From breakfast to baking, without the egg our culinary lives would be immeasurably poorer.
What’s not so well known is that, behind the bar, eggs are also, if not quite queen, then certainly some sort of minor aristocracy. The egg white provides the silken texture to such classic cocktails as the pink lady and the pisco sour. If you regularly use eggs in your cocktails (for these, incidentally, you will need a shaker to emulsify the egg white) you will notice a surplus of yolks. This isn’t a problem for me: I just make lots of mayonnaise and put it on everything like they do at Pret. There are, however, cocktails that use whole eggs, such as the hot rum flip.
Just as when cooking, make sure your cocktail eggs are ultra-fresh. Oh, and remember that cocktail eggs aren’t special small eggs like cocktail onions, they’re just eggs you use for cocktails.
The pink lady
This was invented during Prohibition to disguise the taste of bathtub gin. It’s sweet, delicious and defiantly unmacho. I like to order it in a camp German accent in the roughest bar I can find. Always goes down well.
Serves 1
25ml gin
25ml apple brandy, such as calvados
1 tbsp lemon juice
1 tbsp grenadine
1 egg white
1 Shake ingredients very hard without ice to emulsify the egg, then shake again with lots of ice. Strain into a martini glass and serve with a cherry and a camp wink.
Pisco sour
Pisco is a sort of unaged brandy from Peru. You can also buy a varietal brand – that is, one made from a single grape variety, such as muscat pisco, which is particularly aromatic and delicious.
Serves 1
25ml pisco
15ml lime juice
10ml sugar syrup
1 egg white
A dash of angostura bitters
1 Put all the ingredients except the bitters in a shaker with lots of ice. Shake vigorously and strain into a tumbler or champagne coupe. Add a dash of bitters on to the foam.
Hot rum flip
Flips come from colonial America. Nowadays the word is normally applied to a cold, egg-based drink such as a sherry flip, but originally they would have been heated using a red-hot poker. As most of us don’t have a red-hot poker to hand, here’s a much duller way of preparing it.
Serves 1
Two eggs
50ml aged rum
1 tbsp caster sugar
Half a pint (284ml) of strong ale, such as Fullers ESB
1 Beat the eggs with the caster sugar in a mixing bowl, add the rum and whisk until smooth. Heat the beer in a saucepan until hot, but not boiling.
2 Slowly mix the hot beer into the egg mixture. When it is all mixed, serve in a pewter tankard with a dusting of nutmeg on the top. B
