Pisces' Pearl (a non-alcoholic rum and coconut water cocktail for Pisces season)
Plus some meditations on struggling with simplicity.
Simplicity is not a virtue of which I have ever been accused. I prefer clothing in busy prints, and my music bombastic. In both art and decor I’m attracted to excess, one might even say clutter. My magpie eye likes to be engaged, to never rest for too long in any one place before hopping to light on something shiny and new. I am drawn to recipes with 15 ingredients, and confused why anyone would bother to try those with less than 5.
If there is a way to make something, anything— a party, a dish, a project, a drink— more complicated I will almost always find it. The hard way, and specifically the unnecessarily difficult way is usually my preferred path. In a twisted way, I find it fun.
I’m not sure why I am like this. Perhaps good old fashioned Protestant Work Ethic on one side of the family, and a truly pathological workaholism on the other. Or maybe a feeling of accomplishment as a result of struggle, in a controlled setting like the kitchen, is the quick hit of serotonin that keeps me from collapsing in despair in the face of injustices in the world that I would like to overcome, but where even the first handhold feels miles above my reach. (Not to, you know, read too much into it.)
But sometimes there is beauty in simplicity. Caprese salad. An ice cold (non-alcoholic) martini. A black turtleneck. A basic bun.
Sometimes it is just the correct choice, as it is in this week’s cocktail, Pisces’ Pearl.
Which is not to suggest, for a moment, that I did not try my damnedest to make this drink as complicated as humanly possible. While it is not the sole reason that this is the first 5PM Eternal in awhile (deadlines for pieces at multiple outlets converged on me while at the same time, the news, both domestic and international, was both dispiriting and distracting), myriad complexities with which I experimented as I perfected this drink were certainly a factor in my unplanned hiatus. I’ve been working on this drink on and off literally for months, and I finally decided that it was time to focus on it, exclusively.
And boy, did it take awhile to get it right only to end up with three ingredients (four if you count water).
The inspiration for this drink is the famous Thai dessert mango and sticky rice (ข้าวเหนียวมะม่วง), which is one of my favorite dishes on the planet. More specifically, it is the salty and sweet coconut flavor of the rice and the salted coconut milk sauce that is drizzled over it for which I swoon. Early in the pandemic, when I was still cooking complicated dishes as a way of temporarily diverting my thoughts from near constant anxiety and panic, I made this version from Hot Thai Kitchen. While the ingredients are few and relatively simple, making the dish is an exercise in patience and requires specific techniques that were entirely new to me and are best executed with equipment I did not have (and don’t have the storage space to keep, anyway). I found it both difficult and rewarding, and while the results were delicious, I swore it would be quite some time before I attempted it again.
But that sweet salty rich coconut flavor haunted me. Every now and again I would start to drift toward deciding it had been long enough and I could give it another go, only to realize I just didn’t have the time or patience for it now that I wasn’t stuck at home. So I realized I should make it into a zero proof cocktail.
The first thing I did was attempt to incorporate rice into the drink in some way. After reading about it in Julia Momosé’s The Way of the Cocktail, I thought that the perfect base would be Amazake, a slightly fermented but non-alcoholic drink made from rice and kōji, the microorganism used to make sake and shōchū out of rice (as well as making soy sauce and miso from soy beans). I ordered some kōji starter, and set out to make my own.
I killed the kōji just a few minutes into the first batch, which, to add insult to injury, I only learned after tending to and taking the temperature of the heated rice mixture every half hour or so for 6 hours.
And then I did it again on the second batch, though luckily I knew as soon as I overheated it that there was no use in continuing the process.
But I persevered, and the third time was, as they say, the charm. I was rewarded with a sweet, pearly liquid with notes of condensed milk and rustic, young cheddar. While absolutely soothing and delicious hot, with fresh ginger grated over it, as it is served at Japanese temples for New Year’s Day, the heavy, wintery, and slightly cheesy drink was all wrong for the tropical, oceanic flavor I craved.
For my next attempt I tried blending every conceivable form of liquified coconut (cream, milk, water, toasted coconut syrup), in every possible combination, with fresh Alfonse mango, the smaller, yellow mango that is used for mango and sticky rice. Turns out, there’s a reason that the mango is served next to, rather than mixed into the coconut sweetened rice in the dessert: the tart and floral mango overwhelms the salt and coconut. The combination tasted, not unpleasantly, like a mango frozen daiquiri. Not bad, but not the evanescent flavor I was pursuing.
Finally, in a fit of what I must confess was petulance, I tried combining just pressed coconut water, Lyre’s White Cane Spirit for its light sugar sweetness, and a generous pinch of sea salt in my cocktail shaker. Stirring it together, I thought, “Watch this be what actually works. I can’t send something this basic to everyone!” right before I tasted it out of the bar spoon.
And, of course, voila! There it was. Exactly the flavor that had eluded me. It was so good, so calming and cool and dead simple that I didn’t care that it was only 3 ingredients. I added ice and shook the combination to chill it, strained it into a coupe glass, closed my eyes, and, pleased with myself, took an expectant sip.
And I’d destroyed it.
While admonitions that you must never shake but only stir martinis because you will “bruise the gin” have been debunked as too precious nonsense, it turns out that there are drinks where a vigorous shake will ruin the texture and flavor of a drink. This is one of them. You absolutely must stir and not shake this drink.
Like most recipes that have very few ingredients, the quality and specificity of the ingredients is paramount in the Pisces’ Pearl. You must use pressed coconut water, which has some of the cream from fresh coconut meat in it. You might be able to make this from combining a bit of cream of coconut into some standard coconut water, by very slightly warming both together in a small saucepan and whisking together, then letting it cool before chilling it in the refrigerator, but I didn’t try this, so I can’t confirm that it would work. You could also make your own pressed coconut water by pressing the meat of a young coconut, if you have source for them and whatever tool is necessary to press coconuts (which, if you do, congratulations! You’ve succeeded where I failed in making it complicated). As for me, I just used Vita Coco Pressed in The Original flavor.
While you do not want to shake the drink once you’ve assembled all of (pffft, “all of”!) the ingredients, do make sure to give the pressed coconut water a hearty shake before pouring it, so the creamy part doesn’t just sit at the bottom of the container.
For the non-alcoholic rum alternative, I insist that you use Lyre’s White Cane Spirit here. All of the other readily available zero-proof rums have a darker, aged rum flavor, and are too heavy with bourbon vanilla, aged oak, and caramel notes that will entirely overpower the delicate coconut water.
While I love a fancy finishing salt for most occasions, the mineral content of a sel gris or fleur de sel is not advised for making the saline solution. Go with pretty much any non-iodized sea salt you can find at your local grocery store and it will probably be fine (though, for the record, I used Jacobsen’s Pure Flake Sea Salt because it was the only sea salt I had that wasn’t smoked). Kosher salt or finely ground rock salt will probably work in a pinch, but you’ll need to reduce the amount of salt in the solution just a bit to account for their higher density in the measuring spoon.
And finally, because I cannot emphasize this enough, and I really, really mean it:
DON’T SHAKE THIS DRINK.
RECIPE: Pisces’ Pearl
Ingredients
2 ounces pressed coconut water such as The Original Vita Coco Pressed
2 ounces Lyre’s White Cane Spirit
¼ tsp flake sea salt saline solution or more to taste (see recipe below)
To Mix
Fill a mixing glass (or a cocktail shaker) with ice, leaving enough room to stir.
Pour all ingredients over the ice and stir gently but completely until just chilled.
Strain into chilled coupe glass and serve immediately.
Saline solution:
Mix ½ teaspoon of sea salt with 4 teaspoons of water and stir continuously until the salt is entirely dissolved.
SERVING SUGGESTION: The Unpublishable
Speaking of simplicity, one of the major changes I made in the last few years was ending the Byzantine beauty regimen supported by multiple, expensive beauty products I’d practiced for several years. This wasn’t exactly by choice or some self-righteous turn toward minimalism, but because, about two or three months into lockdown, I started to suffer extreme contact dermatitis. Products I had used for years suddenly caused my skin to burn, instantly breakout into a profusion of tiny but angry red bumps that would then settle into breakouts that took months to resolve. Whether it was stress, years of dermal barrier destroying acids and chemical exfoliants, a build up of fragrance sensitivity, or some combination thereof, I don’t know. But the result is that I stopped using everything on my face other than unfragranced Dove sensitive skin soap and three naturally pressed, unprocessed oils that I swap out depending on the humidity. (I still wear perfume, and frankly, if my skin is going to make me choose between fragrance materials in my skincare and those on my pulse points, perfume wins and it’s not even close.)
As my skin was healing from so many violent reactions to products, I discovered recovering beauty writer Jessica DeFino and her amazing anti-skincare newsletter through my friend, Robin. The Unpublishable, so-called because it addresses stories that beauty magazines and websites (for which DeFino still writes) won’t publish, it is a cri de cœur against the the skincare industry’s burning of both our dermal barriers and the planet. Her work is passionate, righteously angry, and not without frequent gallows humor: she refers to readers as “dewy dust bunnies” and frequently reminds them that despite spending collective billions of dollars on anti-aging, we’re still all going to die.
And sometimes it’s incredibly moving, as in her most recent piece for The Unpublishable. DeFino writes:
What is there to say about skincare at a time like this? My brain is empty, but my inbox is full. In lieu of a newsletter, I present: a poem comprised of copy-and-pasted subject lines and sentences, each pulled from a different email I received yesterday, March 2, 2022 — sent by news outlets, by beauty brands, by PR reps angling for press coverage. A snapshot of the times.
The resulting poem is surprisingly devastating and I encourage you to click over and read it.
DeFino speaks from experience on the personally destructive nature of our obsession with “perfect” skin. While working for the Kardashians (really!), writing beauty content for their app, she suffered from the horror of topical steroid withdrawal. Despite the fact that the steroid cream she was using is meant to be used for 2 weeks, max, her doctor kept refilling the prescription for years. Withdrawal from long term topical steroid use can cause excruciatingly painful skin inflammation, burning, tenderness, and widespread, multi-layer peeling. Sometimes sufferers have to be hospitalized to prevent infections and sepsis. (A word of caution if you want to learn more about topical steroid withdrawal: skip the Google image search. The most extreme cases are the stuff of nightmares.)
Though my experience with contact dermatitis was in no way comparable to DeFino’s skin condition, I feel a kind of kinship with her and her anger for another reason. I’ve also experienced the agonizing physical effects of withdrawal from medication my doctor prescribed me for years, even though it is not intended for and is dangerous with long term use. I also appreciate that she is working to end the association of self-care with products that are, or at least can be, self-destructive, just like the non-alc movement is confronting the the harmful (and counterproductive) idea that you “need a drink” to deal with stress, depression, and burn out. Longterm, these dependencies simply perpetuate and intensify the problems they’re meant to address: see all the “barrier repair” lines now hawked by the very same companies that sold you the glycolic acid gels and ever increasing strengths of retinol that broke down that barrier in the first place.
This is not to pressure anyone to quit all skincare stuff right this second (and if you’re on topical steroids, please consult with a doctor before trying!). Like most things that damage our health and the environment, individual consumers are not the villains here. We’re the victims. Systemic pressures to conform to and perform beauty standards are not just difficult for women to reject, but actively and punitively enforced. For instance, if we don’t ‘look professional,” which means a certain amount of makeup, hair products, and sometimes even skin products, women can miss out on promotions, lose jobs, or never get them in the first place.
Individual rejection of these products and standards action isn’t enough. The beauty industry, as a whole, is contributing to the destruction of the planet while a new “sustainable” beauty brand launches every hour of the day. It doesn’t matter if the new hot wonder molecule comes from biodynamically farmed botanicals, if the inclusion of petroleum derivatives like petroleum jelly and mineral oil perpetuates the fossil fuel industry. An abundance of single use plastics and other beauty packaging materials, even if we are separating them out for recycling, still end up in landfills. Even post-consumer recycled packaging requires energy to produce, and the vast majority of manufacturing relies on energy sources that increase the carbon content of the air and the temperature of the planet.
While Jessica DeFino is further down the road than most of us are, at some point we will all be forced to have a collective reckoning with the catastrophe at the intersection of beauty standards, consumption, capitalism, and climate collapse.
Until next week, my friends, keep it simple, keep it zero-proof, and keep your 5PMs eternal!
