Moscow Mule

Source: The Essential New York Times Cook Book (a favorite!)

Kate and I had the same brilliant idea for Christmas one year.  We bought each other Moscow Mule mugs.  She one-upped my gift by making Moscow Mules and wrapping them.  An excellent Christmas surprise!

"The French may complain that Americans know only one sauce, but they cannot say we have only one drink," Jane Nickerson, a columnist for the Times wrote, introducing this cocktail recipe. "Yankee ingenuity and inventiveness seem nowhere better evidenced than at our bars."

The Moscow Mule was popularized at the Cock 'n' Bull, a trendy Hollywood restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. John Martin, a Smirnoff salesman, claimed to have devised the recipe with the restaurant's bartender as a way of promoting the fledgling vodka brand. The drink, a refreshing zinger made with vodka, lime juice, and ginger beer, was served in copper cups.  Clementine Paddleford, Nickerson's rival across town at the New York Herald Tribune, ran a piece about the Moscow Mule a week after Nickerson.  "The nicest thing about the mule," Paddleford wrote, "is that it doesn't make you noisy and argumentative, or quiet and sullen, but congenial and in love with the world.  One wag of its tail and life grows rosy."

1 1/2 ounces vodka
4 teaspoons fresh lime juice
6 ounces ginger beer

Fill a tumbler with 4 or 5 ice cubes.  Pour in the vodka and lime juice and fill up the tumbler with ginger beer.  (Or, in our family, we just make a pitcher of mules so we can refill our copper mugs easily.)