Post #770768 by CosmoReverb on Thu, Dec 1, 2016 1:14 PM

On 2016-12-01 12:02, AceExplorer wrote:
Pimento drams - this brings up a question that I wrestle with frequently. If I'm going to make a classic cocktail, I want to achieve closeness to the original as much as reasonably possible if the original ingredients are available. So, the big question:

With so many different pimento drams out now, how do others here decide which to buy and use in a classic recipe?

I don't mind innovating, especially when a drink recipe sucks to me personally. In that case I may tweak it, or I may move on. Choice of pimento drams seems to be in that vein of "to each his own, it's really no big deal." Same with the many different choices we have for falernum.

So I thought I would toss this question out to the folks here in this new thread for pimento dram. (There are a couple other threads about pimento dram already here on TC.)

It's a good question, and possibly one deserving of its own thread. "The (Potentially Futile) Quest for Authenticity in Traditional Cocktails."

I, for one, am most likely in the "enthusiastic, but pessimistic" camp. Unfortunately it just seems to me that with subtle variations from batch-to-batch over a long length of time, and occasional revamping of formulations, even the brands and labels of still-existing ingredients don't have any concrete reliability that their taste profiles are the same as what they were 50-70 years ago. I mean even the changes that can occur in the bottle over time could mean that old-stock examples aren't any "true" indicator of how something tasted "back in the day."

So that, plus all of the "best guess" re-creations of the more extinct ingredients, like falernum and fassionola, lead me to believe that attempts to make the truest, most authentic version of what something was originally intended to taste like, might be a vain pursuit.

That being said, I am also in the "I may not know art, but I know what I like" camp and if I enjoy something that might not be exactly 100% faithful to the original intention, well at least someone tried and that's good enough for me.