The Brandy Crusta

is an elaboration on the original Cock-Tail that is accented with liqueur and lemon juice and served in a glass whose rim has been fitted with a broad collar of lemon peel and dipped in sugar. See Cock-Tail. It is one of three drinks in Jerry Thomas’s 1862 Bartenders Guide attributed to New Orleans bartender and saloonkeeper Joseph Santini (ca. 1818–1874); Thomas had worked in New Orleans in the 1850s and may well have encountered the drink then. See Thomas, Jerry. Although the Crusta never enjoyed wide popularity in the United States, it held on as an epicure’s or connoisseur’s drink until Prohibition (there were also gin and whisky versions, the first appearing more often than the second). It did, however, enjoy a surprising afterlife in Australia, where it was a standard drink from the 1930s until the 1980s, although the antipodean version substituted orange juice for the original lemon juice and Australian brandy for the canonical French.

Some mixographers have pointed to the Crusta, the first recorded Cock-Tail variant to include citrus, as the ancestor of the Sidecar and the Margarita and other such citrus cocktails. See Sidecar, Margarita. In the original Crusta, however, the amount of citrus juice is so small as to render it merely an accent, not a full-blown modifier; the ancestry of the Sidecar et al. is better traced through the Daisy. See accent; modifier;, Daisy.

*Recipe: Prepare a narrow-mouthed, stemmed cocktail or sour glass by fitting a wide ribbon of lemon peel in its mouth as in illustration. Rub the rim of the glass and the protruding peel with lemon juice and roll in sugar. Chill glass. Stir with ice: 60 ml brandy, 5 ml maraschino, 5 ml lemon juice, 2.5 ml rich simple syrup, 2 dashes bitters. Strain into prepared glass.

“Perfumed Cocktails.” Sydney Evening News*, February 25, 1931, 8.

By: David Wondrich