Jack Rose

I RAN INTO SOMEONE YESTERDAY who was having trouble perfecting a Jack Rose. The Jack Rose is a true classic that marries applejack's burn with citrus and smoothes it out with the delicate vanilla sweetness of grenadine. He said that no matter how he mixed it, he ended up with a sickly sweet drink. This is the 225th anniversary of Laird's Applejack, which actually trace its roots back more than 300 years, to 1698, according to Lisa Laird Dunn who is part of the distillery's 9th or 10th generation. It's a fascinating history, but let's get right to the Jack Rose.

Assuming my acquaintance was using applejack, which has a better bite than apple brandy or calvados, and fresh lemon as lime tends to overpower the drinkit's down to the grenadine.

Commercial grenadine is a holdover from the days when appearance outweighed flavor on the culinary scale, and the favored colors were generally garish. Commercial grenadine is the cocktail equivalent of the maraschino cherries on the crown rack of Spam that appeared in Good Housekeeping's 1953 cookbook.

Grenadine has been so vilified that no bartender wants to talk about it, much less use it. Why is it behind every bar? Because it seems like some customers were hummingbirds in past lives.

So what's the solution? Make your own grenadine. It's astonishingly easy, yet no one bothers.

TO MAKE GRENADINE: combine equal parts sugar and water in a sauce pan. Two cups of each should do it. (Sounds familiar? Yup. Grenadine is just simple syrup with a whole bunch of pomegranate seeds simmered into it.) Peel a pomegranate or two. Break the seeds apart and add them to the sugar and water. Simmer over low heat for 30 to 45 minutes until the color of the liquid is as red as the formerly red seeds are white. Let the mixture cool before you strain it.

Bottle it and you're all set to make the best, if not the most blazingly red Jack Rose you've ever had.

JACK ROSE

1.5oz Applejack

juice of half a lemon

.5oz homemade grenadine

Garnish with a lime wedge and/or an edible rose petal and/or an apple slice.