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Cocktail Montauk
Put in large glass a dash each orange bitters and maraschino, half wineglass each Plymouth gin and Italian vermouth, three dashes Sloe gin, fill glass with finely shaved ice, stir well with spoon and strain into a cocktail glass.
A stirred gin-and-vermouth cocktail from the era when "cocktail" still meant spirit, vermouth and bitters. The only real translation needed is the glassware-as-measurement.
- WineglassA wineglass in American bar books of this period is 2 fl oz, so half a wineglass is 1 oz. That gives 1 oz gin and 1 oz sweet vermouth.
- A dashA dash from a bitters bottle is conventionally reckoned at roughly 1/8 teaspoon, though period usage varied. Three dashes of sloe gin therefore amounts to something under half a teaspoon.
- Italian vermouthThis means sweet red vermouth, as opposed to "French" vermouth, which meant dry. The recipe is a sweet Martini in structure.
- MaraschinoThe clear cherry-pit liqueur of the Luxardo type, not the red syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. The modern jar syrup will make the drink cloying.
- Plymouth ginStill made and still distinct: softer and earthier than London dry. Any good London dry works, but the drink will read drier and more juniper-forward.
- Sloe ginA sloe-infused, sweetened spirit rather than a gin proper. Choose a producer that uses real fruit; the cheap versions are little more than red syrup and will flatten the drink.
- Ice and stirringFinely shaved ice chills fast but dilutes fast. Stir 20 to 30 seconds, no longer, then strain immediately into a chilled glass.
- YieldOne cocktail of about 2 oz before dilution, which is small by modern proportions. Scale up by half if your glass is much larger.
Naming cocktails after resorts, clubs and railway destinations was common in American hotel bars around the turn of the twentieth century, and Montauk — the far tip of Long Island, reached by the Long Island Rail Road from 1895 and frequented by New York sporting and yachting parties — is the sort of place such a name would point to, though no connection to a particular bar or bartender is documented here. The formula itself is a sweet Martini with a maraschino-and-sloe-gin accent, one of the usual ways of distinguishing one house cocktail from another once the base pair of gin and Italian vermouth was fixed. Its appearance in a general cookbook rather than a bar manual is a reminder that mixed drinks were in this period printed alongside soups and sauces.