Gourmet is pleased to present today’s bonus issue free in honor of May Day. Consider becoming a paid subscriber so that we can keep this worker-owned ship a-rowin’!
To You—Our Comrades
By Alex Tatusian
A May Day cocktail for all
For better or for worse, I’m kinda the resident Gourmet cocktail guy, a badge of dishonor I wear with mucho reluctance. All of the worker-owners can mix a great drink—despite Cale’s protestations re: cocktails—but my version of entertaining revolves around my home bar, I collect and share obscure bottles with guests, and, let’s face it, I’m an incorrigible barfly.
I recently returned from an L.A. estate sale with a remarkable haul of vintage liquor, and I wanted to find something to do with these spoils, specifically some Stoli from the ’80s and a bottle of kümmel, a caraway-heavy German liqueur.
Ordinarily, I’d reach for one of the books perched on a wicker hutch by my kitchen, many of them classics collected over years in pursuit of novel hangovers. Trader Vic’s Bartender’s Guide. Robert Vermeire’s Cocktails: How to Mix Them. The Waldorf Astoria Bar Book. But a look through these storied texts proved uninspiring. Bizarrely, something finally caught my eye in The Bartender’s Black Book, Sixth Edition, a spiral-bound manual of 2,600 recipes, once standard at bars that would serve you a drink like a Sex on the Beach or a Pink Panther or a Long Sloe Comfortable Fuzzy Screw Against the Wall With Satin Pillows the Hard Way. (Don’t ask.) To the credit of author Stephen Kittredge Cunningham (“Professional Bartender”), it also contains versions of every classic under the sun and a handful of simple, palatable drinks that have simply fallen out of fashion. Including a drink I’d never heard of: the Tovarich.
I love The Bartender’s Black Book because it’s a cocktail book for real people. To even read some of these recipes is nausea-inducing, but unlike the vaunted “old books,” as the seminal tomes are sometimes called by aficionados, this volume equips you to serve every workaday concoction a drinker could possibly desire. Sure, some were invented to push the ghoulish liqueurs of the ’80s on the ghoulish patrons of the ’80s, but the book is mostly a list of straightforward recipes for Rob Roys and Sidecars, one after the other, printed in Helvetica with almost zero formatting. The kinds of drinks real boozers order in the low light of last call, craving something comfortable.
The Tovarich leapt off the page because its composition seemed at once novel and classical. A neutral liquor, a sweet and savory German liqueur, and some citrus, shaken—it sounded like a daiquiri from the other side of the planet.
According to Difford’s Guide, effectively the Wikipedia for drinks, a cocktail called a Tovarich first appeared in a recipe book in 1944, but little else has been written about this drink. It may or may not be named after the eponymous play and film by Jacques Deval about two refugee Russian aristocrats hiding out as domestic workers in 1930s Paris. There are a few recipes floating around—the Difford’s version looks more like a pre-Prohibition sour, with foamy egg white and simple syrup—but most hew to the simple tripartite combo in the Black Book.
Tovarich means “comrade” in Russian, and the drink feels like an old friend—fun and familiar, yet unpredictable. It isn’t going to spark another cocktail revival, but it’s refreshingly hearty and worth sourcing kümmel for. Try your local middlebrow liquor store: you might be surprised. If not, decent, affordable bottles are available online, or you can sub aquavit, anisette, or another sweet, spice-forward liqueur. It’s the only oddball ingredient you’ll need.
This May Day, we at Gourmet are thirsty for good company rather than complexity. We want three ingredients and a kitchen floor sticky because of a party we weren’t expecting to host. We’re exhausted by this insane and wonderful world, but we still want to live in it.
Today’s issue is free for everyone because we want to thank the comrades who have sustained us in our charge against the windmill. (Start a magazine in 2026? Why not?) We want to thank Caroline Jaquiss, Jack Kearney, Al Shaw, and Alex Neuss for generous financial support that jumpstarted our efforts. We want to thank all of the other workers and worker-owners out there keeping that burner lit. We want to thank Max Rivlin-Nadler for sharing everything Hell Gate has done to shape the worker-owner model, and for advising us, above all else, to just do this. We want to thank all of our contributors for taking a chance on a new publication of, ahem, strange provenance: you mean the world to us. We want to thank our partners and lovers and friends who let us take over the kitchen or the office or their dinner plans to test a recipe or report a story.
Most of all, we want to thank you, our readers—the Communards, Super-goûteurs, Epicureans, and Gourmands who have supported us by subscribing, forwarding, reposting, and writing to us (please keep it up!). Without you, there would be no Gourmet.
To all of you, we raise a comradely glass. Workers of the world—imbibe!
Tovarich
Adapted from The Bartender’s Black Book, Sixth Edition by Stephen Kittredge Cunningham
Makes one cocktail, easily doubled for comrades
The most important ingredient in any great drink is temperature. A Tovarich, with its gestures to Russo-Germanic climes, should be served ice cold. Parking your vodka and kümmel in the freezer at least a few hours ahead of time will make them slightly viscous, and lend the finished drink an extremely pleasurable mouthfeel, but it’s not essential. You must, however, chill your glasses. —A.T.
- 1½ ounces vodka
- ¾ ounce kümmel
- Scant ¾ ounce fresh lime juice
- ¼ ounce simple syrup (optional, to soften the drink)
- Place cocktail shaker and cocktail glass in the freezer for at least 10 minutes.
- Combine vodka, kümmel, lime juice, and simple syrup (if using) in chilled cocktail shaker. Add plenty of ice, cover, and shake vigorously for 15 seconds.
- Strain into chilled cocktail glass. Don’t garnish.
Alex Tatusian is a worker-owner of Gourmet.
NEXT ISSUE: Cook with James Beard while smoking a cigarillo.