Ingredients:
45ml Gin
30ml Cointreau
22.5ml lemon juice
Shake all ingredients and strain into cocktail glass. Garnish with lemon peel.
Note: There are quite a few variations to the recipe from different sources and books but the above recipe is the most common.
A lady’s drink? A gentleman’s drink? Why do cocktails have to be gender biased?
Maybe we could start a debate on this. What am I getting at, you must be thinking? Well, when we look into the classics, there are many cocktails which are supposedly suited for lady-drinkers. However, when we look at the proportions and the kind of spirits used in the cocktail, it can very well be suited for a male-drinkers, like the Cosmo, for example. The only thing that would set the gender bias of the drink would be visual aesthetics I believe. A sturdy old fashioned glass would look ‘macho’ as compared to say a margarita or a martini glass. But hey, James Bond loves his Martinis...
There is a cocktail which even has the word ‘lady’ in its name but yet it’s NOT a drink ‘just for the fairer sex’. The White Lady.
If anyone has been to London, there is a famous bar called the American Bar at the Savoy Hotel. That is where the White Lady was invented in the 1930s by Harry Craddock. Harry Craddock was also the author of one of the all-time great bartending books - The Savoy Cocktail Book. The White Lady was named after a popular rose of the era, which in turn was named after White Lady Banks in 18071.
There’s actually a couple of ‘Harrys’ involved with this drink. At Harry’s New York Bar in Paris, there was a bartender named Harry MacElhone who also invented his version of the White Lady. The recipes however were completely different from each other – MacElhone’s recipe consisted of brandy, crème de menthe and Cointreau; while Craddock’s recipe was gin, Cointreau and lemon juice. It’s the latter that survived as the popular drink.
1. Degroff, Dale (2008). The Essential Cocktail: The Art of Mixing Perfect Drinks