The Oldest Cocktails You'll Ever Drink

When Fefe Noir and caribougrrl go foraging for prehistoric water, it's just the tip of the iceberg...

It's a brilliant year for icebergs in our neck of the woods.  The more icebergs that drift down from Greenland, the more likely we are to find bits and pieces washed up on shore.

Along some parts of Newfoundland's coast, collecting iceberg pieces to use for cold drinks or to melt for fresh water is an annual ritual.  Down here in the southeast corner of the island, availability is a bit more hit and miss.  It's a good year for icebergs, so we've been scouring the coast for washed up ice and undertaking the terrible job of testing cocktail recipes worthy of ancient ice cubes.

Starting with the obvious ingredient of locally brewed Iceberg Beer (if you can't find this, substitute with a mexican lager), we bring you two cocktails perfect for drinking on the porch after mowing the lawn.

This beer-garita (left) and michelada (right) are made made with beer brewed with iceberg water and chilled with a few hunks of iceberg in the glass.

Iceberg Beer Michelada

sea salt

Use an ice pick or a chisel to crack up the iceberg bits.

small hunks of ice chipped from an iceberg
juice of 1/2 lime
juice from 1/2 small sweet orange (like a satsuma or clementine)
2 tsp jalapeno syrup
most of a bottle of iceberg beer

Salt the rim of a tall glass.  Fill glass with ice. Add the other ingredients in the order they are listed, give it a quick stir and garnish with citrus wedges and sliced jalapeno.

Both cocktails are salty and spicy.  The tequila gives the
beer-garita (left) a bigger kick.  The orange juice sweetens
the michelada (right) just enough to temper the salt.

Iceberg Beer-garita

sea salt
small hunks of ice chipped from an iceberg
juice of 1 lime
3 tsp jalapeno syrup
3/4 oz. silver tequila
iceberg beer

Salt the rim of a tall glass and fill with ice.  Add lime juice, tequila and syrup.  Give it a gentle stir then top up with beer.  Garnish with slices of fresh jalapeno and a wedge of lime.

~~~

(Ground-based) Iceberg Foraging and Handling

If the tide and currents are just right, you might come across a beach littered with car-trunk sized pieces of iceberg.  These are small in the grand scheme of an iceberg life, but they can be rather awkward to lug around.  Not only are they hard to get your arms around, but they're slippery as all get out.

The icebergs we see along the Avalon peninsula in the
southeast of Newfoundland have traveled about 3000 km
on their trip from western Greenland.

Foraging for usable iceberg pieces is serious business when you don't have a boat.  (We don't have a boat.)  You have to find bergy itty-bits that are big enough to make it worth the effort of bringing them home, but small enough you can wrangle them from the beach to the trunk of your car.  You are also confined to accessible beaches, and the tides and bergs are not always cooperative.

As the icebergs melt and crack and fall apart, small pieces
sometimes drift close enough to shore to capture.

Go for a drive, sticking to coastal roads.  Try not to be distracted by the spectacular view of gigantic, prehistoric, hunks of ice floating around willy-nilly in the ocean.  Be aware of them though, because they are a good sign that you might find some washed up bits, particularly when there are trails of broken up bits and pieces drifting toward shore.

The first day we went out looking for beached iceberg was the hottest day we've had yet this year.  The sun was shining, it was warm enough to wear short pants, and it was the Saturday of a long holiday weekend.  The holiday weekend when people head out to their cabins and summer homes for the first time in the year.  The holiday weekend at the beginning of tourist season.  There were people everywhere.  Every tiny, barely used side road, every dirt track down to a beach, every lookout.  But not one hunk of ice washed up... at least not one that has survived the eye of other iceberg foragers.

So here's another tip:  go out on a cold, foggy day.  Less competition.

To increase your chances of being the person in the right place at the right time, go iceberg foraging on cold, foggy days when the competition is low.

When you do find washed up ice on a beach you can get to, you want to be sure it's iceberg ice and not annual sea ice.  The pressure of thousands of years of snowfall accumulation results in a very hard ice, much harder than what's in your ice cube trays at home (sea ice is comparatively soft).  Most strikingly, iceberg ice is filled with tiny bubbles.  The same way the ice is made from water which froze 12,000 - 100,000 years ago, those bubbles are filled with air from the same time period.  Prehistoric water, prehistoric atmosphere. 

All those tiny bubbles in the ice are what make icebergs
appear white in colour.  They also contain air from tens
of thousands of years ago when the ice formed.

Despite all that air, the ice is heavy, so remember to lift with your legs.  If you have a pair of gloves handy, this will make the trip back to the car with your armload of ancient ice more comfortable.  You will get wet.  Waves will inevitably wash over your feet while you are wrestling the ice up to the tide line.  Your shirt will be soaked from carrying the berg, because, well, it's wet to begin with, and your body heat is enough to melt it a bit while you lug it.  So either wear your rubber boots and rain suit, or consider the frozen wetness a hazard of doing business... part of immersing yourself in the experience.

(Your mother-in-law's job during iceberg foraging trips is, apparently, to provide helpful advice from the back seat of the car.  She will be worried about your wet shirt.  Pay her no mind, it's not actually possible to catch the flu from an iceberg.  Also, unless you only took fist-sized pieces, she is wrong about it melting before you get home.)

If you wade out at all to retrieve ice, bear in mind that the water is still really cold this time of year.  Unless you're geared up with insulated waders, don't stand in it for too long.  Even prehistoric ice in your drink is not worth hypothermia.

Once you get it home, let the ice sit out for several hours to shed the salty seawater and any other surface contaminants.  If necessary, use a hammer and chisel to break it into hunks which will easily fit in your freezer.  Wrap well and freeze until needed.  Use the chisel again (or an actual ice pick) to break into drink-sized hunks.

If you want iceberg water, chisel into pieces small enough to maneuver into food-safe containers and leave it out to melt.  Bearing in mind that we've stopped heating the house because it's May (never mind that it's only a few degrees above freezing out, I'm in winter-denial): a large saucepan filled with iceberg pieces took nearly 3 days to melt completely, but there was enough for a pot of coffee by the time a day was gone.

~~~

Why bother with icebergs?  

There's something incredibly compelling about knowing you are holding the air and water that existed tens of thousands of years ago.  If you buy the local propaganda around iceberg products, this is water in it's purest form.  The scientist in me would argue that distilled water should be more pure, but there's no romance in distillation.  To be fair, this ice was formed before humans started burning petrochemicals and tossing plastic into the ocean, so the air and water is untainted by the industrial age.  I'm willing to forgive a bit of volcanic ash and some woolly mammoth farts captured in the Greenland glacial sheet, and think of it as the cleanest water available.  Plus, it's really really old, and that's just super cool. (Heh.  Get it?  Super cool...)

Get some really good coffee beans and use iceberg water
to brew up what might be the best cup of coffee you'll ever
drink.  

Definitely use the ice in cocktails. For one thing, it's a great conversation starter at a party.  For another, it's an excellent way to show off in front of your friends.  But also melt some water out and make coffee with it.  Trust me, it makes a seriously good cup of coffee.  Do NOT, however, waste iceberg water on Folgers or Maxwell House.  Go out and buy some really good coffee, in the form of fresh-roasted beans and grind it yourself.  Serendipitiously, we recently won some great coffee from Got My Beans through a The Food Gays giveway... definitely iceberg-water-worthy.

Choose ice that is small enough to handle, but big enough to be worth the effort of  the expedition.  After that, the choice is arbitrary.  This one reminded me of Tiktaalik emerging from primordial soup.  I left it because, well, it's creepy.

One of my all-time favourite Newfoundland words is "maggoty" and although the Dictionary of Newfoundland English will tell you the word refers primarily to salt cod which is full of blow-fly maggots, I've never heard it used to refer to actual maggots.  In my experience, it simply gets used to express that something is riddled with something else.  St. John's is maggoty with tourists in the summer.  The coast is maggoty with icebergs.

And it is, this year.  Maggoty with 'em.  The icebergs.  We're having a crummy, cold spring (minus that one Saturday), but it's a spectacular year for bergs.  Drop everything else and take advantage of it.

The best time to visit Newfoundland if you are hoping to see icebergs is during May and into early June.  

Chasing Lovage, Stumbling on Plantain

In which caribougrrl and Fefe Noir go whale watching, take note of some foraging opportunities, get outmaneuvered by some sheep, make way for the caterpillars, and provide you with some tips for picking and preparing a couple of seaside edibles.

It started the way these things usually do.  We were out for a coastal walk, looking for whales.  A minke was swimming along the shoreline, quite close, but we were up a cliff and having trouble keeping our eye on it.  So I scrambled out on a rocky head for a better look and once there, I noticed in a crevice next to me a plant I vaguely recognized.  I knew I should know what it was but just couldn't conjure it up.  So I did what you do in those situations; picked a couple of leaves and crushed them between my fingers then inhaled.  Celery-like.  So I stuck it in my mouth, like you would, right?  Contemplating the flavour (celery-parsley-fresh air-ness) and trying to bring the name of the plant to mind, I heard a stern voice behind me.  Fefe Noir.  "Did you just eat something?"

"Noooo...," I said in my most convincing (er, I mean transparently-guilty sounding) voice.  I have a habit of lying about stuff like this even, or perhaps especially, when I know it's abundantly clear that I'm lying.  I don't know why I do it.  Survival instinct?  No, I didn't hear a noise that sounded like that bear over there, it must be your imagination..  Of course I wasn't trying to break that large branch into firewood  by standing on one end and pulling up the other end; you must be seeing things.

Young love-age.

"Lovage!" I shouted as it came to me.  "Scotch lovage!"

Then the important question: Fefe Noir squinted at me and said, very slowly, "Are you sure?".  I don't know why she's always so skeptical.  She doesn't know how I'm still alive.

I had to admit, no, not absolutely certain.  Pretty sure.  Ninety-six-point-seventy-five percent sure.  So I picked some and stuck it in my pocket, to identify later.  I scoured the area though, several small plants, none looking big enough to cut back just yet, but maybe in a couple of weeks.  The whale by then was almost forgotten, until it surfaced so close to us we could hear the blowing.  Lovage forgotten.

After consulting with both Peter Scott's field guide to edible plants of Newfoundland and Labrador, and the Peterson guides for both edible plants and wildflowers (and despite the conspicuous absence of scotch lovage from the Peterson guides), I was able to convince Fefe Noir that I was indeed correct about the identification.  We started talking, obsessively, about what to do with it specifically for the blog... and while making this decision over the next few weeks, we seemed to see it everywhere we went.  In one place where the scotch lovage was so abundant, we could have literally picked bushels and hardly made a dent... it was, of course, a day when we weren't ready for it and we were too far from home to consider going back for some later.  Aside from a bit of seaside nibbling, we left that field of lovage alone but we did stop there for a picnic.

Seaside plantain is the sort of plant you walk past and
walk over without really seeing it.   It's worth paying
attention to.

Now, recall that I have been flipping through my edible plant guides, and I may have been poking around the miracle of the internet to see how other people use lovage... and thus checking out other seaside edible plants.  And there we were, sitting on the ground and right next to me is a plant I recognize.  A plant I've seen all over the place for years, but I didn't know was edible until very recently: seaside plantain.  I couldn't recall having read anything about there being similar toxic plants and I couldn't quite recall how it's meant to be used, so I did what I do best and picked a leaf and stuck in my mouth.  I was contemplating the slightly bitter but otherwise strangely tasteless raw leaf when I heard a stern voice behind me... 

So here's the thing.  Both scotch lovage and seaside plantain are extremely common along the coast of the north Atlantic ocean.  Until you are ready to use them, then the plantain remains happily abundant but the lovage disappears.  But, you're thinking (and you're right), we had seen lovage, lots of it, and taken note of where it was.

Most of the places we'd been to were with visitors from away... so places a bit far-flung for a quick trip for a fistful of lovage, or places that you visit because they are nature preserves and, well, protected, so picking lovage isn't cool (much less permissible).  No problem.  Although there wasn't very much lovage in that first place I spotted it, some time had gone by, so we knew it was a sure spot for how much we needed.  However, I failed to mention earlier in the post that this particular area is part of a municipal pasture.  Did it cross my mind that if I was interested in eating scotch lovage, the local sheep might likewise be interested?  Admittedly, no.  Lesson learned.

A multitude of similar coastal trails visited, thousands of plantain plants, no lovage.  So we finally went back to the place we harvested the plantain (skipping the lovage at the time because we were evidently over-confident about being able to find it closer to home).  We brought the dogs to kill two metaphorical birds with one metaphorical stone, making it feel a bit less like back-tracking.

One last amazing thing before you get to the how-to below:  the scotch lovage which was still right where we left it was already occupied when we arrived.  A couple of short-tailed swallowtail caterpillars were busy munching on loveliest of lovely scotch lovage plants.  There was enough lovage to share (thankfully) and we carefully harvested stems from parts of the plant not being used by the caterpillars.

Short-tailed swallowtail caterpillars are strongly associated with scotch lovage.  And very pretty too.

~~~

Identify, pick and use seaside plantain and scotch lovage.

Seaside Plantain Plantago juncoides (also known as Goose Tongue)

Seaside plantain tends to grow in colonies.

The Peterson guide aptly describes seaside plantain as a "homely" plant.  It's low growing and generally found in colonies above but close to the high tide line (though looking at how it's distributed, you get the sense that wave action is part of how seeds are dispersed; it's not uncommon to see a lone plant here or there, up a cliff face or much further inland than the others).  We have found it on pebbly beaches, in rock crevices, and interspersed with black crowberry on coastal heaths.  The leaves are fleshy with a deep groove through the length and although some grow straight, many of the leaves curl and curve around in strange ways.  Flower stalks are erect and are topped with a tight elongated cluster of greenish-yellowish flowers.

Pick only 1-3 leaves from each plant (fewer from smaller plants, more from larger plants) being careful to not pull the roots of the plant up.  The leaves twist out of the plant fairly easily if you are selecting younger central leaves... the older the leaf, the more bitterness it has, so we stuck to the younger leaves.  If they are resisting plucking, they are probably too old anyway.

Since this was the first time we used seaside plantain, we stuck to the recommendation in all the field guides consulted: we boiled the leaves in a small amount of water and served with butter.  They hold their shape during cooking and the flavour is slightly salty and bitter like rapini, the texture similar to asparagus but slightly chewier.  This would be an excellent green to serve with lamb.

As a **cautionary note**:  Apparently in areas where there are salt marshes, a similar plant called seaside arrowgrass accumulates cyanide in the leaf.  Avoid confusing the two!  Seaside arrowgrass leaves grow more or less straight up (rather than curling) and are not grooved.  My suspicion is that it's difficult to confuse them side by side, but if you are salt-marsh wanderer, be mindful.

Scotch Lovage Ligusticum scothicum (also known as Scots Lovage, Sea Lovage, Sea Parsley, Sea Celery)

Scotch lovage is very similar to flat leafed parsley in appearance and taste.

If you are familiar with herb garden varieties of lovage, you will have no trouble spotting this plant.  We found them on pebble beaches, in crevices of rocky outcrops/rocky heads and in coastal heaths.  Plants are bushy and tall (10-60 cm) with clustered white or greenish-white flowers in an umbrella-like shape (similar to yarrow and other carrot-family flowers).  The leaves are alternate on stalks and composed of three flat three-lobed leaflets with toothed edges.  Veins in the older leaves are visually prominent ranging from dark green to reddish-purple; but are not terribly prominent in the young growth.  When you crush the leaves, they smell heartily of celery.  Black and short-tailed swallowtail caterpillars are strongly associated with scotch lovage (and other wild parsley or parsnip-like plants).

Like any perennial herb, it can stand cutting, but since we share wild plants with wild (and, apparently, domestic) animals, we left the vast majority of the plant intact.  For use as a fresh herb, select thinner stems; for use as a cooked herb go ahead and cut some of the older, thicker stems.  The flavour is (not surprisingly) very similar to flat-leafed parsley but with a strong celery note and the taste of sea-air, probably from the saltiness.  Use as you would use parsley or celery leaf.  We made tabbouleh, one of our favourite parsley dishes.

Fefe Noir's Seaside Tabbouleh

1 c. whole grain bulgur (cracked wheat)
juice of 1-1/2 lemons
2-inch piece of preserved lemon, rind only, finely diced
1 tomato, finely diced
1 bunch scotch lovage (or substitute parsley from your herb garden), leaves only, minced
sprig of fresh mint (bonus points for wild mint, we couldn't find any), leaves only, minced
2-4 spring onions (2 if they're large, 4 if they're small), finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, pressed
salt to taste
a goodly grind of black pepper


Pre-soak bulgar:  In a non-reactive bowl combine bulgar with the juice of 1/2 lemon plus enough water to make up 1 c. liquid.  Let sit overnight (or if you didn't plan ahead, give it at least 2 hours for the bulgur to absorb the water).

Combine all remaining ingredients with soaked bulgur (don't forget the other lemon, juiced).  Let sit for at least an hour before eating to let the flavours combine.  Serve at room temperature.  

Another excellent side for lamb... we may have a meal here... 

~~~

The lovely Bella did some seaside foraging of her own while we were out gathering lovage.  She's rather fond of
getting getting some extra calcium by scavenging crab shells discarded by gulls.