Wonder Woman had her golden lasso. Derek Zoolander had his piercing, power-cheekbones Blue Steel gaze. Harry Potter could “expecto patronum” up a magical spirit stag. MacGyver once made a working defibrillator using some candlesticks, a microphone cord and a rubber mat.
I have no such powers. I can’t usually find a pair of scissors in my junk drawer, much less restart someone’s heart with its contents. My to-do lists have started to sprout to-do lists of their own. Last week, I couldn’t find my phone for a couple hours and eventually discovered it in the fridge, near the coffee creamer.
But I can conjure a pretty good cocktail. And during the busy holiday season, I turn again and again to a magical potion that’s been in the tippler’s bag of tricks since at least the 17th century: Expecto saccharum!
Oleo saccharum, to be precise, fancy Latin for “oily sugar,” which I’ll admit doesn’t sound quite so seductive and mystical in English. But you haven’t smelled it yet. When you do, you’ll understand: This goop could be called “Rudy Giuliani,” and you’d still want to eat it with a spoon.
Oleo saccharum doesn’t actually appear out of thin air: You have to make it, but it doesn’t require you to wander the earth gathering mystical molds from haunted caves or a smooth-talking a goblin for a sliver of his bunion. You just need an afternoon, some fresh citrus fruits and granulated sugar, and minimal elbow grease.
Get the recipe: Citrus Cordial (Oleo Saccharum)
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There’s little that transforms an individual drink as quickly and easily as a swath of citrus peel. For martinis and Negronis, expressing the essential oils loaded into nature’s gift wrap — more specifically, the flavedo, the bright outermost skin rather than the white pith underneath it — is a 20-second trick that can take a drink from good to shazam. Extra impresario points if you express the peel through the flame of a lighted match, igniting and roasting the oils midair before they settle on the surface of your cocktail.
With oleo saccharum, though, you scale up on those oils, drawing them out with the power of sugar into a thick syrup. Oleo saccharum is traditionally made to boost the flavor of punches, but its use is hardly limited to that, and when mixed with the fruits’ juice, it turns into a deeply flavorful shrub or cordial that’s perfect as an enhancement for sparkling wine for all those end-of-year toasts — and mixes beautifully with lots of other spirits, liqueurs and mixers. It’s also nonalcoholic, which means your party can be more inclusive of those who don’t drink.
Share this articleShareI always include lemons; I think of their deep, bittersweet florality as the backbone of the syrup. The basic version I’ve offered here is majority lemon, with some navel orange added, but you can get more creative by bringing in blood oranges, tangerines, clementines. More rarely I’ll include a little bit of lime or grapefruit peel, usually in smaller quantities as they both skew bitter. Sometimes that bitter quality is useful and desirable in drinks, but when you want an oleo saccharum with the broadest possible application, I recommend this version as a base. You can vary the sugar as well: I often do a combination of granulated and something with a little caramelly note like turbinado or demerara.
Some guide points for prep: Choose fruit with a hard, shiny peel; aggressively firm citrus have skins that are tight with essential oils. Wash them well, under hot water (nonorganic citrus often has wax and even color added to the skin, and you don’t want that stuff in your oleo). Once you’ve got your clean fruits, you want to strip off as much of the colorful part of the peel and as little of the bitter white pith underneath as you can. I typically use a standard vegetable or Y-peeler for this step, unless I’m dealing with the Nudist Citruses: Clementines and their ilk have peels that don’t cling as tightly to the fruit. They’re ready to just take it all off! I’m not fruit-shaming, mind you—it’s great when you want to eat a clementine, and would be fine if their rapid dishabille didn’t include all that white pith you want to avoid. When I want to add clementine oils, I use a zester or Microplane to get off the part of the skin I want.
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Once you’ve got strips of zest, scatter the sugar over them and then use a cocktail muddler, pestle or just a fat wooden spoon to pound on the peels, thoroughly grinding the sugar against the skin of the fruit. Try to hit all the peels at least a few times, and after a minute or two, you’ll see that the sugar will start to look damp.
Once that’s happened, your work here is done for now. Leave the bowl alone for at least 3 hours, overnight if you want, and go do something else. Catch up on your party prep, gift wrapping, card writing, holiday baking, emailing Carolyn Hax on how to deal with your true love who gave you 23 live birds for Christmas — whatever sparks that good old-fashioned holiday feeling.
Get the recipe: Champagne Cocktail With Citrus Cordial
By the time you come back to the bowl, the sugar will have done the rest for you, drawing all those fragrant oils out of the pores of the peel. You’ll have a nice big puddle of wet, perfumey citrus sugar. Do not roll in it, much as you might be tempted! Juice the peeled fruits into it, stir it until any remaining sugar has dissolved, then strain out the solids and refrigerate the liquid (known as a shrub or cordial) until you’re ready to use it.
Here are some ways to use your potion in a DIY bubbly bar at the holidays:
- Set out bottles of chilled sparkling wine in ice buckets. You don’t have to go with anything super pricey; a good dry (brut-style) cremant is a good choice. You could include a rosé, a cava or a prosecco as options as well, and you’ll want a nonalcoholic sparkling wine or bubbly such as Töst if you’ve got nondrinkers in attendance. Add an ounce or so of your shrub and top with the bubbly.
- Add some spirit or liqueur in addition to the shrub. Start with an ounce of gin or cognac, then add the shrub and top with the bubbles. Or try the citrus syrup with elderflower, ginger or hibiscus liqueur, then the sparkling wine. You could add some Campari or other red bitter — most of which have a good bitter orange note — for a good citrusy spritz.
- Try a splash in a citrusy beer, such as a hazy IPA or radler, or in hard cider.
- For other nonalcoholic options, add some to lemon or orange-flavored seltzer waters, Italian bitter sodas such as Sanbitter and chinotto, hibiscus tea, or even basic tonic.
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