May 14, 1997|By Rob Kasper
LONG AGO, I learned you can't fight tradition. Even though the Black-Eyed Susan is a cocktail that should be tossed down the drain, not down your gullet, some people will still want to drink it during Preakness Week. Or they think they will.
They will try one Black-Eyed Susan out of some sense of regional pride. The Kentucky Derby has the mint julep as its official concoction. The Preakness, run this Saturday at Baltimore's Pimlico Race Course, has the Black-Eyed Susan. New York's Belmont run next month has the White Carnation.
As cocktails go, the Susan is hurting. It is a forced marriage of fruit juices -- pineapple and orange -- and "sweetie-pie" liquors -- vodka, rum and Triple Sec. It tastes more like something you would sniff at a wedding reception than drink at a horse race.
The best advice I have ever come across on how to enjoy a Black-Eyed Susan is to fill a glass with shaved ice, add equal parts of orange and pineapple juices, then forget about adding any booze.
The julep, a mixture of bourbon, sugar and mint, is firmly rooted in a tradition of boozy decadence. The Susan, and its New York sister, the White Carnation, seem to be aimed at folks who like to eat Fruit Pops. The White Carnation, for instance, is made with 1 ounce vodka, 1 ounce peach schnapps, about 5 ounces of orange juice, a splash of club soda, and garnished with a slice of orange and a strawberry.
A few years back I mounted a campaign to dump the Susan as the official Preakness cocktail, and issued a call for recipes for a replacement. The idea was to get a drink that not only tasted better than a Susan but also had a few ingredients in it that could be traced to Maryland.
Recipes came in by the sackful. Some of the suggested replacement cocktails were memorable. One, for instance, was basically a Bloody Mary -- vodka and tomato juice -- but instead of putting the usual stalk of celery in the glass, this recipe called for sticking the claw of a Maryland crab in the top of the glass. The drink was creative, but kind of scary. The claw looked like it could, at any moment, reach out of the vodka and take revenge on your nose.
Another recipe pushed the candidacy of the Southside, a drink made with lime, sugar, mint, gin and sometimes rum. The version of Southside I tasted was very potent, and very, very green. Its native Maryland ingredient was, I suspected, some shredded Maryland turf.
In the end, a distinguished panel of tasters picked a cocktail made with Maryland rye whiskey, lemon and simple syrup. We presented our findings to track officials, hoping they would sell this cocktail, rather than the Susan at the track. The officials studied our findings, and eventually ignored them. They did, however, rework the recipe for the Black-Eyed Susan, adding some pink grapefruit juice and peach schnapps.
The Susan has since repeatedly repelled attempts to replace it. Fruity drinks, with or without alcohol, happen to be enjoying considerable popularity around the nation. Walk into any convenience store and you will find a seemingly endless collection of bottled juices on display. Any one of them probably tastes similar but better than a Black-Eyed Susan.
But I have made my peace with Black-Eyed Susan. We may have feuded, but that is all in the past. I may think it lacks good taste, substance and local roots. Nonetheless, the Black-Eyed Susan is a firmly established part of the Preakness tradition.
Maybe we can get rid of it next year.
Here, in my annual bow to public opinion are two recipes, the old and the new, for the Black-Eyed Susan.
The old recipe came from the Junior League of Baltimore's "Hunt to Harbor" cookbook (Waverly Press, Inc., 1985).
Black-Eyed Susan
Serves 1
1 ounce vodka
1 ounce rum
3/4 ounce Triple Sec
1 lime wedge
pineapple juice
orange juice
Fill a 12-ounce glass with shaved ice. Add vodka, rum and Triple Sec. Squeeze in juice from the lime wedge and drop wedge in glass. Fill with equal parts pineapple and orange juice.
I got the recipe for the new Susan from a tout at the track in 1988 when this version made its debut.
New Black-Eyed Susan
Serves 1
6 ounces orange juice
1 ounce pink grapefruit juice
1 ounce pineapple juice
1/2 ounce vodka
1/2 ounce rum
1/2 ounce peach schnapps
Mix fruit juices and alcohol. Serve in tall glass filled with ice.
Pub Date: 5/14/97
