I made it home from the festival quite late last night. This morning when I woke up, I was exhausted. As far as I could tell, there was only one way to fix that.

Red Snapper

•  90ml gin
• 180ml tomato juice
• 60ml lemon juice
• 3-6 dashes Tabasco
• 3 dashes Worcestershire sauce
• 1/4 tsp horseradish cream
• a sprinkle of black pepper

 

Shake ingredients over ice and strain into a large ice-filled Collins glass, or a big wine glass if you’re feeling fancy. Garnish with a celery stalk or I’ll hunt you down and smack you with said celery stalk. You can rim the glass with some cracked black pepper and celery salt if you can be bothered (I wasn’t).

 

If you didn’t know before reading this post and you haven’t already guessed from the recipe, the Red Snapper is the gin alternative to the infamous vodka-based Bloody Mary. It’s also the superior version, if you ask me.

Shooting the usual suspects (AKA the ingredients list) made me nostalgic for last Ginuary. It all came flooding back to me!

I went with Bulldog Gin, for a couple of reasons. It’s currently my newest bottle, so I’m a bit excited about it—I couldn’t access a bottle last year, but since last Ginuary it’s become readily available (and affordable) in Dan Murphy’s stores across Australia. It’s named for Winston Churchill, a right bulldog of a man who would surely have appreciated a Red Snapper. And @BULLDOGGIN tweeted yesterday about Bloody Marys with gin. Uh, team… it’s got its own name.

I was looking forward to eating a blueberry bagel for brunch but I suppose that’s off the cards now. There’s nothing sweet about a snapper. The idea of tomato juice isn’t really that appealing to me; it generally translates as cold tomato soup in my brain. As far as I’m concerned, this is its only acceptable form.

 HORSERADISH! I grew up fearful of zing. I feared the zing, dear readers. Even a couple of years ago, Bloody Marys and their ilk weren’t something I was keen for, because I knew the dreaded Tabasco lurked inside. But I’ve really come around in the last couple of years (I may be immature but my palate is maturing nicely) and I don’t balk at “hot” things any more.

That’s why, when I found two decent-looking Red Snapper recipes, I decided to throw them together and see what stuck. The basics of a Red Snapper are very simple: gin, tomato juice, and some zing. From there it can get far more complicated, if you can be bothered. You can see my additions in my recipe, but there are a lot more things you can do to a Red Snapper (or a Bloody Mary), if you feel so inclined. My recipe comes primarily from the Food Republic, with a little wink to Embury Cocktails.

I prefer a Red Snapper to a Bloody Mary, because of my afore-stated feelings about tomato juice. A Bloody Mary is kinda just like boozy tomato juice for breakfast, where a Red Snapper is a DRINK. The gin gives the drink a brilliant boozy complexity that goes above and beyond a Bloody Mary. Also, gin is the best.

I’m clearly finishing this post after having imbibed my boozy brunch, so you’ll have to forgive me for rambling. I think one of my favourite things I’ve learnt about this drink is that it allegedly came into existence in America in the 1950s because there was a vodka shortage but gin was plentiful, so it was subbed in. Once vodka was around again, the vodka version was sometimes referred to as the “Red Hammer” because people had gotten so used to a “Bloody Mary” being gin-based. The Red Snapper can also be referred to as a Bloody Margaret or a Ruddy Mary, if you want to believe wikipedia.

Screw it, I’m eating that blueberry bagel. HAPPY DAY AFTER NEW YEAR!