We've been flipping through Ted Haigh’s Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails book and came across “The Soother”. It sounded like the perfect cold weather cocktail. This drink splits the base spirit by using half cognac and half Jamaican rum. It also includes orange curacao, lemon juice, apple juice and simple syrup. This relatively long list of ingredients allows plenty of room for experimentation. The original recipe came from the Waldorf Astoria’s Old Bar and dates back to the early 1900’s. It’s included in The Waldorf Astoria Bar Book by Frank Caiafa – where the author suggests that you could serve this as a warm drink. Now the possibilities were becoming overwhelming!

We began by creating a few variations of the Soother and (along with our volunteer tasting team) did some side-by-side comparisons. The original recipe uses a tiny bit of apple juice, but (being farm market shoppers) we decided that a healthy dose of fresh apple cider would be a good modification. We tweaked the recipes for the second round and settled on two favorites – one that worked best as a cold cocktail and one served warm.

For the cold version we gravitated towards a bottle of Stolen Smoked Rum that was gifted to us by friends. We had yet to use it in a cocktail, but it seemed like the smoky flavor of this Caribbean rum (with its coffee and vanilla notes) would be a good choice for our Winter Soother. We found that this rum could really take over the cocktail, so we stuck with the even ratio of rum to cognac. We used Grand Marnier as the orange liqueur, and added lemon juice and apple cider. We tried a several options for the simple syrup. You really don’t need much simple syrup in this cocktail, but it’s a good opportunity to add another layer of flavor. We liked this cocktail with cinnamon simple syrup, but for the final version we settled on using barrel-aged hickory syrup. Hickory syrup has a sweet, smoky, earthy flavor. We highly recommend Falling Bark Farm Reserve Cask Hickory Syrup (which also works really well in a bourbon Old Fashioned).