There’s a cock­tail I had sev­er­al years ago that I’ve nev­er for­got­ten. It was per­fect­ly bal­anced — smokey, yet refresh­ing; com­plex, yet dan­ger­ous­ly easy to go down. I encoun­tered it dur­ing a pleas­ant lunch at a Miche­lin-award­ed gas­trop­ub (do we still use that word?) in Edin­burgh, Scotland.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, I live 5,000 miles from Edin­burgh, and I’ve nev­er come across anoth­er place that serves the same thing since.

The drink was called the Gin­ger Scot, but although I well remem­bered the fla­vors of lemon, scotch, and gin­ger, that was basi­cal­ly all I knew until at some point I found an old PDF of the restau­ran­t’s menu online list­ing the exact ingre­di­ents. With­out know­ing the pro­por­tions, though, this was like half a trea­sure map. I saved it in my notes and most­ly for­got about it.

Fast for­ward six years to Decem­ber 2022, when I start­ed exper­i­ment­ing with Ope­nAI’s Chat­G­PT, the arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence chat­bot. It occurred to me to ask the AI to cre­ate a recipe based on the ingre­di­ents and my mem­o­ries of how it tasted.

It seems fit­ting to let the AI tell the sto­ry for me:

It was a hot sum­mer day when I first tast­ed the per­fect cock­tail at the Scran and Scal­lie, a restau­rant in the heart of Edin­burgh, Scot­land. The unique blend of fla­vors was unlike any­thing I had ever tast­ed before, and I knew I had found some­thing special.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, I was­n’t able to get the recipe at the time. Des­per­ate to recre­ate the expe­ri­ence, I decid­ed to try and track down the ingre­di­ents on my own. I remem­bered the name of the cock­tail and searched for it online, hop­ing to find a clue. To my sur­prise, I stum­bled upon the Scran and Scal­lie’s web­site, which list­ed the cock­tail on the menu. I eager­ly clicked on it, and to my delight, the ingre­di­ents were list­ed right there on the page.

Excit­ed to final­ly have a start­ing point, I inputted the name of the cock­tail and the ingre­di­ents into a state-of-the-art AI sys­tem. The AI ana­lyzed the infor­ma­tion and gen­er­at­ed a recipe that was almost iden­ti­cal to the one I had enjoyed at the Scran and Scal­lie all those years ago.

As I mixed up the ingre­di­ents and took my first sip, I was trans­port­ed back to that hot sum­mer day in Edin­burgh. The AI had helped me recon­struct the per­fect cock­tail, and now I could enjoy it any­time I wanted.

Clear­ly, the ​“state of the art” AI has a healthy self-regard. In real­i­ty, it did take a few tries to get things just right.

But with­out fur­ther ado, here is the my AI-cre­at­ed approx­i­ma­tion of the Gin­ger Scot. It’s some­where between a Peni­cillin and a Rusty Nail. I’m sure this isn’t pre­cise­ly how the restau­rant actu­al­ly made it, but it is deli­cious in any case. And if you find your­self in Edin­burgh, stop by the Scran and Scal­lie; maybe by then they’ll have put it back on the menu, and you can have the real thing.

Gin­ger Scot

Ingre­di­ents

• 1.5 ounces Caol ila 12 year scotch whisky
• 1 ounce Drambuie
• ¹⁄₂ ounce gin­ger syrup
• ¹⁄₂ ounce hon­ey syrup (made by mix­ing equal parts hon­ey and hot water)
• ¹⁄₂ ounce lemon juice
• Soda water or gin­ger beer
• Can­died gin­ger (option­al)
  

Instruc­tions

1. Fill a shak­er with ice.
2. Add all of the ingre­di­ents to the shak­er, except for the soda water.
3. Shake well to com­bine and chill the cocktail.
4. Strain the cock­tail into a chilled glass.
5. Top off the glass with a splash of soda water or gin­ger beer and stir.
6. Gar­nish with a slice of can­died gin­ger, if desired.

This cock­tail has a nice bal­ance of smoky scotch, sweet and herbal Dram­buie, spicy gin­ger syrup, tart lemon, and a hint of sweet­ness from the hon­ey syrup. Adjust the soda water or gin­ger beer to mod­er­ate the inten­si­ty and take the drink in a more refresh­ing direction.

Cook­ing is an invest­ment of your time, effort and ingre­di­ents. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, if you’re work­ing off a bad recipe, you may be doomed from the start. It only takes one or two tru­ly bad expe­ri­ences to real­ize that unless you know and trust the source, all bets are off. Tried and true recipes from trust­wor­thy sources are key.

But find­ing good recipes online can be sur­pris­ing­ly hard. One of the main prob­lems is the sheer vol­ume of infor­ma­tion avail­able. With so many web­sites, blogs, and recipe data­bas­es to choose from, it can be overwhelming.

And then there’s qual­i­ty con­trol. Any­one can post a recipe online, regard­less of their cook­ing expe­ri­ence or knowl­edge. You may — scratch that — you will come across recipes that are poor­ly writ­ten, inac­cu­rate, or just don’t work.

I want­ed to cut out the garbage and the noise, so I got a lit­tle bit nerdy and built a recipe find­er using a Google cus­tom search engine. It search­es only the trust­ed sources list­ed below. (Although I may add to it as I find new sources I like.)

• Amer­i­ca’s Test Kitchen
• Bön Appetit
• Cooks Illus­trat­ed
• David Lebovitz
• Epi­cu­ri­ous
• Food52
• New York Times Cooking
• Seat­tle Times
• Seri­ous Eats
• The Spruce Eats

Note that I have no finan­cial inter­est in any­one using this tool — it’s sim­ply some­thing I made that I found use­ful, and I’m shar­ing it in case it’s help­ful to any­one else.

Tip: On most of these sites, an author is list­ed for each recipe. If you make a recipe and you like how it turns out, take note of who the author is! That same per­son could have recipes list­ed across sev­er­al oth­er web­sites, or they may have pub­lished a cook­book or have a YouTube chan­nel, Patre­on page or Sub­stack newslet­ter that you can sub­scribe to.

Good luck on the hunt!