Suddenly, there are grasshoppers. Not the insects, but the cocktails, which arrive in martini glasses and are green like plastic Happy Meals toys, green like modeling clay, green like the Great Gazoo’s avid little face.
Here’s how you make a grasshopper: You take one part crème de menthe, one part crème de cacao and one part heavy cream, then shake it all up and strain it into that iconic glass. Voilà. Mint chocolate chip ice cream that gets you drunk.
People loved them 50 years ago and, apparently, some people have learned to love them today.
Most bartenders still smirk when you ask for one, but Paul Clarke, editor of Imbibe Magazine, claims “the grasshopper is getting a bounce” in trend-setting bars from New Orleans to Portland. Bartenders are discovering higher quality ingredients, such as Giffard Menthe Pastille, which might be described as la crème de la crème de menthe. At Ford Fry’s new French steakhouse, Restaurant Marcel, it comes mixed with Leopold’s VS Cognac and a flamed orange for a reboot of the stinger.
Crème de menthe and crème de cacao are liqueurs — spirits mixed with flavorings, sometimes colorings and usually sugar. It has been my experience, as a child of the 1970s, that any liqueur with the word “crème” in its name contains enough sugar to leave a crystallized rim of crust around the edges of its screw-top cap.
There were crèmes galore in my parents’ liquor cabinet, which I will now introduce you to. Picture a stone fireplace in a suburban living room flanked on either side by bookshelves and two cabinets of oak polished to a reflective luster.
On one cabinet sat the hi-fi system, and inside its doors stood my dad’s record collection. There were 78 rpm wax recordings of Marlene Dietrich, the Brandenburg Concertos in a tan linen box set, Houston Grand Opera’s recording of “Porgy and Bess,” and “Two Virgins,” the avant garde album with images of John and Yoko nude, front and back, cover to cover. These things make an impression on a teenager still young enough to consider stealing the crème de menthe.
That was in the other cabinet, beneath a decorative bar tray which held a collection of highball and rocks glasses decorated with a pattern of gold leaf postage stamps. When you opened the doors, a shelf of alcohol pulled out on a sliding track.
Front and center stood the two bottles that went into heavy rotation: the Scotch whisky and the cognac. Then there was vodka and gin that didn’t get much traction, as well as a bottle of Balkan slivovitz, a plum brandy firewater that my dad drank occasionally as a shot. The bottle of Drambuie existed solely for my father to mix with the scotch to make rusty nails. The Angostura bitters beside it was so ancient its wrap had browned like old newspaper. The jar of cocktail onions had never been opened. Finally, in the far back reaches of the liquor cabinet, lurked the crèmes.
Crème de cacao was a horror because the smell promised chocolate and the flavor delivered cough syrup. The crème de banana had a broken seal but not a drop missing; the odor apparently was enough to turn anyone off. The crème de menthe I could nip, and no one would notice its disappearance.
Did grasshoppers happen in our house? I think so. I remember a discussion about buying cream for a party in case anyone wanted a grasshopper. I also remember a wizened aunt asking for a “thimbleful of crème de menthe” after dinner.
Many of the popular cocktails of that era, from rusty nails to stingers, were “duos,” i.e., a sweet liqueur mixed with a distilled spirit. These drinks had a different kind of gravitas from today’s bitter-bright craft cocktails. They were sickly and sticky, but also adult, like cigar smoke, oxblood leather banquettes and neon tube lights. They clinked in sweaty glasses and tasted appealingly of ruin. I remember, at my first restaurant job in the late 1980s, bartenders still kept crème de menthe in the well.
The return of crème de menthe perhaps signals a return to this kind of drinking. We love our modern cocktails, with their bitters and tinctures, and their calibrated layering of craft spirits. But maybe we’re ready for a drink that delivers a heavy dose of alcohol under cover of sugar, that clinks about in desultory ice-machine ice, and that has the eerie flavor of yesterday.
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