The Best Hangover Cures at Home and Abroad

(Bloomberg) -- Regional hangover cures are having a moment, and the timing is good. Oktoberfest is in full swing, tailgates are dominating stadium parking lots, and holiday party season is fast approaching. And even as drinking declines in America—consumption of cases of wine, spirits, and especially beer dropped for a third straight year, by almost 1% in 2018—you can still catch a buzz from hard seltzer.

All of which means that it might be a good time to learn some new tricks for recovering that don’t entail a $249 “deathbed” I.V. drip. 

In his debut cookbook Antoni in the Kitchen (Rux Martin Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $30) Queer Eye’s food star Antoni Porowski has a recipe for Polish Hangover Soup (Zurek). It’s stocked with smoked bacon, kielbasa, and root vegetables, with garnishes of pickles, sour cream, and hard boiled eggs. “This tangy, fortifying soup has brought millions of Poles back to life after a hard night of bad decision-making (read vodka),” he writes. Its base is a fermented mix called zakwas, a sour rye starter that you can buy at Polish markets or make yourself over the course of a few days—either of which takes advance planning, so it may be wise to plan your hangover accordingly.

Likewise, in the monumental, new Alpine Cooking (Ten Speed Press, $50), author Meredith Erickson serves up Hangover Soup With Cheese Dumplings from a lodge in Kitzbühel, Austria. The dish features a rich beef-enhanced broth and oversized dumplings crafted from mashed potatoes and soft pretzels, among other alcohol-absorbing ingredients.

But the season’s definitive guide to recovery is Hangover Helper: Delicious Cures from Around the World (Hardie Grant, $20) by Lauren Shockey. The food writer and former Village Voice restaurant critic sourced 50 international recipes to ease the pain after a big night, from spicy soups in Asia to starchy snacks from the U.K., as well as hair-of-the-dog cocktails and non-alcoholic drinks. The book also includes intel from the World Health Organization on international drinking habits: The worlds biggest boozers come from Moldova and Lithuania; per capita consumption is roughly 15 liters of alcohol a year, which equals a shot a day. (Americans are comparative lightweights, at about 8.65 liters per person in 2017.)

Gatorade is a one-word antidote for a lot of drinkers, and Shockey is a fan. “I have nursed many hangovers in my life with fruit punch-flavored Gatorade. Unlike cooking, say, a full English breakfast, Gatorade is easy to consume, and you can easily buy a bottle or two on a late-night drunken bodega run,” she says. “That said, I find Gatorade to be very sweet, and I’m firmly in the salty-starchy camp of hangover cures.”

For others in that camp, here are her five ultimate cures. Recipes available in Hangover Helper.

Yaka mein, New Orleans. This Chinese-Creole beef noodle soup is also known locally as ‘Old Sober’ and may be spelled variously yak-a-mein or ya-ka-mein or yakamein. A blend of flavors from ingredients that include soy sauce and Creole seasonings, its origins are said to derive from Chinese immigrants who came to work the railroads in the 1800s. It’s virtually unknown outside Louisiana, and it makes New Orleans a prime location for creating—and then curing—hangovers.

Francesinha, Porto, Portugal . A showstopper of meat, cheese and carbs—the holy trinity of hangover food—francesinha is a glorious specialty of Porto. Ham, roast beef, fresh sausage, and linguica, Portugal’s answer to chorizo, is stuffed between two slices of bread, smothered in melted cheese, and topped with a fried egg and a beer-spiked sauce. Essentially, it’s an extreme version of France’s croque monsieur. 

The Bacon Butty, England. The bacon butty is a beloved British hangover sandwich that takes all of five minutes to make and is a glorious contrast of crispy bacon rashers and soft, squishy white bread slathered in butter and HP sauce. Even the royals love a good bacon butty: Prince Harry had them served for Prince William’s wedding. (We’re just putting this out there, but somebody needs to make a version with Japanese milk bread.)

Kongnamul Gukbap, Jeonju, South Korea. Shockey was first inspired to write this book after learning about South Korean haejangguk, which essentially translates to “hangover soup.” Drinking culture is so prevalent in South Korea that haejangguk isn’t a single soup—it’s a genre. Each region of South Korea specializes in its own style of haejangguk, with restaurants devoted to the single dish. In Seoul, the haejangguk might be made with congealed ox blood; in Jeonju, the most common style of hangover soup is called kongnamul gukbap and made with beansprouts, which are high in the amino acid asparagine, which has hangover-curing properties. 

Pickle Brine Bloody Mary, U.S. A U.S. cocktail by way of Russia and Poland (see Antoni, above), this version of the quintessential hair-of-the-dog drink adds pickle juice—that beloved Eastern European hangover remedy—for even more salt to help replenish electrolytes. If mixing up a Bloody is too much effort, you can also throw back the essential idea with a pickleback: a shot of whiskey (or any spirit), followed by a shot of brine.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Justin Ocean at jocean1@bloomberg.net

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