Liquors of yesteryear: What they are and where you'll find them

Open a cocktail's heyday, but these relics - along with hundreds of others - are long gone. Fortunately, you can still approximate their tastes, though repeating their legendary magical or medicinal powers won't be so easy.

Of course, you can't approximate anything unless you know what it's supposed to taste like. Often, just learning the ingredients of a mystery elixir can help. Gum, gomme, and rock-candy syrup, for instance, are merely yesteryear's monikers for any bar - is usually replaced with something else. Today, most bartenders use wormwood.

If your neighborhood bar can't offer a sample or substitute of something that's piqued your interest, consider what it might taste like based on part of its name: quality and variety is Marie Brizzard of France.

If you can't find a particular fruit brandy, consider substituting the American version of classic cocktails, can work in place of apricot brandy, though it'll be sweeter and less flavorful. To compensate, add less schnapps or less of the drink's other sweeteners. Another option is to mix 4 parts schnapps to 1 part brandy. Although slightly more work, this method gives you a better blend of flavors and more closely approximates the flavor of a fruit.

Eaux de vie, such as poire Williams, pisco, framboise, applejack are apple brandies that are still shelved today and regularly called for in vintage bar books.

If you're trying to match the flavor of a cordial, follow the example of French mixologists who work with macerated fruits in fruit or mixers to make cordials, you may have to wait anywhere from one to four weeks for your mix to "age" and produce the taste and body you want. The shortcut to this is to use flavoring extracts available from drug stores. These extracts are particularly pungent, so start with only a few drops in half a bottle of vodka; then dilute the mix with thick simple syrup. With extracts, you have less control over the spirit's taste, but it will be useable the day you mix it.

For flavors that you can't approximate with a spirit, consider syrups like those used to make Italian sodas. Many of these syrups share the names and flavors of popular spirits. It's also worth noting that bars of the past kept plenty of syrups on hand, so a strange tonic cited in a recipe might actually be syrup. vodka.

Of course, there are some elixirs, such as orange bitters are best made at home. If you do manage to approximate one of these forgotten cordials, take the opportunity to name it after yourself. Even in the heyday of these liquors, people rarely knew what to expect from one brand to the next. If you can't capture or even guess a liquor's taste, take a closer look at the recipe. There's something to be said about Darwinian theory and cocktails: A truly obscure liqueur may have died out simply because it wasn't worth buying or sipping.