Rapscallion
Recipe:
- 40ml Scotch (originally Talisker 10yo)
- 20ml p.x. sherry
- 2,5ml pastis (or sub with absinthe)
Stir everything on ice until sufficiently chilled, strain into a prechilled cocktail glass, express a lemon zest over the drink, discard (optional garnish: cherry).
I think a lot has been said about the Rascpallion, including everything I could think of. So for a historical treatise, it's better to go to the corresponding, fantastic cocktail blogs, such as Bar Vademecum.
Powerful, clear and beautifully playable with the exchange of the individual ingredients, particularly influenced by the % of whisky, of course. However, I can definitely comment on something quite new: I think it's one of the drinks that can benefit most from prebatching aka bottle aging.
There is one of these in the Ona Mor Bar in Cologne, prebatched with Duplais Verte absinthe, not the original Pastis. It hasn't been in the bottle for long, maybe 2-3 weeks, but it's wonderfully smooth (I'd say largely because of that) and a great drink for me too, although it feels like they use more absinthe than in the above-mentioned ratio and I'm not the biggest fan of the spirit. It comes across clearly in the bar's version, but was well incorporated and the drink overall is fantastically silky, perhaps too elegant for some fans of harder rapscallions with Talisker and Springbank. Either way, an exciting, beautiful drink and one of the definitive “true modern classics”!
Source: Adeline Shepherd & Craig Harper, Ruby Bar, Copenhagen, 2007
