Aperitif

Cocktail Hour the French Way

Aperitif is an invitation to enjoy a French style happy hour, an apero, with friends. For author Rebekah Peppler, an American who lived in Paris for awhile in her 20s and 30s, this means drinks made with sherry, vermouth, and other fortified wines, and savory snacks to accompany them before dinner.

Peppler starts of with an introduction to vermouth (plus its cousin quinquina), sherry, and a few recommended liqueurs like Suze, St Germain, and creme de cassis. Most of the ingredients she uses are bittersweet, which definitely gives the drinks she builds from them a consistent palate.

Vermouth is made from wine that’s fortified with a spirit like brandy, then infused with herbs, including wormwood, from which it draws its name. Quinquina is very similar, except the bittering agent is quinine instead of wormwood. Sherry starts similarly but gets its flavor from aging in oak barrels rather than infusing herbs. Peppler picks a few brands to mention by name - Byrrh, Dubonnet, and Lillet - but largely treats the various vermouths and quinquinas as interchangeable aside from grouping them as rouge, blanc, and rose, which is honestly what I do at home too.

Next there are four sections of drink recipes, grouped by the weather at the time you’re drinking them - warm, hot, cool, and cold. Peppler says this is partly seasonal, partly based on time of day, and whether it’s been rainy or sunny. The drinks are all relatively low alcohol, what Dinah Sanders calls ‘shims’. Because of Peppler’s limited ingredient list, and because many of her ingredients are categories with several options for how to fill it, a lot of the recipes seem like flexible templates. Others are oddly specific. There’s a Kir drink in each season, for example, always with the exact same ratio, just changing the mixer, always blackcurrant liqueur (cassis), just with sparkling wine, lager, cider, or red wine.

There’s also a section with recipes for snacks, various puff pastries, crackers, and seasoned popcorns you can make yourself, along with spreads to smear on them, tapenades and pates. There’s a bit of advice for doctoring olives or preparing cheese to share, but the emphasis is on things you prepare more than things you might purchase directly.

I have a suspicion that Peppler’s vision of l’apero has as much to do with the nature of her friend group in Paris (and her nostalgia for those friends, after she moved back) as it does with what’s customary in France, but I think that’s inevitable. Imagine what a French woman who lived in New York as a young adult might write about American happy hour, for example! But I do feel inspired to try out a few more vermouth drinks this year.