This is the best cookbook I have seen in many months. It is about as close to being perfect as you can imagine: engaging topics, wonderful recipes, sharp writing, and photographs that are art.
If you drink more than water and coffee, then this book is one you will use week after week for the rest of your imbibing life.
This is not a cocktail book, although they do appear. This is a drink book, with ideas dashing from the creative mind of author Lindy Wildsmith. She is British and brings that wonderful British gardening perspective to this book. Recipes abound using fruits and herbs and employing them year round. Lindy has a quarterly calendar showing how, even in the dead of winter, there are plenty of ingredients to play with: cranberries, grapefruit, tangerines, pomegranates, dried fruits, the citrus trinity of oranges, lemons, and limes.
Here’s a survey of the chapters in Artisan Drinks.
- Still Waters Run Deep: offers suggestions for cordial, syrup and soft drinks
- Family Fizz: give you alcohol-free but very sparkling beverages
- A Global Resurgence: provides beer apple and pear cider concepts
- A Very Good Year: suggests wine ideas but ideas like you have not seen before [more below!]
- And Now for Something Stronger: offers liqueurs and digestives
- Taking the Plunge: surveys punches and party drinks
- Happy Hours: survey artisan cocktails using the cordials and syrups crafted earlier
- Oasis of Calm: end your day with teas, tisanes and spicy brews
The recipes here are stunningly different. You look at a recipe, often with an accompanying beautiful photo, and you just stop. You look, you ponder, and you smile. Consider these ideas:
Bourbon Shrub
Fennel Flower Prosecco
Rose Petal Cordial
Blackberry Cordial
Flinty Cocktail, made with those two cordials
Peach and Vanilla Vodka
Peak Vodka Bellini, made with that vodka
Spiced Blackberry Tonic
Strawberry Rum Cordial
Venetian Eggnog, made with Marsala
I’m going to be spending this year traveling through Artisan Drinks. This weekend I’ll be making a Florida Cocktail Cordial, one of those winter ideas made from grapefruit and oranges.
Oh, that wine chapter? Forget the grapes.You will need rhubarb, sweet raisins, dandelion, beets, carrots and oranges. Really! Truly! Wonderfully!
This is an important book, one that gives us a very different slant on what to drink. The sophistication here is immediately obvious. But, to emphasize that, the photos in the book will captivate you. I’m closing this review with the shot of the Rose Petal Cordial. Suzi and I do have rose bushes in our garden, and now we will be drinking rose as well as smelling it.
Add this book to your “cocktail” collection and expand your drinking horizons far wider than you might have though possible.
