Morning Glory Fizz
The Morning Glory Fizz is the Victorian morning after in a small glass: Scotch given the full fizz treatment with egg white, split citrus, a thread of absinthe and a brisk top of soda. It appears in the manuals of the 1880s, Harry Johnson's among them, prescribed in print as a bracer to be taken before noon. It is the fizz family's only Scotch member and its most confident medical claim. The build is the Silver Fizz ceremony applied to malt: a dry shake to set the egg white, a hard wet shake to chill and aerate, then the ice-free glass and the fast soda the fizz laws demand. Lemon and lime split the citrus between them, which is a period habit rather than a modern flourish. The result is the family eccentric, whisky where gin ruled and morning where evening reigned, and it is genuinely excellent whenever anybody actually drinks it, which is the Victorian joke landing about a century late.
Glassware: Highball Glass
Garnish: None: fizz law
Ingredients
60ml
The fizz family's one malt member. Keep it unpeated, because smoke and egg white are a bad combination and the anise has nowhere to go against peat.
15ml
Half of the period citrus split. The 1880s manuals poured both lemon and lime, and the brightness of the finished drink shows exactly why.
10ml
The other half of the split. It brings a sharper, more floral acidity than lemon alone, and the combination is what makes the drink taste older than a modern sour.
20ml
Standard fizz weight at 20ml. It is balancing 25ml of combined citrus as well as softening the egg white, so cutting it leaves the drink austere.
1
The Silver Fizz ceremony, and the silk the soda will lift into a head. One white is enough; two makes the drink pillowy and slow.
2 dashes
Two dashes, worked into the foam rather than sitting on top of it. Victorian medicine by their lights and seasoning by ours, and the counted dash is not a suggestion.
60ml
The brisk top into an ice-free glass. Pour it fast: the turbulence is what lifts the foam, and a timid pour leaves the head slumped in the bottom.
Instructions
Dry shake the Scotch, both juices, syrup, egg white and absinthe without ice for 10 seconds.
Add ice and shake very hard for 12 more.
Strain into a chilled ice-free highball.
Top briskly with the soda and serve at once.
Expert Tip
Fizz law governs, and it has three clauses. No ice in the glass, because the drink is already cold and diluted from the shake and ice would only flatten the soda; chill the glass instead. Top briskly rather than gently, because the soda's turbulence is what lifts the egg foam into a head rather than leaving it slumped. And serve it immediately, since a fizz has about five minutes of real life and is a flat whisky sour after that. Use an unpeated Scotch. Smoke and egg white are a genuinely unpleasant combination, and the anise from the absinthe has nowhere to go against a peated malt. A gentle Speyside or a decent blend is exactly right, and an expensive bottle is wasted under this much citrus and soda.
Flavour Profile
Where It Comes From
The drink appears by name in the bar manuals of the 1880s, Harry Johnson's among them, and it appears with a prescription attached. It was a morning bracer, recommended before noon, in an age that had confident and largely wrong ideas about what alcohol, eggs and absinthe did for a person.
The fizz boom carried it along with the gin family to the end of the century. What is striking is that its eccentricity survived intact: everything else in the category standardised on gin, and this one kept its Scotch, its split citrus and its absinthe through every reprinting. Nobody sanded it down, probably because nobody was ordering it often enough to bother.
The Silver Ceremony on Malt
A Silver Fizz is a fizz with egg white, and the technique is fixed: a dry shake without ice to denature the protein and build structure, then a hard shake with ice to chill and aerate, then soda into a cold, empty glass.
Malt takes it better than expected. Whisky has more weight than gin and the foam carries that weight gracefully, giving a fizz with real body underneath the froth rather than the light, bright thing a gin fizz is. The soda's job is to stop the weight becoming heaviness, which is why the pour has to be brisk and the drink has to be quick.
Ten seconds dry, twelve wet. Less than that and the head will not hold.
The Absinthe Thread
Two dashes go in before the shake, which puts the anise inside the texture rather than on top of it. It is the same principle the Rattlesnake works on, and the effect is quite different from a rinsed glass: the absinthe arrives as a flavour running through the drink rather than as a perfume hitting the nose first.
Count the dashes. Absinthe at 60 to 70% is loud, and three dashes in a drink this size will bury the malt and the citrus together. Two is the calibration and it holds at any hour.
The Split Citrus
Fifteen millilitres of lemon and ten of lime is a period habit that modern recipes usually flatten into 25ml of lemon. It is worth keeping.
Lemon brings a rounder, more familiar sourness; lime brings a sharper edge and a floral top note that lemon does not have. Together they read brighter and slightly more complicated than either alone, and against malt, which is sweeter and heavier than gin, that extra complication is doing real work. It is also the clearest signal that the drink comes from before the twentieth century tidied everything up.
How to Serve It
Brunch is the modern home for the historical joke, and it is a genuinely good place for it. Serve it beside a Ramos Gin Fizz as the family's two eccentrics: one gin, one malt, both requiring more shaking than anybody expects.
The five-minute law hurries the table along agreeably. Make them one at a time, hand them over immediately, and do not attempt to batch, because there is no version of this drink that survives sitting in a jug.
The Spirit
Whisky (Scotch)Whisky made in Scotland and matured there in oak for at least three years. The rules are unusually tight about what may go in: water and plain caramel colouring are the only permitted additions, so everything else in the glass came from grain, cask and time.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a Morning Glory Fizz?
An 1880s Scotch fizz: malt whisky with split lemon and lime, simple syrup, egg white and two dashes of absinthe, shaken twice and topped with soda in an ice-free glass. The manuals of the period prescribed it as a morning bracer.
Was it really a morning drink?
By Victorian prescription, yes. The manuals recommend it before noon as a restorative, on medical reasoning that has not aged well. Modern brunch inherits the joke honourably enough, and nothing about the drink actually requires the hour.
Which Scotch works best?
An unpeated one. Smoke and egg white are a genuinely unpleasant combination, and the absinthe's anise has nowhere to go against peat. A gentle Speyside or a decent blend is right, and an expensive bottle is wasted under this much citrus and soda.
Why no ice in the glass?
Because the drink is already cold and correctly diluted from the shake. Ice would dilute it further and, more importantly, flatten the soda and kill the head. Chill the glass instead, top briskly, and drink it within about five minutes.
Master the Techniques
You Might Also Like
Ramos Gin Fizz
Henry C. Ramos created this at the Imperial Cabinet Saloon in New Orleans in 1888, and by the Mardi Gras of 1915 his bar needed thirty-five shaker boys working in relay to keep up with it. That is the drink’s reputation in one statistic: it is built on a shake so long that no single pair of arms could finish one. Seven ingredients go in before the soda: gin, lemon, lime, sugar, egg white, cream and orange flower water. The egg white and the cream emulsify over the shake into a foam denser and more stable than any sour’s, and the soda, poured in after straining, lifts that foam into a white column standing above the rim. Orange flower water is where most versions fail. It is a distilled floral water, not orange bitters and not zest, and it is the only thing that reaches between the gin’s botanicals and the cream’s weight. Two or three drops make the drink. Leave it out and you have a cream fizz with gin in it.
Gin Fizz
The Gin Fizz is the sour family’s effervescent branch and one of the golden age’s defining orders: gin, lemon and sugar shaken hard and fired into a small glass with soda, drunk fast while the sparkle holds. Jerry Thomas printed the fizz template in 1876, New Orleans made a religion of it, and by 1900 fizzes were being drunk by the dozen at American bars with shaker-men working in shifts. The classic serve is the part modern bars forget: a fizz takes no ice in the glass. It is shaken viciously cold, strained into a small chilled tumbler, topped with a short measure of soda and drunk in a few minutes. Ice in the glass makes it a Collins, which is a longer and lazier drink entirely. From this template the family branches. Egg white makes a Silver Fizz, yolk a Golden, the whole egg a Royal, and the Ramos added cream and orange flower water and demanded twelve minutes of shaking.
Rattlesnake
The Rattlesnake arrives with the best joke in the Savoy Cocktail Book attached to it. Harry Craddock printed the spec in 1930 with a note that it is “so called because it will either cure Rattlesnake bite, or prevent Rattlesnake bite, or make you see Rattlesnakes”, and the line has travelled with the drink ever since. Underneath the joke is a whiskey sour with the Sazerac’s trick played on it. Rye, lemon and sugar in standard proportions, an egg white for the crown, and three dashes of absinthe that are not rinsed around the glass, as a Sazerac would have it, but shaken through with everything else. That single decision is what makes the drink. A rinse puts the anise on the nose, met once and then gone. Shaken into the foam it diffuses through the texture instead, so every sip carries the same herbal shadow underneath the lemon. It is the sour for people who order Sazeracs, and it is far better than a novelty name deserves.
Where this one sits
Recipe by Jerry Can Spirits
Enjoyed This Recipe?
Explore our full collection of cocktails and discover your next favorite
Browse All Cocktails