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GIN SLING (an American drink)
Put half a small lemon, cut into thin slices, into a large tumbler, with a dessert-spoonful of sifted loaf sugar. Fill the glass with ice, finely pounded, and add a wine-glassful of the best gin. Drink through a straw.
A short drink with only four elements, so the proportions matter more than usual. Two of the measures are Victorian and one of the ingredients is not quite the gin sold today.
- Wine-glassfulIn this period a wine-glass is reckoned at about 2 fl oz, so roughly a double measure of spirit. A dessert-spoonful is about 2 teaspoons.
- Sifted loaf sugarLoaf sugar was cone sugar scraped and sifted fine — the equivalent is caster or superfine sugar. Granulated will sit undissolved at the bottom of a cold glass; a spoonful of simple syrup does the job better.
- The gin"The best gin" in a British book of this date may well have been Old Tom, the lightly sweetened style then common and rounder than modern London dry, though the recipe does not say. With a dry gin you may want less sugar, or none if the lemon is muddled hard.
- The tumblerA large Victorian tumbler was perhaps 10 to 12 fl oz, though sizes varied and the book gives none. Filled with ice and about 2 oz of gin, the drink is built strong and dilutes as it stands.
- Pounded iceFinely pounded ice is crushed ice, traditionally wrapped in a cloth and struck with a mallet. It melts fast and supplies the water the drink otherwise lacks, so serve it the moment it is built.
- LemonHalf a lemon in slices, not juiced. Press the slices against the sugar with the back of a spoon before adding ice to get the oil out of the peel.
- YieldOne drink, and a strong one. Doubling into a jug does not work — the crushed ice has to be fresh in each glass.
A sling in early American usage was one of the simplest mixed drinks: spirit, sugar and water, sometimes warmed, and it appears in eighteenth-century tavern records long before the cocktail proper. The name is often traced to the German schlingen, to swallow, though the etymology is traditional rather than settled. By the time Cassell's compiled this dictionary, American bartending had become a London novelty — Jerry Thomas's bar guide of 1862 and the American bars of the big hotels put drinks like this, the cobbler and the julep in front of British readers, which may well be why an English household reference book bothers to label the entry "an American drink" at all. Note what has dropped out here: the water. Built on crushed ice with no soda or plain water added, this version has drifted from the old sling toward what a modern bar would recognise as a smash or a fix, and the straw is there because the drink is meant to be sipped slowly as the ice does the diluting.