Cocktail #1: The White Lady

I was in the liquor store today and noticed that they'd stocked a whole bunch of Lillet and wondered why for a moment. Then it hit me, there is a new Bond film coming, which means that every poseur in creation will be buying Lillet and making that God-awful cocktail Bond drinks. An antidote was needed and here it is (the first of a series).

According to some sources anyway, this was Somerset Maugham's favourite cocktail. So let us read some Maugham to get in the mood.

One of the many inconveniences of real life is that it seldom gives you a complete story. Some incident has excited your interest, the people who are concerned in it are in the devil's own muddle, and you wonder what on earth will happen next. Well, generally nothing happens. The inevitable catastrophe you foresaw wasn't inevitable after all, and high tragedy, without any regard to artistic decency, dwindles into drawing-room comedy. Now, growing old has many disadvantages, but it has this compensation (among, let us admit, not a few others), that sometimes it gives you the opportunity of seeing what was the outcome of certain events you had witnessed long ago. You had given up the hope of ever knowing what was the end of the story, and then, when you least expected it, it is handed to you on a platter.

Love that stuff. It's from a story called "The Romantic Young Lady". Maugham wrote great short stories and some novels that are good enough if you are willing to put the efforts into them. As a result, he is not read much anymore.

As you can see in the above, every line, every word in Maugham is doing real work. There are no sections where you can just coast along. That's good in a short story but less so in a longer work. Drinking a White Lady is sort of like that. There is a certain thrill that comes from saying, "I'll have another white lady please," but this is a cocktail for those who want just one before dinner.

How to make it? Well, there are four ingredients:

Gin
Cointreau
Lemon juice
Egg White 

I've decorated mine with a nasturtium.

I'm not saying anything about proportions because it's best not to know if you want to learn how to make cocktails right. Roughly speaking, more gin than anything else, no more than half as much Cointreau as gin and less of each ingredient as you go down the list. Experiment and figure out what tastes best. Learn to trust your own taste and, most important, educate your sentiments such that you change the recipe as you learn more about the art of living.

Put all ingredients, except the flower, in a cocktail shaker and shake it hard until the outside of the shaker is cold enough that it hurts to hold it. The whole point of shaking is to chill the drink not mix it. That's why you have to shake hard.

A couple of caveats.

1. The final result should be tart. How tart is up to you but on no account should this cocktail taste sweet. If you look the oldest recipes, they made them really tart—it was a drink to make you pucker up.
2. Dried egg whites don't work. It's the real thing or nothing. You can substitute a small dollop of cream. Not so much that you can taste cream but more so that it changes the colour and texture of the drink. However, the cream will tend to separate so you will have to swirl it around occasionally as you drink it.