Four Specialty Cocktails Inspired by Passover

If you’re a Jew on Facebook, you may have seen a link recently to The Sipping Seder, a look at the traditional Seder plate through a modern-day cocktail-lover’s lens. Two connoisseurs of mixed drinks, Rob Corwin and Danny Jacobs, came up with six drinks representing the six items on the plate: Charoset (a sweet paste of fruits and nuts), Maror and Chazeret (bitter herbs), Karpas (vegetable), Z’roa (shank bone), and Beitzah (egg). Sounds like a joke, but when you look at the site, you see that Corwin, 41, and Jacobs, 36, are utterly serious. They thought hard about what gives karpas, say, its essential karpas-ness: Because Sephardic Jews dip their vegetables into vinegar instead of salt water, the cocktail incorporates Balsamic vinegar, parsley, and gin (and a footnote points out that No. 209 Distillery’s gin is kosher for Passover). The beverage is herbal and spring-like, but with an acidic hit—the ritual act in a martini glass.