The Spirits #10: The White Lady

~ The White Lady Loves You More ~ "The only thing a civilised person drinks" ~ Karen I'm Not Taking Sides ~ Lost Ingredients of the Golden Age ~ Cocktail XI ~

~ THE WHITE LADY ~

40ml gin
20ml orange liqueur
20ml lemon juice
5ml sugar syrup
15ml egg white

Freeze a coupe. Add all the ingredients to the shaker in the order prescribed - though do pause to taste for balance just prior to adding the egg white. You might feel you need a drop more sugar or lemon. Once you’re happy, add the egg white and LOTS of ice and shake vigorously for five seconds. Now stop. Fine-strain (i.e. through a small tea-strainer) into a spare vessel, discard all the ice from the shaker and agitate once more - this extra shake is to froth up the egg white. Pour into your frozen coupe. No garnish.

Swellegant, huh? Now, some MUSIC - and please excuse me while I expire in the corner.

(((YOU DO KNOW IF YOU READ ALL THE WAY TO THE BOTTOM YOU GET A SHOPPING LIST SO YOU KNOW WHAT TO GET IN FOR NEXT TIME?)))

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The White Lady is an ethereal shimmer, a liquid ghost, a portal into a more elegant way of being. It was to pre-war London what the Rose was to pre-war Paris, a modish sip, so popular, it used to be sold pre-bottled, years before anyone thought of putting Porn Star Martinis in cans. I always picture it being inhaled at Bloomsbury salons by bougie literary London women. Apparently, Laurel and Hardy always sank a few at the Savoy when they arrived in London. The White Lady was also, apparently, Alfred Hitchcock’s favourite drink. “What we need is a White Lady,” was what he would say whenever a studio landed an unpromising script on him.

But the White Lady Vanishes. OK, the White Lady hasn’t vanished exactly - but it has fallen slightly out of fashion. I looked up the recipe up in the ‘classics’ section of the extremely comprehensive Death & Co book - the second most important cocktail book of the 21st century? - and it wasn’t in there. Which means it is deemed marginally less important by the New York cocktail cogniscenti than the Mudslide Flip.

There’s some tedious confusion as to the White Lady’s origins, as so often with vintage cocktails. A White Lady was noted by Harry MacElhone in his ABC of Mixing Drinks of 1919, only his one involved 1/4 oz creme de menthe, 1/4 oz brandy and 1oz Cointreau. (I actually tried this in the name of research. It’s a bit like eating a fistful of Quality Street at the same time.) By the time MacElhone opened up in Paris, he was making it more or less as above - only minus the egg white. But in the interim, Harry Craddock of the Savoy’s American bar was claming it as his own. It was sometimes known as the “Chelsea Sidecar”, on account of it being basically the same drink as the Sidecar but with gin instead of brandy.

At any rate it is with the Savoy that the drink is most closely associated. (The pictures are by Aubrey Beardsley by the way, from the Savoy magazine which published eight issues in 1896; it was not affiliated with the then-brand-spanking-new hotel, but it was named after it, ast the name suggested “modernity and opulence”). Apparently, Craddock once interred a White Lady in a shaker within the walls of the Savoy’s American Bar. Possibly apocryphal? But I like to think that some appalling chemical reaction is going on in that shaker and one day the wall will burst upon and London will be flooded in lacy eggy lemony gin goop.

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It’s harder than it first appears to get White Ladies just right. It’s in the Sour family but it uses orange liqueur as the sweet element - Cointreau, quintessentially - which is a little harder to balance than sugar. Is it me or has Cointreau become less raspingly sweet in recent years? Or perhaps I just have a sweeter palate than I once did. At any rate, I found the first White Lady I made too dry for my taste. I made another one, upping the Cointreau quantity to acheive the right balance - but then the orange became over-dominant and the cocktail thumpingly alcoholic (Cointreau is 40% ABV). Hell! In the end I simply added a little extra sugar syrup for sweetness and lowered the gin a bit. Not a bad idea when you’re making a cocktail with a spirit-liqueur-citrus family (Sidecars, Margaritas, Aviations, etc) - a scant 5ml of sugar syrup will help you along.

Anyway, you’ll see why this was once the modern, opulent thing to sip. Petronella Wyatt, media posh person, once let slip (in a column about the time she saw Boris Johnson cry) that Errol Flynn had his own variant on the White Lady, which he taught to her friend Countess of Wilton in the 1950s. “He was a tragic man, trapped by his own physical beauty. His eyes, the colour of Anatolian waters, had a terrible sadness. But he taught her to make a cocktail of such subtlety that it is like drinking moonbeams…” To make an Errol, substitute half of the gin in the above recipe for white rum.

And one of the funny things about the White Lady is that, girly as it might appear, it has its devoted following among stalwartly heretorsexual men. It is a great favourite in the British Army Officers’ Messes. Simon Heffer, right-wing columnist, considers it “the world’s greatest cocktail” and “the only thing a civilised person drinks”. The White Lady moves in mysterious ways.

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PLAYLIST

Eve, Mathilde, Ivy, Jolene, see if you can spot the theme.

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LOST INGREDIENTS

Occasionally, leafing through the old cocktail books, you will come across an ingredient that is no longer made anymore. Somehow, I find these ingredients far more compelling than many extant ones.

Hercules Turns up in the Savoy Cocktail Book. Once thought to be a British absinthe substitute; more recent sleuthing has determined that it was an aperitif wine infused with yerba maté - which would have given it a serious caffeine kick.

'Pash’ Cited seven times in the Café Royal Cocktail Book of 1937, Pash would appear to be a British passion fruit liqueur that came in more than one colour. It has long since vanished without trace.

Jacquin’s Forbidden Fruit A liqueur made from pomelos, sweetened with honey and said to have a licorice-like flavour. It came in an orb-shaped bottle almost identical to the one that Chambord comes in today. Once wildly popular in the US (where it was widely seen as a “ladies” drink), the original recipe was lost in the 1950s and Forbidden Fruit finally discontinued in the 1970s. Ancient bottles occasionally come up at auction.

Cordial-Médoc A by-all-accounts first-rate liqueur from Bordeaux, frequently cited alongside Chartreuse and Bénédictine. It was made from a secret combination of 15 herbs, spices and fruits macerated in cognac. Apparently the key ingredient was peach pits. It was briefly revived this century - but is now defunct again.

Calisaya A defunct type of Italian amaro made from cinchona bark, bitter oranges and other nice things. It’s a mainstay of pre-Prohibition bar books, used a bit like a proto-Campari - recent efforts have been made to bring it back from the dead.

Pimm’s Nos 2-5 Pimm’s No 1 Cup is gin-based and you can still sometimes find No 6 which is vodka-based. But did you know there used to be Pimm’s No 2 (Scotch), No 3 (brandy), No 4 (rum), and No 5 (rye whiskey), too? If you happen to be clearing out the basement of an old country house and turn up one of these - let me know, OK?

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OFFER!

Online alcohol shop The Drop Store is giving readers of the Spirits a discount. Head HERE, have a mooch and if you add thespirits10 (i.e. lowercase!) in the promo code you will get 10% off at checkout.

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WHAT I’M READING

“There’s a generation of rappers now who are in the limelight that [think] fatherhood’s cool, fatherhood’s sick”... I loved this on how pop stars cope with fatherhood. (Guardian)

Lab-grown meat has been approved for sale for the first time - which could be a landmark moment. The piece includes the stunning fact: “By weight, 60% of the mammals on earth are livestock, 36% are humans and only 4% are wild.” (Guardian)

A Brixham fisherman on voting Brexit: “I wish I hadn’t… I never looked at the implications of the paperwork. I was brainwashed” (FT).

Why do we listen to new music? (Pitchfork).

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WHAT SPIRITS SHOULD YOU BUY?

I also wrote this for the Times (£) on what spirits to get in for a strategically cocktail oriented Christmas. The original brief was to choose 11 bottles, not 12, which naturally prompted me to consider which formation I would go for were this some sort of Cocktail XI. I opted for a 4-3-3, naturally, Cointreau in the anchor role, Campari as Pirlo, marauding full backs, gin as False Nine.

(Subs: Peychaud’s Bitters GK (USA), Absinthe (FRA), Maraschino (CRO), Cognac (FRA), Bénédictine (FRA)

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SHOPPING LIST

Pay attention now: bourbon, two passion fruits, grenadine AND… orange flower water (which you should be able to find in Middle Eastern grocers or the bakery section of a decent supermarket.)

Grenadine? I mean pomegranate syrup. You can buy commercial grenadine for about £7.99 but the leading brands (Monin and Bols) aren’t great; respectable cordial makers like Bellvoir and Bottlegreen always seems to overlook pomegranate flavour, thereby missing a trick; and confusingly, those French syrups that call themselves “grenadine” are faux amis (there are merely ‘berry’ syrups and don’t have the right taste). It’s almost as if there is a conspiracy. The best choice, therefore, is to make your own.

Grenadine
Fortunately it’s easy! It’s EXACTLY like making sugar syrup only instead of water, you use pomegranate juice. Pom 100% Pure Pomegranate Juice is the stuff to use; or you could buy a large fresh pomegranate, cut it into eighths (on the x, y and z) and juice it like you would a lemon. Either way, collect the juice in a cup and pour it into a cold saucepan on a low heat. Take twice amount of sugar and introduce it to the pan, stirring it continually until the sugar dissolves at which point remove from the heat. Do not allow to boil. For a richer flavour, dissolve a decent trickle of pomegranate molasses, which is also available from Middle Eastern shops. You can also add intrigue with the bitter juices from orange zest, or scant amounts of orange flower water, rose water, and vanilla extract – but don’t overdo it. Grenadine should look and taste red. It will be roughly the sweetness of rich sugar syrup. This will keep in the fridge for a month or so. You can also use it in the ROSE if you like and I promise, I’ll give you some more uses over the next couple of weeks.

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