A fair few of the recipes I came across in this month’s research involved muddling strawberries, but this is the only one that properly read as a cobbler, complete with the heavy wine component in the base (originally ruby port), with Cognac in a supporting role. The 1920s Parisian book it comes from has lots of Campari in it, so I threw in a little for dimension. Reminiscent of our Torino Cobbler.

There were a couple of great fizz recipes I came across for this month’s theme. The first is the Crushed Strawberry Fizz, a simple gin fizz with muddled strawberry that was popular at the St. Nicholas Hotel, NYC, in the 1880s. Then there’s the eponymous Elsie Ferguson Fizz (named for the star of stage and screen) from the 1910s (gin, lemon, strawberry, grenadine, cream, soda). I replaced the grenadine with strawberry syrup and added egg white and a little strawberry vermouth.

I was a little surprised at how many spirit-forward drinks I found that called for strawberry syrup or liqueur. Gin and Cognac were by far the most common bases for these drinks and many of them called for vermouth. And several of the books I found these drinks in have lots of Campari-laced recipes (including the Café Royal book, from which I took the drink’s name). So I turned this into a kind of subtly strawberry Negroni! It’s delicious and would lend itself nicely to batching for a summer soirée.

I found several sours that called for strawberry syrup or liqueur in my research; some called for gin, others for whiskey, but a few of them called for rum, which I liked the sound of! There were a bunch of supporting characters, too (anisette, red Curaçao, raspberry liqueur, pineapple, orange) so I kind of made something up inspired by all of this as well as the Siesta, Strawberry Daiquiris and the Gigantic drink Sea, Sex, and Sun. The result is absolutely delicious and triply strawberry-y!