Two of a Kind

My wife and I have been enjoying classic cocktails since before you could go to a thousand bars and pay $15 to get one. This isn't to sound like some sodding hipster—on the contrary, I love that the trend has caught on; it means that many places offer drinks that are far more interesting and far less saccharine than your standard Appletini or Vodka-Cran (née, Cape Cod). It's only to point out that although we weren't exactly searching for vintage-looking glassware, when we found ourselves in a thrift shop with a sizable glass collection, we looked around.

One particular glass caught our eye, an old-style cocktail glass, maybe about 3oz, stout but chic, and the seams on the stem told us it was clearly not of any significant heritage. We searched for its mate in vain. It was a loner, which is probably why there wasn't even a price on it. One glass among hundreds, many similar but no match. It looked nice, but without a mate we left it there.

Not two hours later, in another thrift shop about a mile away, while looking for something completely different, we see another glass, remarkably similar to the first one. This was not on a shelf with hundreds of its glassware brethren. Though the first glass was a loner, this one was truly alone. Not a single other glass for its company, it stood out. It looked like a match, but we couldn't be sure. At $1 though, it's an easy sell, so we take it home. 

The next day we head back to the first location, this time with a few items to donate. On the shelf in the same place as we left it is the first glass. Looking at it again, it's definitely a match—the only two, apparently—in the vicinity. The woman at the register takes my donations and looks at the glass with no price. "Aw, we'll just say it's twenty-five cents." I reach into my wallet and pull out my smallest bill and hand it to her, apologizing that she'll have to break a $20 bill for a measly quarter. She takes a quarter from the top of the register and smiles. "Someone lost a quarter!" She dumps the quarter into the till and hands me a receipt. And with that, I walked out.

The glasses are quite pretty, and we christened them with a CEO cocktail. We both wondered about the strange separation of these two glasses, so near and yet so distinctly apart. Perhaps they were once a set, and their union foretold some great travesty or bad aura. Perhaps this caused the owner to dispose of them, but not bearing to actually destroy them, decided to place them in separate locations with the hope that they could be enjoyed individually, but never again as a pair. Or maybe they were separated as part of the most subtle scavenger hunt ever devised. Perhaps it is only a coincidence that these two glasses found their way to two separate thrift shops a mile apart, each without a mate. Were I so inclined this could be the premise of a novel, but I'm not, so I write this instead.

Cheers!

The CEO Cocktail

• 2 oz brandy
• 1/2 oz Chambord or crème de cassis
• 1 oz Lillet Blanc
• 2 dashes orange bitters
• A lemon twist (apply as a garnish before serving)

Shake with ice, strain into a chilled cocktail glass (vintage, or otherwise). It's not a bad drink, but as is often the case with classic cocktails with fruit liqueurs, the lack of sugar leaves a finish that is not unlike cough syrup.