cocktailslanguage
I've come across the two following cocktail recipes:
East Meets West
Absolut Raspberry vodka, Cointreau, St-Germain
elderflower liqueur, pomegranate juice, lime juice, whiteThe English Writer
Tanqueray gin, Aperol, pink grapefruit, acacia
honey, lime juice, white
what does 'white' mean here? white rum? white wine? white liqueur (if there's such a thing)?
It doesn't compare at all - broiling is the US term for what is called grilling in UK. The heat source is above the food.
In the US, a "grill" is used to mean a "gas powered barbeque", as the Brits would say. The heat source is below the food.
"Al dente" is used to refer to food cooked so it is still "firm to bite" but not soft
This is very important to pasta which should be removed from the cooking liquid just before it has fully cooked through, as like most foods, it will continue to cook after being removed from the heat source
Always gently stir your pasta every minute or so while cooking to ensure it cooks evenly. Then near the end of the cooking time, bite into a piece of paste every 15 seconds or so to see if it has nearly cooked through. It should be firm to bite, and not soft all the way through. It should not resist biting though
With some pasta types like Penne etc. you can sometimes actually see the uncooked inner layer (a thin white line) if you carefully slice it in half which a knife, or just bite cleanly with your teeth
If the pasta is going to be mixed into a hot liquid sauce before serving, take the pasta out of the cooking liquid at an even firmer point
The term "al dente" can be used for all cooked foods that should be cooked to just before soft, and then served (fresh greens, thin meat cuts etc.)
The reason for all of this is that there have been many flavour and nutrition benefits noted when cooking to this point. Also for pasta it tends to fall apart if cooked past "al dente"
Best Answer
As mentioned in a couple of comments, this almost certainly means egg white, which is used in some shaken drinks to create a stable foam on top of the finished cocktail. It can also "round out" the flavor of a drink and prevent them from seeming overly sweet or tart. Neither of these is explicitly identified as a shaken cocktail, but that's the usual technique for drinks that include both sugar and citrus, as both of these do.
Some recipes use as much as an entire egg white, but much smaller quantities can be used if you crack and separate eggs before service, storing the whites chilled in a squeeze bottle, or mixed directly into a syrup you're making in bulk for one specific drink, a technique sometimes used to speed up service in high-volume bars. (For the "English Writer", you'd combine and keep chilled the non-alcoholic ingredients: grapefruit, lime, honey, and egg white. This allows your bartender to measure only 3 ingredients when making the drink rather than 6, which speeds the process and increases consistency.)
The abbreviation to simply "white" could mean any number of things: it could be they're using an egg substitute instead, or don't want to raise health concerns about the egg (which are minimal, but guests occasionally get squeamish) or the recipe simply got cut off (bartenders tend to list recipes from largest quantity to smallest). Without the exact context, it's difficult to say why the "egg" was left off here, but it wouldn't surprise me to see egg along with the other ingredients in both of these drink recipes. It's commonly used in cocktails and I can't imagine what else they might mean.