Recipe: Hey Tutz
The Latest Cocktail Menu at Milady's Features New Work From Owner Julie Reiner. With Recipe!
In these days of Dirty Martini dominance, I have seen every sort of salty, savory garnish pressed into service and every sort of brine. But it wasn’t until I checked out the new cocktail menu at Milady’s that I’d encountered a Dirty Martini made with bread and butter pickles.
Bread and butter pickles—which have the best name of any pickle in the world—are a sweet, sliced pickle. They are typically made using small cucumbers, which are sliced thin and combined with chopped white onion and sometime bell pepper, as well as pickling spices such as celery seed and turmeric. The brine is sweet, being typically made of more sugar than vinegar.
Most accounts give credit for the invention of the pickles and the name to Omar and Cora Fanning, farmers from Streater, a town in north-central Illinois. The Fannings would trade the quickly made pickles for whatever else they needed from neighboring farmers and stores. So the pickles were their “bread and butter.” The pickles were popular, so the Fannings applied for a trademark in September 1923 and were awarded one in March of 1924 for "Fanning's Bread and Butter Pickles."
However, the Fannings couldn’t keep up with demand, so, in 1927, they sold the patent trademark to the New Jersey-based CPC International Inc., now known as Best Foods. A product called Fanning’s Bread and Butter Pickles was soon after bottled and sold by Best Foods. There were ads as early as 1928. The pickles’ coolness, crispness and sweet-sour taste were regularly touted. Omar Fanning died in 1945 in California. Cora died in 1959.
As a kid, bread and butter pickles (along with watermelon pickles) were my favorite kind of pickle, as their sweet, lightly tangy flavor pleased my childish palate. I still like them today, but, though they are a fairly common site in the condiment aisle in grocery stores, they are typically overshadowed by their more savory cousins. Moreover, I almost never see them used in restaurants.
The pickle recipe used for the Milady’s cocktail Hey Tutz is from the grandmother of bartender Mo Roscover, who was known in her family as Grandma Tutz. The drink is a soft Martini, made with Citadelle Jardín D’ete Gin, La Coppa Extra Seco vermouth, the pickle brine and Bittermens Celery Shrub. The result tastes almost exactly like a bread and butter pickle. It is garnished with a couple slices of pickle as well.
“This is a good Martini to get young people drinking Martinis,” said Milady’s co-owner Julie Reiner. Regarding the name, she said, “It’s very fitting for Milady’s.”
That sensation of drinking a particular food was a frequent one during a recent taste-through of Milady’s new menu, which is both excellent and benefits from a rare assist from Reiner, who collaborated on several of the new cocktails.
Two Red Fruits, by Brooke Toscano and Reiner, equally evokes the very different fruits of its name: strawberry and tomato. Reposado Tequila is infused with fresh strawberries and then combined with tomato water, fino Sherry and Comoz blanc vermouth. In the glass, the cocktail is as bright red as its namesake produce. The savory-sweet drink tastes equally of strawberry and tomato—if you can imagine that—and hovers on the edge of Bloody Mary territory. Reiner said she tried employing a drop of saline solution, but found it wasn’t needed. The tomato water spoke loudly enough on its own.
La Dama Verde is as vibrant green as Two Red Fruits is red. (I was served both at the same time and was immediately transported to Christmastime.) It is the work of bartender Laurymar Lopez, who was there to make it for me the day I visited. She said it was inspired by sofrito, a sautéed base of onions, garlic, peppers and herbs that is common in Spanish, Latin American, Mediterranean and Caribbean cuisines.
Lopez takes cilantro, parsley and bell pepper, mixes them up, puts some sugar on the mixture and turns it into a puree. To this, she adds Tequila, Sotol, lime juice and Nixta corn liqueur. On the rim are all the herbs and veggies, dehydrated, crushed up and mixed with salt and sugar. It’s a delightful cocktail, herbal and fresh, with a flavor that reminded me of a tomatillo.
Those with a deep knowledge of Reiner’s career will recognize one drink on the menu. Leilani’s Fizz is a reinterpretation of a drink that was on the menu at Reiner’s tropical SoHo bar Lani Kai, which opened back in 2010. The original was gin, lychee, lemongrass, fresh lime and club soda. The updated Fizz—another collaboration with Toscano—clarifies the lychee, running it through a centrifuge. And coconut water is added to the mix, making the cocktail even more tropical in nature than it was. Reiner calls the process, “taking these drinks and 2025-ing them with new techniques. It’s all the same flavors, just done differently.”
Other new drinks on the menu include Another Vice, a Miami Vice riff that sports a thick head of strawberry daiquiri foam; and Corn Star, a Porn Star Martini spin that has a base of Corn-Pops-cereal-infused Grey Goose vodka.