February Vintage Cocktail: The Avenue

I found the recipe for this month’s vintage cocktail in the e-book version of Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails from the Almagoozlum to the Zombie by Ted Haigh (as mentioned here).

The Avenue was first published in 1937 in the Cafe Royal Cocktail Book, which was the unofficial recipe guide of the United Kingdom Bartenders Guild.

There really doesn’t seem to be much of a story behind The Avenue (as far as I could tell); however, what seemed to attract people to make this particular cocktail is not the beautiful Calvados or the bourbon, but the supposedly rare mixers used.

The first one being real passionfruit juice; obtaining this simply involved me buying six passionfruit from the shops and passing it through a sieve to extract the juice - this step was almost too easy to bother writing about but I managed to cut two of my fingers badly when slicing the last passionfruit, that I felt it deserved a mention (mind your fingers!). 


The second mixer is Grenadine made with real pomegranate. The only grenadine that I was familiar with is the pomegranate-free, high corn syrup, fire-engine red concoction that rested at the bottom of my Vodka Sunrise circa 1997. After doing a check on Google, I managed to find out that real grenadine requires little more than pomegranate juice and sugar – which is pretty much sugar syrup with pom juice instead of water.

The only pomegranate juice that I could find at the time was pretty pricey at $10 a bottle, but I figured that I could make the grenadine and use the rest for healthy, antioxidant rich juice for breakfast for the rest of the week (this is my justification).

The third mixer is orange blossom water, which I already had in the cupboard – I love it; the smell, the taste, sometimes when I am feeling the urge I just stand there bottle in hand inhaling its soft fragrance.

The fact that Grenadine has been the most popular mixer since the 1920’s aside, I imagine that it would have been quite difficult to source passionfruit juice and especially orange blossom water back in 1937 when the recipe for The Avenue was published and therefore making this a rather special and rare cocktail indeed.

The taste is complex. Firstly, I could barely tell that there was any bourbon in it at all, which made me thankful that I only bought a mini bottle of Jack Daniels (as I had already spent so much on the Calvados and the pom juice already). What I could taste, however, was the orange blossom water, the grenadine and the calvados, all in perfect harmony with the tangy passionfruit juice which kept it from becoming too much like perfume. This is a seriously beautiful cocktail. I am not sure if it wins over The French 75 for me but it comes very close.

The Avenue
via Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails from the Almagoozlum to the Zombie by Ted Haigh, first published in the Cafe Royal Cocktail Book
1fl oz bourbon
1 fl oz Calvados
1 fl oz passionfruit juice
1 dash of real pomegranate grenadine
1 dash orange flower water
Shake in an iced cocktail shaker and strain into a cocktail glass.