371. Webster Cocktail

My interpretation:
  1 oz Plymouth Gin
  0.5 oz Martini & Rossi Extra Dry
  0.25 oz Rothman & Winter Orchard Apricot
  0.25 oz fresh lime juice

Shake well (30 seconds suffices to achieve good consistency, strain into cocktail glass, serve. —  The first thing to notice about this delicious Martini riff augmented by discreet portions of Apricot and lime, is that the math is all wrong. Jack may have meant percentages of 2 oz (a grown man’s drink), making this a larger drink than usual (i.e., 2.6 oz + dilution). However, I think it quite instructive to refer to the Savoy Cocktail Book (1930) here, the putative source, which calls for the proportion outlined above in my interpretation. This leads us to conclude that there is here a typo in the second line, and that apricot brandy should read 20%, not 50%. Of course, in type the characters are approximately mirrored along a horizontal axis. That would put us at 2 oz plus about 1 tsp., well within cocktail glass capacity of the time after dilution.

365. Waldorf Special Cocktail.

 My interpretation:
  2 oz Rothman & Winter Orchard Apricot
  1 T lime juice

Shake well (30 seconds), strain into cocktail glass, serve. — This recipe, if it may be called that (better, an apricot liqueur treatment neatly balanced with a little lime), which makes a nice post-prandial, is first described in Straub 1913 (specifying “apricotine”) before appearing in JM 1916. It does not appear in the Old Waldorf Bar Days book—which doesn’t mean, of course, that it was not served or invented there. When combined with a dry martini, it becomes a Webster (q.v.)