Bunny Hug
1/3 Gin (Almost 3/4 oz Boodles Gin)
1/3 Whisky (Almost 3/4 oz Binny’s Single Barrel Buffalo Trace Bourbon)
1/3 Absinthe (Almost 3/4 oz Absinthe Verte de Fougerolles)
Shake (Stir? What does it matter? I lean towards shake for this MF.) well and strain into cocktail glass.
This cocktail should immediately be poured down the sink before it is too late.
This cocktail has always puzzled me.
First, the cute name made no sense, until someone pointed out that the “Bunny Hug” was some sort of raunchy dance invented at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel. Sort of the early 1900s equivalent of “Freak Dancing.” Also that “Hug” was not really quite as “cute” a term, as it might originally appear. Apparently, the name was supposed to evoke something more like, “doing it like rabbits”.
There’s also what may be an apocryphal story that a dancer named Vernor Castle adapted the Bunny Hug into the slower and more acceptably named Foxtrot.
Then there’s the menacing epigraph. Is it meant as a warning or encouragement?
I really had little hope for the cocktail. Given the lineage of the name, it seemed more likely that it was the turn of the century equivalent of a shooter. A short, high alcohol drink you slammed between dances.
That may be; but, it’s actually not that bad. Absinthe is dominant, of course; but, the gin kind of mediates, and the whiskey is there in the finish. I probably lucked out by picking a feisty whiskey, like the Buffalo Trace. Anything more polite would simply get blown away by the Absinthe.
Still, not something you’re really going to slowly savor in front of a warm fire. Make it small, make it cold, and get on with the dancing.
This post is one in a series documenting my ongoing effort to make all of the cocktails in the Savoy Cocktail Book, starting at the first, Abbey, and ending at the last, Zed.