Gin Cocktails and the Stories Behind Them

The punch behind the Tom Collins

Many well-known drinks began as punches. The word comes from the Hindi for five, panch, and is thought to stand for the five elements every punch needs: strong, long, sour, sweet and spice. The Tom Collins is a case in point. In 1830 the Garrick Club’s bar manager, an American called Stephen Price, was an early champion of iced soda water with gin, and the club’s punch, published in 1835, combined gin, lemon, sugar, maraschino and iced soda. At nearby Limmer’s Hotel the head waiter John Collins served a similar punch sweetened with capillaire, a syrup flavoured with orange flower water, and it was his drink that eventually carried his name around the world. Stephenson’s Tom Collins uses Old Tom gin, strained lemon juice and sugar syrup, topped with soda over plenty of ice.

Sours with a liqueur: the White Lady and the Breakfast Martini

The White Lady belongs to the family of sours sweetened with triple sec or orange curaçao, a tradition that goes back to the Brandy Crusta of 1840s New Orleans. Stephenson’s complaint is that these drinks are usually made to early 20th-century specifications with too much citrus and too much liqueur, so they come out flabby and sugary. Dial the modifiers down and let the gin lead and they turn into a refreshing pre-dinner sharpener. The first documented White Lady recipe is in Harry Craddock’s The Savoy Cocktail Book of 1930. A relative, the Breakfast Martini, was created in 1996 by Salvatore Calabrese at the Library Bar of the Lanesborough Hotel in London, with orange marmalade, and later served at New York’s Rainbow Room after Calabrese persuaded Dale DeGroff.

Equal parts: Corpse Reviver No. 2 and Last Word

Recipes with equal measures of every ingredient have a feeling of inevitability, and the gin chapter has two. The Corpse Reviver No. 2 belongs to a once large family of morning-after pick-me-ups; hangover cures have been called Corpse Revivers since at least the early 1860s, and Craddock printed two of them in 1930. The Last Word, gin, Green Chartreuse, maraschino and lime, is often called a Prohibition drink, yet it was on the Detroit Athletic Club’s menu in 1916 at 35 cents, the dearest drink listed, probably because of the Chartreuse. Ted Saucier first documented it in Bottoms Up in 1951.

The author thinks a Last Word could use more dilution, since half its ingredients are liqueurs, and lengthens it into the Long Word, carbonated in a SodaStream bottle with manzanilla sherry instead of gin and a couple of drops of saline.

Ada Coleman’s Hanky-Panky

The Hanky-Panky of gin, sweet vermouth and a teaspoon of Fernet-Branca was invented by Ada ‘Coley’ Coleman, who worked at the Savoy’s American Bar in London from 1903 to 1924, at a time when women were not allowed to drink there. It is the base for the Cole Hole, a barrel-aged version named after Coleman and the Coal Hole pub next to the Savoy. Stephenson advises against barrel-ageing drinks that already contain an aged spirit, and favours a cocktail with an unaged base like genever with a high moutwijn content, which stands up to the oak.

Gin twists from the lab

The chapter also has some more experimental versions: a Lactom Collins that tops a Tom Collins with sour gose beer and garnishes it with goats’ cheese, a Bronx served long with a column of clarified orange juice ice, a non-alcoholic Corpse Reviver in a freezer pouch, a Continental Martini with a juice made from whole bergamots, and a Pure Brilliant White Lady made white with a coconut oil and lecithin emulsion instead of egg white.

Recipes from this chapter

The gin chapter’s recipes are collected on this site as drafts until we have permission to publish them, together with the homemade ingredients they use.