Newark

Brooklyn

A Brooklyn is 60ml of rye whiskey and 22.5ml of dry vermouth, with 7.5ml each of maraschino liqueur and Averna and two dashes of orange bitters, stirred over ice for 20 to 30 seconds and strained into a chilled Nick and Nora glass with a cherry. About 3.3 UK units. The Averna and orange bitters stand in for Amer Picon, the French bitter orange aperitif the old recipes call for. The Oxford Companion says Picon’s strength fell from about 40% ABV to 38% in the 1920s, 27% in the 1970s and 18% in 1989, and Punch says it is still largely unavailable in the United States; in our view any Brooklyn poured now is a reconstruction. Difford’s Guide says the Brooklyn as we know it first appears in print in Jacob Grohusko’s Jack’s Manual, 1908, as equal parts rye and Italian vermouth with a dash each of Picon and maraschino. In 1913 Jacques Straub’s manual, as Difford’s Guide reproduces it, made it with French, or dry, vermouth.

Red Hook

A Red Hook is 60ml of rye whiskey, 22.5ml of Punt e Mes and 15ml of maraschino liqueur, stirred over ice for 20 to 30 seconds and strained into a chilled Nick and Nora glass with a cocktail cherry. About 3.2 UK units. Imbibe credits Vincenzo Errico with it, at Milk & Honey in New York in 2003, and says it takes its name from Red Hook, the south Brooklyn neighbourhood that was a 19th-century industrial shipping port. It sits between the Manhattan and the Brooklyn: rye from both, maraschino from the Brooklyn, and Punt e Mes, a bitter-edged Italian vermouth, doing the work of sweet vermouth and the bitter Amer Picon at once. Imbibe’s published recipe takes half an ounce, 15ml, of Punt e Mes. We pour 22.5ml, which keeps the bitterness in step with a maraschino measure twice the size of the Brooklyn’s.

Jack Rose

A Jack Rose is 60ml applejack, 22.5ml fresh lemon juice and 22.5ml grenadine, shaken hard and double strained into a chilled coupe, with lemon peel expressed over the top. About 2.4 UK units with a 40% applejack, or 3.0 with a bonded apple brandy at 50%. The lemon and grenadine are poured in equal measure, and the grenadine is why the drink looks and tastes as it does. Made from real pomegranate, it brings tart red fruit as well as sugar, and turns the glass pink. The Oxford Companion finds it in print in 1899, in the New York Press, as the pet of many connoisseurs at a downtown New York bar, and says the name was apparently taken from the Général Jacqueminot, or Jack, rose, a hybrid the drink resembles in colour. Difford’s Guide lists other claims for the name, among them a 1905 Police Gazette item crediting the Jersey City bartender Frank J. May. Hemingway put one in Jake Barnes’s hand at the Crillon in The Sun Also Rises.

Hanky Panky

A Hanky Panky is 45ml of London Dry gin, 45ml of sweet vermouth and 7.5ml of Fernet-Branca, stirred with ice for 20 to 30 seconds and strained into a chilled coupe, with an orange twist expressed over the top and dropped in. About 2.8 UK units. The measures are the IBA’s. Ada Coleman made it at the American Bar of the Savoy, where, the Oxford Companion says, she rose to head bartender before Harry Craddock displaced her in January 1926. The Companion quotes her telling The People in 1925 that she spent hours experimenting until she invented a new cocktail for the actor Charles Hawtrey, who had come in complaining of overwork. He either called it “the real hanky panky” on the spot or came in the next day asking for “that hanky panky stuff”, and the name stuck. Craddock put it in The Savoy Cocktail Book, in the Internet Archive’s scan. Equal gin and sweet vermouth make a sweet Martini. The Fernet-Branca, a bitter Italian amaro, adds menthol and dark herbs, cools the finish and keeps the vermouth from tasting syrupy.