Bluebird Cocktail

A refreshing cocktail that's easy to make. Blue curaçao is an orange flavored liqueur made from the peel of a type of bitter orange that grows on the island of Curaçao, which is located in the southern part of the Caribbean, not very far from Venezuela. The name is assumed to have been from indigenous peoples that was put into Portuguese spelling, as Portuguese ships made frequent visits to the island in the 1500s. The island of Curaçao is a part of the Netherlands. Blue curaçao (cure-ah-sow, rhymes with how) should be available at liquor stores and in some beverage store outlets, as its alcohol content is typically 15 to 20%. The "Bluebird Cocktail" has a variety of recipes, with big differences in some, but I like this one.  

 

Ingredients (per cocktail):

 

1 1/2 ounces dry gin

1 ounce blue curaçao

dash or two angostura bitters

orange slice

2 ounces tonic water

ice

rocks glass/Old Fashioned glass

Add the dry gin, blue curaçao and bitters to a rocks glass, stir to mix, add some ice, then add the tonic water and orange slice, but give the cocktail only one quick stir (you want the fizz of the tonic to remain). 

WORD HISTORY:

Villain (villein)-This word is related to the "-wick" and "-wich" parts of place names (for example: "Gatwick, Brunswick, Warwick, Norwich and Ipswich"), from Old Germanic, which had borrowed the base for both "-wick" and "-wich" from Latin, and to "villa," a Latin word borrowed by English via Italian, and to "village," "vicinity" and the last part of "parish," with the first two being Latin-derived words, and with "parish" a Greek derived word borrowed by Latin, which passed it to French, and English borrowed all three from French. "Villain" goes back to Indo European "weik," which had the notion of "settlement, house, abode:" thus also, "villa, village." This gave Latin "vicus" meaning "series of homes;" thus also, "village," and this then produced "villa," "house in the countryside," thus also, "a farm," and this produced "villanus," noun use of adjective meaning, "farm worker, farmhand;" thus also, "peasant." This passed to Old French as "vilein/vilain," meaning "peasant, person of low social status" (remember, this was in the time of feudalism). English borrowed the word around 1300, initially as "villein," which was retained and used with that spelling for "a feudal peasant," while the spelling "villain" took the more nasty meaning of "scoundrel, one inclined to wickedness." "Villein" is not at all common in American English in modern times.