Widow’s Fool
A cocktail for the weekend and a song to go with it
Welcome to Friday. As always, a good cocktail and a nice piece of music and we’re ready to kick off the weekend. So let’s get started.
Our drink for the weekend is the Widow’s Kiss. It was probably created by George Kappeler and it was first published in his 1895 cocktail book Modern American Drinks. The Widow’s Kiss was very popular during the first third of the last century but by the third publication of the recipe, in Harry Craddock’s 1930 The Savoy Cocktail Book, it was beginning its descent into the realm of forgotten cocktails. That may have been because people tastes moved away from herbal liqueurs like Chartreuse and Benedictine. With advances in preservation techniques, alternatives to the herbal liqueurs became available for the first time and people started to prefer the new fruit flavored liqueurs that could be kept for a while without losing their flavor.
The standard recipe for a Widow’s Kiss calls for Calvados (apple brandy from Normandy) but it can be difficult to find in the US. You can substitute Laird’s 7-1/2 year old brandy. But, if you have the opportunity, try it with Calvados. Our recipe modifies the traditional recipe by decreasing the liqueurs from .75 to .25 ounce each and increasing the brandy from 1.5 to 2 ounces (Jim Meehan's PDT recipe). Change it to suit your tastes.
Widow’s Kiss
2 dashes Angostura bitters
.25 ounce Benedictine
.25 ounce Chartreuse (yellow or green - try each and see which you like better)
2.0 ounces Calvados or Laird’s Apple Brandy
All all ingredients in a shaker and shake with ice until cold. Strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a Luxardo cherry.
Our song to accompany this weekend’s cocktail
Tuesday was April Fool’s Day. I usually ignore the calendar and current events for Friday, finally but April Fool’s is pretty agnostic so why not select a song about a fool to accompany this weekend’s cocktail. After doing a little research I can confirm that there are a lot of songs about fools. A lot of them. It is impossible to choose a best one. There are just too many and their content and styles and stories are so diverse: I’m a Fool to Want You. Chain of Fools. What a Fool Believes. A Fool for You. Fooled Again (And I Don’t Like It). Foolin’ Around. River of Fools. I could go on and on but you get the idea. I ended up having to just choose one.
The song to accompany our cocktail with weekend is Fool In The Rain from the 1979 album In Through the Out Door by Led Zeppelin. I’ve never been much of a fan of the band. Maybe too many years were to throughly saturated with Led Zeppelin music - everywhere all the time. Whatever it was, I just haven’t been a fan. But this song I do like quite a bit.
They were never a singles band so our song was one of only ten singles put out by the band over their history. It was also their last single. Drummer John Bonham died and the band broke up in 1980, the year following its release.
Yes, it’s a song about a guy that gets stood up by a woman and who laments that he is just a fool waiting in the rain for a woman that isn’t going to show up. By the way, the phrase fool in the rain is not in the song.
Fool in the Rain
Written by John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, produced by Jimmy Page, performed by Led Zeppelin
Friday, finally Playlist on
Here’s to standing in the rain, while filled with dreams, hope and anticipation.
Until next week…