Jane Rocca’s third book The Fashionable Cocktail: 200 Fabulous Drinks for the Fashion Set, will be launched to media by Voxfrock editor, Janice Breen Burns next week and to the public by broadcaster Helen Razer on September 3.
Here, Ms Rocca explains why Perfect Ladies, Black Sambuca Slurps and Touche Par L’Amours are the perfect accessories for a glamourous life. Neryl Walker’s delightful fashion illustrations, including those featured here – are a highlight of the book (Midform post: allow 5 minutes to read) Main illustration,top: “Perfect Lady”, by Neryl Walker.
It’s perfectly acceptable to get tiddly on cocktails.
A heady little buzz of alchohol will go nicely with your LBD, or vintage frock-lette, or whatever chic ensemble you laboriously composed for this very civilised mode of relaxation. Tiddly, yes, messy, no. Cocktails are simply too deliciously tangled in the rites and rituals – the frocks and chit-chat and pretty postures – of modern civilisation to spoil with a messy all-fall-down-drunk finish.
Jane Rocca
“When I’m going out for cocktails, it’s a frock, and somewhere nice,” says author of The Fashionable Cocktail, Jane Rocca. “You’re not going to go out in jeans. You’re not going to over consume. There’s a culture, and it’s about embracing that.”
Ms. Rocca is a renowned music and fashion journalist and author of two other books that have ridden cocktails’ waves of popularity in the past 10 years. Her first, The Cocktail: 200 Fabulous Drinks, took off after a review in The New York Times, was eventually translated into Spanish, French and Italian, and still sells across the US and UK.
Black Russian
45 ml vodka
25 ml coffee liqueur
Build in an old-fashioned glass filled with ice. stir well.
Her second book, Cocktails and Rock Tales, neatly muddled her deep knowledge of the music industry with recipes winkled out of her expanding circle of creative barmen friends in cutting-edge establishments from Sydney to New York. Now, Ms. Rocca predicts The Fashionable Cocktail will be her last book – “That’s my trilogy” . She’s investigated virtually every delightful connection cocktails have to music, fashion, even the human psyche and society as thoroughly as any stylist, psychologist, historian and anthropologist.
The book divides 200 recipes into eight loose fashion genres including Vintage, Bohemian, Hipster, Haute Couture and Luxe and by doing so, suggests we are as knowable by the cocktails we pick as by the way we compose our clothes. “Fashion and cocktails are very similar, a lot of links,” Ms. Rocca says. “They’re both seasonally driven and yes, you get your classics in both, but people are always altering them to create little characters.”
French 75
30 ml gin or cognac
15 ml fresh lemon juice
15 ml sugar syrup
60 ml champagne
lemon twist to garnish
Fill a shaker with ice, add gin or cognac, juice and syrup. Shake, strain into chilled Champagne flute. Top with Champagne and lemon twist.
Her own style is an amalgam of frocks and cocktails; a bit vintage, a bit hipster, a bit luxe, a bit…. “Actually, I don’t know which girl I am in the book!” she laughs. But, she does have a favorite cocktail: mango marguerita. An ex-boyfriend at Melbourne’s Cherry Bar introduced her to the luscious combination of fresh fruit and her favorite tipple, tequila: “Which is not so overpowering mixed with salt and ice..” On warm summer days, with a box of fresh mangos and garden full of friends, Ms. Rocca often whips up nirvana in a blender then adds a marachino cherry on top. “I’ve gone through about three (blenders) in a year….”
Ms. Rocca is not as enamoured, however, with every cocktail recipe she is offered. “There was one that included duck fat in the glass,” she says. “And, I won’t name the bar, but another one that required the use of a syringe…” She dumped those for ickiness and the wrong message respectively, but there are others dropped for less specific reasons. “Some just get too creative.”
As in fashion, she says, there is a constant drive among cocktail entrepreneurs to break molds, move forward. Sometimes enthusiasm transcends taste. “It’s like fashion; always, all the time; “where do I take things now? How do you reinvent the wheel?” she says. “In fact a lot of new cocktails, (also like fashion) are hook-turns from the original.”
As a cocktail historian, Ms. Rocca is also fascinated by the culture’s churning fads and classics – its patterns – as they define styles and eras and even geographic locations. “I remember when I wrote the first book (in 2004), there was a push for asian ingredients; coriander, lychees, tropical fruit, that sort of thing, and Sydney was all about double straining while Melbourne was all about edgy ingredients and muddles.”
The recipes and wider circles and patterns have altered countlessly since then and another generation turned on to the elegant rituals of cocktail culture but the creative leaders have stayed fairly constant according to Ms. Rocca. Names like Greg Sanderson, Shae Silvestro, Thomas Kiltorp, and a dozen others she lists in a page-log chunk of acknowledgements at the back of her book probably don’t mean much outside Ms. Rocca’s circle, but they continue to set trends as new and readable of their time and place as any fashion.
The Fashionable Cocktail: 200 Fabulous Drinks for the Fashion Set, Hardie Grant, (hard cover $24.95) will be launched at a public function by Helen Razer, at Touche Hombre, 233 Lonsdale Street, Melbourne on Tuesday September 3, from 7 to 9 pm. as part of the Melbourne Spring Fashion Week Offsite programme. Tickets $75, include cocktails and gift bag. Book (03) 8520 6444 and hola@touchehombre.com.au
Janice Breen Burns, jbb@voxfrock.com.au
