Golden Cadillac
The Golden Cadillac is a Grasshopper with Galliano where the crème de menthe should be, and the swap turns a cold after-dinner mint into something closer to crème brûlée. Galliano's vanilla and soft anise sit against white crème de cacao and cream in equal thirds, and the drink comes out gold, thick and unapologetically a dessert. Its origin is unusually well documented for a drink of this kind. It was made in 1952 at Poor Red's, a barbecue roadhouse in El Dorado, California, for a couple who had just bought a gold Cadillac. The bar kept making them, and kept making them, and ended up one of the largest single accounts for Galliano anywhere in the world. That is the whole appeal. It is not a subtle drink and it was never trying to be. It is a small-town bar's celebration cocktail that outlived the celebration by seventy years and is still being shaken in the same room.
Glassware: Nick & Nora Glass
Garnish: Nothing: the gold is the garnish
Ingredients
30ml
The vanilla and soft anise that replace the Grasshopper's mint. It is sweet on its own, which is why the drink needs no additional sugar and why the thirds should not be adjusted upward.
30ml
White rather than dark, purely for colour. Dark tastes much the same and turns a drink named after a gold car an unappetising brown.
30ml
Double cream, cold. Single splits more readily against the alcohol and gives a thin result, and the weight is most of what a drink like this is for.
Instructions
Add the Galliano, white crème de cacao and cream to a shaker.
Fill with cubed ice and shake very hard for 12 seconds.
Double strain into a chilled Nick and Nora glass.
Expert Tip
Shake it much harder than you think. Cream drinks need aeration rather than just chilling, and twelve seconds of genuinely hard shaking is what turns three heavy liqueurs and some cream into something with a texture worth drinking. A polite shake produces a cold, flat, slightly greasy glass. Use white crème de cacao, not dark. Dark works perfectly well on flavour and turns the drink a muddy brown, which defeats the entire point of a drink named after the colour of a car. Get the cream cold and use double rather than single. Single cream splits more readily against the alcohol and gives a thinner result; double holds together and gives the drink the weight it is meant to have.
Flavour Profile
Where It Comes From
Poor Red's is a barbecue restaurant in El Dorado, in the California gold country, and it has been there since the 1940s. In 1952 someone at the bar made this drink for a couple celebrating the purchase of a gold Cadillac, and the name was the obvious one.
Most cocktail origin stories of this vintage are unverifiable and repeated because they are charming. This one has an unusual piece of corroboration: Poor Red's became one of the largest single accounts for Galliano in the world, on the strength of one drink ordered several hundred times a day. A bar does not get through that volume of a fairly niche Italian liqueur by accident.
The Grasshopper Swap
A Grasshopper is equal thirds of green crème de menthe, white crème de cacao and cream, and it tastes like an after-dinner mint. Take out the menthe, put in Galliano, and change nothing else.
Galliano is vanilla-forward with a soft anise edge and a herbal background that most people never consciously identify. Against chocolate and cream it reads as vanilla almost entirely, which is why the drink lands on crème brûlée rather than on aniseed. Where the Grasshopper is cold and sharp, this is warm and round. Same structure, same method, same glass, opposite sensation.
Why the Thirds Do Not Move
Everything in the glass is sweet. Galliano is a liqueur, crème de cacao is a liqueur, and cream carries its own sweetness. In most drinks that would be a problem to solve with acid or dilution, and here there is neither.
What holds it together is the ratio. At exactly a third each, the cream has enough volume to carry the two liqueurs rather than being overwhelmed by them, and the cacao and the Galliano cancel each other's excesses. Push either liqueur up and the drink stops being balanced and starts being syrup.
Galliano's Two Careers
The tall yellow bottle has had exactly two moments of real fame. One is the Harvey Wallbanger, which put it in every home bar in the 1970s and then took it back out again when that drink went out of fashion. The other is this.
Of the two, the Golden Cadillac is by some distance the better argument for the bottle. The Wallbanger uses Galliano as a float on orange juice and vodka; here it is the entire reason the drink exists.
How to Serve It
Shaken very hard, double strained into a chilled coupe or Nick and Nora, and drunk cold before it warms. No garnish is necessary and most of them look wrong on it.
It is a dessert, so treat it as one. After dinner, instead of pudding rather than alongside it.
The Spirit
GallianoA tall yellow Italian liqueur, vanilla-led with anise and herbs behind it, made since 1896. It is sold at two quite different strengths, and a recipe written for one will not balance with the other.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where does the Golden Cadillac come from?
Poor Red's, a barbecue roadhouse in El Dorado, California, in 1952. It was made for a couple celebrating a new gold Cadillac, and the bar went on to become one of the largest single accounts for Galliano in the world.
How is it different from a Grasshopper?
One ingredient. A Grasshopper uses green crème de menthe where this uses Galliano, and everything else is identical: the same equal thirds, the same hard shake, the same glass. The result moves from a cold after-dinner mint to something much closer to crème brûlée.
Should I use white or dark crème de cacao?
White, and the reason is colour rather than flavour. Dark crème de cacao tastes much the same but turns the drink brown, which is a poor outcome for something named after the paintwork of a car.
What does Galliano actually taste like?
Vanilla first, with a soft anise edge and a herbal background most people never quite place. Against chocolate and cream the vanilla dominates almost entirely, which is why the drink reads as custard rather than aniseed.
Master the Techniques
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Grasshopper
The Grasshopper is New Orleans’ green dessert: born by the standard account at Tujague’s in the French Quarter around 1918, second prize in a New York competition and first prize in posterity. Green crème de menthe and white crème de cacao share cream in equal thirds, the colour named it, the South adopted it, and the 1950s supper clubs canonised it. The build is the Alexander constitution in mint dress, with one significant difference: the two liqueurs take the base spirit’s place between them, so there is no spirit anywhere in the glass at all. It is the family’s first all-liqueur member, and gentle by construction rather than by any act of restraint. Green crème de menthe is constitutional here, which makes this the one drink where the usual preference for the white bottle inverts. The colour is the name, and any other combination of the two bottles muddies the grasshopper into a khaki brown.
Harvey Wallbanger
The Harvey Wallbanger is a Screwdriver that took a swerve: vodka and orange juice with a float of Galliano, the tall golden Italian liqueur, and the most successful drinks-marketing campaign of the 1970s attached. The recipe is credited to Hollywood bartender Donato “Duke” Antone in the 1950s, but the fame belongs to Galliano’s importers, whose surfing cartoon mascot Harvey put the drink on every American bar and airline by 1975. The float is the whole idea: fifteen millilitres of Galliano’s vanilla-anise gold resting on the surface, so the drink opens herbal-sweet and finishes as a plain Screwdriver, the same descent-through-a-layer trick the New York Sour plays with wine. Stirred in, it is merely sweetened orange juice; floated, it is a drink with a beginning, middle and end. It collapsed with the decade and returned with the revival’s soft spot for honest kitsch: the modern reading pours fresh orange juice, keeps the float floating, and lets a very silly name introduce a rather clever structure.
Brandy Alexander
The Brandy Alexander is equal parts cognac, dark crème de cacao and cream, shaken hard and served up under a heavy grating of nutmeg. It is the definitive dessert cocktail of the twentieth century and it has never seriously been challenged for the title. It is a variation that overtook its parent. The original Alexander is a gin drink with white crème de cacao, and it is genuinely good. Somebody swapped cognac in after the First World War and took the cacao dark at the same time, and the result was so much better suited to the end of a meal that within a few decades the child had taken the family name. Ask for an Alexander in most bars now and you will be handed this. Two darkenings, then: brandy's oak where juniper was, chocolate depth where cocoa butter sat. The equal thirds and the violence of the shake never moved.
Where this one sits
Recipe by Jerry Can Spirits
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