Last Light on the Water: A Bourbon, Cacao, and Black-Lime Party After Dark

Make one jar of black-lime salt. That is the whole menu. Everything below is that jar landing on five different things, which is how a party for ten at nine-thirty at night should work, because nobody wants to be assembling canapés at an hour when the guests have already eaten dinner somewhere else.

The drink is stirred, dark and slightly strange, and it is in Last Light on the Water: Bourbon, Banana, Amontillado, and Cacao. The food’s only job is to keep it from becoming a dessert.

The jar

Dried limes are loomi, and they are a staple of Persian and Gulf kitchens, where they are boiled in brine, dried in the sun, and dropped into stews whole to release sourness slowly over an hour. Grinding them into a finishing salt is my shortcut and not anybody’s tradition, and it is worth knowing the difference.

Crack three dried limes open, pull out and discard the seeds, which are genuinely bitter in a way the shells are not. Blitz the shells with half a cup of flaky salt and a teaspoon of dark brown sugar, then push it through a tea strainer. About two-thirds of a cup, and it keeps a month in a sealed jar.

You will buy a bag of twenty dried limes in order to use three. There is no smaller bag. Consider the other seventeen a long-term commitment to Persian stew.

The five things it goes on

• Cashews and Marcona almonds in browned butter. Three cups for ten. Tossed hot, salted immediately. The drink has banana liqueur and cacao syrup in it and needs fat and salt more than it needs anything clever.
• Three-year cheddar, broken not sliced, with the salt and a spoon of honey alongside. The tartness of the lime is doing the job an apple usually does on a cheese board, without the apple.
• Seventy percent dark chocolate, broken and dusted. The cacao syrup in the glass and the cacao in the chocolate are the same note an octave apart, and the black lime is the only reason that is interesting rather than repetitive.
• Popcorn with brown butter. Two large bowls. The one thing on this list that cannot be made in advance under any circumstances.
• Navel orange segments. Four oranges, cut into suprêmes, dusted lightly. This is the palate reset, and against a drink built on banana, sherry and cacao, the room needs one badly by the second round.

Ten people, two hours, three waves

Two drinks each is twenty stirred cocktails. Two bottles of bourbon, one of amontillado, and a bottle of banana liqueur that will outlive the roof. Amontillado is the forgiving sherry: unlike fino, an open bottle is still good in two weeks, which matters when a recipe asks you for fifteen ounces out of a twenty-five ounce bottle.

Freeze twenty-four two-inch cubes the night before. Cloudy is fine. Nobody at ten at night is auditing the clarity of your ice, and anyone who is can be seated near the door.

9:30. Nuts and cheddar out. First round poured. The cheddar has been out of the refrigerator since 8:45, because cold aged cheddar tastes like a rumor of cheddar.

10:15. Popcorn, made at 10:12. Second round. This is the loudest the room will get.

11:00. Chocolate and oranges. No new drinks after this.

The prep ledger

A month ahead: the salt. Three days: the nuts, stored airtight, re-warmed six minutes at 300 degrees so the butter comes back to life. The cacao syrup, a week.

Two hours, maximum: the oranges. Cut suprèmes weep and go pale past that, and a weeping orange on a late-night plate looks like an accident.

Twenty minutes, maximum: the popcorn. Brown-buttered popcorn is spectacular for about a third of an hour and then it is upholstery. Make it while people are watching, which also buys you a legitimate excuse to be in the kitchen for five minutes at the exact point in an evening when a host most needs one.

How it ends

The chocolate is the signal. When it goes out at eleven, the bourbon goes into the cabinet, not back onto the counter, and the room reads that correctly without anybody saying a word.

The other half of it is plates. Do not put out plates for the last course. Plates keep people seated and give them something to hold that requires a table, and the last hour of a good late party should be a room of people standing up holding one square of chocolate, discovering independently that they have coats.

Salty note: After dark, flavor should get deeper, not simply sweeter. So should the lighting.

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