Today, you may be aware, is the two hundredth anniversary of Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo. This is a big year, apparently - the Magna Carta turned eight hundred on Monday. My first thought on hearing this, naturally, was, "Is there a Waterloo Cocktail? Float the Champagne on top, then carefully pour the raspberry liqueur through the Champagne, so it also floats on the gin and cordial.
Recipe modified from metric units to the units that landed men on the moon. Elder or St. Germain would approximate this flavor reasonably well, while admittedly adding a few things of their own. Now, ordinarily, this would be the part where the author signs off, with maybe a musing about Waterloo for the road. But today, as I was doing my research, I found this article as well. For those who don't feel like going through the Scheherazadean exercise of articles within articles, here's the money quote:.
In other words, today is also the 75th anniversary, at least symbolically , of the start of the French Resistance. Which naturally made me wonder, "Is there a Charles de Gaulle Cocktail? And, just as naturally, there is. Everybody's on the same page that this is a Green Chartreuse, hot chocolate, and dairy drink. In the first of those two links, you'll see heated milk and a garnish of heavy cream called for although the cocoa is still a powder in that recipe, so the milk could be read as simply indicating a rich hot chocolate.
In the latter, no particular type of cream is specified, but its location is: on top. So we've got a slug of Chartreuse in a mug of hot chocolate with some species of decorative cream surtopping it.
Remind you of anything? This is a reasonably well-known drink , evidently thanks to Jamie Boudreau , since most of the online references I see cite him as their source. As a non-Francophone, I have to give credit to blind luck, careful Googling, and this young lady's travel blog , for introducing me collectively to the idea of "chocolat chaud," which is, literally, French for "hot chocolate.
