To the common Spaniard, the phrase “combinación,” that means “mixture,” won’t call to mind the cocktail of the identical title. However the mixture of gin and candy vermouth has been documented in Madrid because the early twentieth century, and was one of many metropolis’s aperitif cocktails of selection within the Fifties and ’60s. Nonetheless, within the years since, the Combinación has pale from menus and fallen out of public consciousness. The cocktail may need remained a historic footnote in Madrid’s ingesting tradition have been it not for celebrated bartender Diego Cabrera, who made it his mission to offer the Combinación a second life.
In 2018, Cabrera took over the bar at Viva Madrid, a conventional tavern that first opened in 1856. Desirous to modernize the choices, Cabrera established a cocktail program within the historic area, that includes crowd-pleasing cocktails like Espresso Martinis and Piña Coladas alongside his personal tackle the historic Combinación.
One of many earliest recorded recipes for the Combinación comes from Pedro Chicote, certainly one of Spain’s most well-known bartenders, in his 1927 e book, El Bar Americano en España. His system requires dry gin and vermouth in equal proportions, plus a small measure of crimson Curaçao and Angostura bitters. Quick-forward nearly a century and Cabrera has reimagined the basic with minor tweaks, calling it the Media Combinación, because the drink is best identified within the capital. (Comparable drinks with various proportions seem in several areas below totally different names, just like the Marianito within the Basque area.) Cabrera’s bar ditches the Curaçao and makes use of a home mix of amontillado sherry and candy vermouth, particularly Vermut Navarro, which is created from raisins and with out added sugar. “I’ve at all times been questioned within the orthodox cocktail world, but when it’s in my palms to enhance a drink, why wouldn’t I?” asks Cabrera. “Individuals’s palates have modified—we don’t drink as they did within the Twenties; cocktails evolve.”
Along with the basic Media Combinación, Viva Madrid additionally gives a Cuban model that includes Curaçao and mint leaves. In line with Cabrera, each variations are greatest accompanied by a Gilda, a snack of Basque origin manufactured from guindilla peppers, Cantabrian anchovies and Manzanilla olives served skewered on a toothpick. Cabrera calls it the proper marriage.
A decade in the past, the drink was solely obtainable at a number of bars, like historic Lhardy, which has had the Media Combinación on the menu for nearly a century. Sonsoles García, from Lhardy’s managing crew, explains that they nonetheless use the normal recipe, which calls for 2 elements vermouth, certainly one of gin (initially Gordon’s) and Angostura bitters. In line with Lhardy’s data, throughout the Spanish Civil Struggle (1936–1939) each the glass by which it was served and the quantity of drink within the glass shrank to cut back prices; that format has remained to this present day.
However the place did the drink come from? “The historical past of the Combinación is lengthy and sophisticated,” explains François Monti, a drinks author who moved to Madrid in 2008. “Each vermouth and the cocktail turned widespread within the nation on the finish of the nineteenth century. Round that point, within the conventional tradition of the European cafés, drinks just like the Americano in Italy, the Combinación in Spain, or the Cassis Vermouth in France emerged,” explains Monti. His interpretation is that the Combinación was born in Spain’s basic cafés—locations the place combined drinks weren’t sometimes served—as an try and recreate an American-style cocktail, maybe because of shoppers who had traveled overseas and got here again sharing the way it was performed in locations like Paris. “These café barmen, who didn’t essentially have an understanding of American cocktail tradition, devised one thing comparatively just like what the vacationers talked about, creating their very personal, very European drinks within the course of,” he says.
After a interval of scant reputation, “la hora del vermut,” that noon aperitif time that was integral to Spaniards’ weekend rituals for a lot of the twentieth century, is seeing a revival, and at its heart is the Combinación. The drink has even began to seem on menus outdoors of Spain. Impressed by Cabrera’s model, Miguel F. Lancha, cocktail director at José Andrés’ ThinkFood Group, included the drink on the menu at Bar Celona in New York Metropolis. “Media Combinación was a kind of classics from Madrid that was on the verge of disappearing, a lot in order that younger bartenders within the Spanish capital didn’t even understand it,” he says. Media Combinación can be served at different spots operated by the group, in cities reminiscent of Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Orlando.
Drinks historian David Wondrich considers the Combinación an necessary hyperlink between up to date and historic Spanish cocktail tradition. “It’s a vital cocktail as a result of it’s outdated; it makes use of American concepts of mixology with out being an American drink (displaying how these concepts interacted with native traditions and substances); it’s attribute of Spain, probably the most necessary international locations within the world unfold of the cocktail bar; and it’s nonetheless widespread,” he explains.
If Cabrera has any say in it, so long as Viva Madrid remains to be going robust, the drink will do the identical. “The Media Combinación is our homage to Madrid; it’s a part of its historical past and we have to defend it,” he says. “So long as we hold it in our menu, this cocktail will likely be alive.”
