate pumpkin, that’s part of what drives it. And while that seasonality is still occasionally tied to pesky things like when foods are best, it’s also somewhat driven by the holidays around them. So the fall comes and we get pumpkins which cover a couple holidays but really other than pie are linked to fall/Halloween and then it’s on to egg nog and peppermint and all that fun stuff. We get like a week of cranberries. What happened here people?
I don’t lament it too much, Thanksgiving is a complicated holiday considering the history of the nation, but it’s also beautiful to see how many people have made it their own, despite its less than stellar origins; it’s something that any American can participate in as a holiday, and it’s centered around family, given or chosen, and those rituals mean something. But despite that kind of standing, it has little stead in pop culture weirdly. There are not really Thanksgiving movies, and Alexandra Petri definitely didn’t make up songs to celebrate Thanksgiving in this column. Maybe people just don’t know what the hell to do with sage in a beverage either (not true, Rye garnishes a nice twist on an Old Fashioned with it on their current fall menu), because the bars just seem to skip straight from Halloween to Christmas now too.
Never fear, though, Trader Jane’s is here to not get too far ahead of the holidays. The Christmas beverages will be here before we know it (literally basically all the bars in the Bay Area I know doing pop-ups and such setting up shop for that tomorrow). In the meantime…let’s give thanks!
So…what to do with a beverage in the Thanksgiving vein? Well, let’s look to the best side dish there is, cranberries. Jellied, sweetened a bit, with a dash of orange usually, that’s a great side folks. You can get lots of other stuff all the time and they are good sides too, but we just do it for Thanksgiving more than anything and besides, I don’t think mashed potatoes and gravy are the makings of a good tiki beverage.
I made a little fresh batch (quickly if you’d like, used 6 oz of cranberries with 1.5 cups of water, boiled that down at a simmer for a bit, and rain things through the fine mesh strainer…I’m sure there are more complicated ways but this worked for my purposes). Grabbed a lime for the citrus, and curaçao for the orange, and rich Demerara simple syrup to sweeten things up. I didn’t overthink the rum too much, and grabbed a bottle of El Dorado 12 (though the 5 would work fine). If you don’t have fresh unsweetened cranberry juice, you could probably skip the simple, but…well, you’re own your own because that’s not how I roll.
So what do we have here? The makings of a nice swizzle.
1 oz fresh unsweetened cranberry juice
.75 oz lime juice
.5 oz rich Demerara syrup
.5 oz dry curaçao
2 oz El Dorado 12
Build all ingredients in a Collins glass. Fill halfway with crushed ice and give it a good stir with your barspoon. Top with more crushed ice. Garnish with grated nutmeg and a tiki umbrella with a couple fresh cranberries.
That, my friends, is how you make The Bog Standard Swizzle (get it?). Anyway, happy Thanksgiving however you are celebrating!
This is Trader Jane’s, a periodic newsletter about drinks (mostly tiki) and other fun writing. Follow me on Substack for something every couple of weeks (a low volume Substack, I swear!), and follow me on Twitter and Instagram for more timely updates on my beverages (and for lots of other things of course!)
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