Old name, new drink
The secret histories of five classic cocktails.
A cocktail's name is the most durable thing about it. Recipes get simplified, ingredients disappear from shelves, tastes shift by a generation — and the name just keeps going, sometimes attached to a completely different drink than the one it started as. Here are five classics whose stories are stranger, and often better, than the drink itself.
The Sea Breeze (1920s name, 1980s drink)
The name Sea Breeze dates to the 1920s, appearing in Harry Craddock's 1930 Savoy Cocktail Book as a mix of gin, apricot brandy, lemon juice and a dash of grenadine — nothing like the drink we know today. That transformation came courtesy of Ocean Spray, the cranberry growers' cooperative, which began promoting a vodka-and-cranberry cocktail in the 1960s to sell more juice. The pairing with grapefruit juice took hold slowly, and the drink didn't really become a fixture of bar menus until the 1970s and 80s — the era it's now most associated with.
The recipe: 2 oz vodka, 3 oz grapefruit juice, 1 oz cranberry juice, over ice in a highball glass. Garnish with a lime wedge.
The Aviation (1916, minus one ingredient for most of a century)
Bartender Hugo Ensslin published the Aviation in his 1916 book Recipes for Mixed Drinks, made with gin, lemon juice, maraschino liqueur and crème de violette — a violet liqueur that gave the drink its pale blue-lavender color. Just fourteen years later, Harry Craddock's hugely influential Savoy Cocktail Book (1930) printed the recipe without the violette at all, and most bartenders followed his lead for the rest of the century, partly because the liqueur became almost impossible to find in the US. A commercial version wasn't reimported until 2007, and only then did the Aviation start showing up again in its original color.
The recipe: 2 oz gin, ¾ oz lemon juice, ½ oz maraschino liqueur, ¼ oz crème de violette, shaken and strained.
The Gimlet (Navy medicine, then a Chandler line)
The popular story credits a Royal Navy surgeon, Sir Thomas Gimlette, with mixing gin into the lime cordial British sailors were required to drink to prevent scurvy — though there's no solid evidence he actually invented anything, and the timeline doesn't quite hold up. What's well documented is Rose's Lime Cordial, patented in 1867 as a way to preserve lime juice without alcohol, and the first printed Gimlet recipe, in Harry MacElhone's 1922 ABC of Mixing Cocktails, equal parts gin and Rose's. The drink got its real fame three decades later, when Raymond Chandler had Philip Marlowe declare in The Long Goodbye that "a real gimlet is half gin and half Rose's lime juice and nothing else." Most bars today ignore him and use fresh lime juice and simple syrup instead.
The recipe: 2 oz gin, ¾ oz fresh lime juice, ½ oz simple syrup, shaken and strained.
The Clover Club (a gentlemen's drink, ruined by gender politics)
Named after a private club of lawyers, journalists and businessmen who met at Philadelphia's Bellevue-Stratford Hotel from 1882, the Clover Club — gin, lemon juice, raspberry syrup and egg white, shaken until frothy pink — was, for a while, the drink of powerful men; pink was considered a strong, masculine color at the time. Its fall was almost as fast as its rise: by the 1930s, tastes had shifted, pink had been reassigned to femininity, and Esquire magazine named it one of the worst drinks of the decade. It disappeared from menus for seventy years until cocktail historian David Wondrich wrote about it in 2007, and bartender Julie Reiner named her Brooklyn bar after it a year later.
The recipe: 2 oz gin, ¾ oz lemon juice, ¾ oz raspberry syrup, 1 egg white, dry shaken then shaken again with ice.
The Last Word (a $0.35 mystery from Detroit)
The Last Word appeared on the menu of the Detroit Athletic Club around 1915–16, at 35 cents the most expensive cocktail the club served — equal parts gin, green Chartreuse, maraschino liqueur and lime juice. For decades, the story credited a visiting vaudeville performer, Frank Fogarty, with bringing the recipe with him; the club's own archives later found no real evidence he had anything to do with it. Whoever invented it, the drink vanished almost completely after Prohibition, surviving only as a single entry in a 1951 cocktail book, until Seattle bartender Murray Stenson found it there in 2004 and put it back on a menu for the first time in half a century.
The recipe: ¾ oz gin, ¾ oz green Chartreuse, ¾ oz maraschino liqueur, ¾ oz fresh lime juice, shaken and strained.
What connects all five is less the drinks themselves than what happened to them in between: an ingredient vanishing from the shelves, a magazine calling one "awful," a cordial invented to fight scurvy, a name that survived changes its own inventors wouldn't recognize. The next time an old cocktail sounds familiar, it's worth asking exactly which version of it you're being served.
A note on measurements: All measurements above are fluid ounces, the standard unit in cocktail recipes. If you'd rather work in metric, 1 oz is roughly 30 ml — so a ¾ oz pour is about 22 ml, and a ¼ oz dash is about 7 ml.
