Rummy and Cher

From Cherimoya to Nuts

Springtime farmers market tables loaded with hand grenade-looking cherimoyas have always fascinated me. These fruits don’t appear particularly enticing, with their seemingly armored and leathery skin. But then again, how did humans figure out we should eat the innards (the gonads, no less!) of the spiky sea urchin? When either adventurous or hungry, it’s best not to go by first appearances.

And if I’m going to delve into a new food, I’m probably going to try to turn it into a cocktail. So here’s the Rummy and Cher, a tropical blast that will trick you into thinking you walked into a tiki bar. For if you take home a cherimoya and cut it open (wait until it softens some—as you would do with an avocado), you’ll quickly discover why one of its nicknames is custard apple. The white, creamy flesh—with lots of biggish black seeds you need to pick around—delights with bursts of banana, pineapple, pear and strawberry flavors. People freeze cherimoyas and then scoop the flesh as if it was ice cream for a reason.

With so much fruit to kick off the cocktail, I figured I might as well keep with the tiki profile, hence the rum. To be honest, years of lame rum-flavored cakes from Italian bakeries in my Jersey youth made me dislike distilled sugar cane, but the straightforward Appleton Estate Signature Jamaica Rum does the spirit right. There’s just enough of all the notes one expects—vanilla, caramel, banana, strawberry (hey, some of those are cherimoya notes, too!)—without overt sweetness. Indeed, the cocktail needs that simple syrup to add some more mouthfeel and sugar things up. On a consumer note, this bottling of Appleton is relatively inexpensive, so fine to use in a mixed drink.

Of course, you might be wondering why, for a mere eight drops in two drinks, you need to wait two days to make this cocktail. That pistachio tincture might seem an excessively fancy addition, but after testing the drink with and without, it adds plenty, starting with a bracing saltiness that sets this fauxtiki drink’s sails. It also delivers the nuttiness, similar to what orgeat, generally made from almonds, provides to so many tropical drinks. Of course, we get a local bonus since we get to use nuts from the Santa Barbara Pistachio Company, a Santa Barbara Farmers Market fixture. (And then when you serve the drink, you can provide your own joke about local nuts.)

I’ve borrowed the tincture from a terrific new book, Cure: New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix ’Em. If you are interested in the state of cocktails—or New Orleans, as if the two can be separated—check it out. Neal Bodenheimer, proprietor of the titular bar that has won James Beard awards, has written a sloshy, enticing love letter to his town. It will inspire your mixology.

Mint really starts taking off in spring, and while you could wait until Derby Day for a mint julep, in the meantime you can let its sweet-spiciness grace other drinks, too. Local lemon trees also still seem laden with plenty of fruit, so while lime is a bit more typical for a tropical potion, it seems better to get acid zippiness with the benefit of what’s most in season. Add everything up and the cocktail even gets a bit of foaminess from that fruit—this is almost a smoothie.

Turns out there’s even one better reason to toast to the cherimoya with this cocktail: At least one source suggests it got to California via the same person, Judge R.B. Ord, who also imported our state’s first avocados. And where did Judge Ord live in 1871 and plant those wonderful discoveries? Yep, Santa Barbara. It might be about time we erect a statue to this horticultural hero.