White Lady (cocktail)
The White Lady is a classic cocktail that belongs to the Sours group and is made from gin , Cointreau and lemon juice . In many recipes you can also find the addition of protein , occasionally the Cointreau is replaced by another Triple Sec . The ingredients are shaken and then strained into a cocktail glass. Without the protein, the White Lady is essentially a sidecar in which gin is used as the basic spirit instead of brandy .
The drink was created at the time of alcohol prohibition in the United States in Harry's New York Bar in Paris by the bar owner Harry MacElhone. Many bar owners and bartenders survived the prohibition era in Europe, just as wealthy Americans used trips to Europe to drink alcohol.
When MacElhone was still working at Ciro's Club in London, he had already created a cocktail called White Lady from lemon juice, Cointreau and crème de menthe . This was unusual because it contained two liqueurs but no basic spirit. The first White Lady was not well received by the audience. It was only when he significantly reduced the amount of Cointreau and replaced the creme de menthe with gin and thus added a basic spirit to the cocktail that the cocktail was successful. MacElhone was probably based on the sidecar that Harry's New York Bar had put into its range a few years earlier. The cocktail experienced a boost in awareness through Harry Craddock , the bartender at the Savoy Bar , who included the drink in the first edition of his Savoy Cocktail Book in 1930 .
Just a few years later, the first recipes with an additional protein appeared, which created the most common form of the White Lady today.
Remarks
- ↑ Philipp Reim: Elegance from the Roaring Twenties: the White Lady Cocktail , Eye for Spirits January 25, 2015
- ↑ Victoria Moore: Raise a White Lady to the genius of the cocktail bar , The Telegraph November 24, 2011