Me, you and Yvette: Until now, a forbidden romance

[Scroll down for three cocktail recipes]

For $90 it better be bloody delicious. Or délicieuse, as the label promises.

That’s what I was thinking as I spirited home my bottle of Crème Yvette. Boozehounds around Toronto had spread the news via Twitter that the elusive purple liqueur had finally made its way to our province (indeed, our country); no matter what the ridiculous price, I was determined to bring some home.

To make a long story short — and it is a long story, one that goes back more than a century — Crème Yvette is a liqueur flavoured with berries, violet petals, vanilla, orange peel and honey. So it’s fruity and flowery. It’s subtle — understatedly delicious, although it’s best consumed in small quantities.

Back in the day, it appeared in old-school cocktails such as the blue moon, but it had relatively few uses. Layered pousse café-type drinks seemed to be the main (ahem, pointless) application. Crème Yvette was the epitome of a liqueur that sits on the back bar for years because the bartender will be damned if he knows how to use it.

The current bottle hails Yvette as “one of the most important cocktail ingredients of all time,” which is an outrageous exaggeration: It’s actually one of the most obscure, which would probably explain why the stuff went out of production circa 1969. What bottles remained may have been dumped down the drain.

“Oh, Crème Yvette? That’s an old bottle, Jimmy. Been here for years. Nobody drinks the stuff. May as well pour it out.”

Tragic.

Anyway, the company that held the rights and the recipe, Charles Jacquin et Cie of Philadelphia, brought back Yvette in 2009 thanks to the retro cocktail revival (formerly made in the United States, it is now made in France). The venerable Imbibe magazine told the story.

(Who was Yvette, by the way? The company’s Robert Cooper says: ““I have been searching for the answer to that question for years now. Nobody seems to know.” Alas.)

I got my hands on a shot of the liqueur at a launch in New Orleans in 2009, but back then the market was pretty much restricted to New York. I liked it: My yearning for Yvette set in. When it made its way to Ontario, albeit in very small quantities, the cocktail nerd in me was determined to have a bottle of the stuff — no matter how seldom I was likely to use it.

In recent days I’ve been experimenting with some of the few possibilities the internet offers. Thanks to Yvette’s violet colour, they tend to look like silly girly drinks, but in fact they are sophisticated cocktails that justify the high Canadian price of Yvette — but yeah, I admit they are pretty girly.

YVETTE COCKTAIL

OK, sounds straightforward: Yvette, gin, simple syrup, lime juice and … cream. Wait, say again?

There’s no denying it: This is a weird-sounding cocktail employing obscure ingredients. You’re probably never going to make one (please comment below if you do!).

On the other hand, it shares some flavour traits with the crowd-pleasing Ramos gin fizz. It’s really tasty, trust me. Creamy and floral and aromatic, if a touch sweet. Charles Jacquin quotes a cocktail book from 1930 that noted: “If you’ve ever had one, you’ll never forget it—nor regret it.”

Here’s my translation of Jacquin’s official version of the recipe:

• 2 oz. gin
• ¼ oz. fresh lime juice
• 1 oz. Crème Yvette
• ½ oz. cream
• ½ oz. simple syrup

Method: Combine ingredients in an ice filled shaker. Shake well. Fine strain into a chilled coupe or cocktail glass.

DELFT FUCHSIA

Riffing on a recipe called the Delft blue over at DIY Cocktails, I swapped out their crème de violette for Crème Yvette (they are similar and sometimes treated as interchangeable), thus creating the Delft fuchsia:

• 2 oz. genever (Dutch gin)
• 1 ounce Crème Yvette
• 1/2 ounce elderflower liqueur (e.g., St-Germain or Chase)
• 1 ounce fresh lemon juice
• flowers, for garnish

Method: Shake liquid ingredients well with ice, strain into chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with violets — or do like me and steal some blue-eyed grass from the park across the street.

The Delft hits both the sweet and sour parts of the tongue less than gently. Yet I personally enjoyed it. I especially liked how the roundness of the genever and the floral flavours of the Yvette played down the kinda simple sweetness of the elderflower liqueur.

EAGLE COCKTAIL

If you’re really allergic to sweet drinks, try a recipe that Jamie Boudreau of Seattle pulled out of the Stork Club Bar Book, and then adapted. It’s simliar to a classic called the blue moon, which the Yvette bottle mentions by name.

The eagle cocktail is pink, and its meringue-like layer of whipped egg protein makes it fluffy, too. Altogether it has a dessert-like appearance. But in terms of flavour it’s relatively dry and simple, allowing the drinker to taste the berry and flower aromas of the Crème Yvette against the juniper of the gin. Lovely.

I hope Jamie won’t mind me repeating his recipe here:

• 1½ oz gin
• ¾ oz Crème Yvette
• ¾ oz fresh lemon juice
• white of an egg

Method: Shake hard (Boudreau reminds us that you always shake hard when using eggs) and strain into four-ounce stemmed glass.

Writes Boudreau: “I’d tell you more about how delicious this is, but instead I think I’ll just keep it to myself and make you go out and buy a bottle of Yvette to find out for yourself.”

Well sure, if you’re lucky!

If you’re in Ontario, I notice that the LCBO is now asking us to order via phone. I don’t quite know how that works, but if you’re ready to start a little fling with Yvette …