277. Ping-Pong Cocktail

My interpretation:
  1 oz Rothman & Winter Creme de Violette
  1 oz Plymouth Sloe Gin
  1 tsp lemon juice

 Shake with fine ice, strain into cocktail glass, serve. — This St. Louis-born dessert duo, augmented with a balancing squirt of lemon and floral Violette note, does much to improve the reputation of Sloe Gin. The simple and effective (indeed, award-winning—see below) recipe is first found in Charles Mahoney’s Hoffman House Bartender’s Guide (1905), where it specifies 3 dashes of lemon juice but also adds a cherry (Jack often omits garnishes). It is from there we also interpolate the usage of fine ice for “mixing.” That recipe’s final note warns against making it “too sweet.” The later Savoy Cocktail Book (1930) has a 2:2:1 ratio, which brings the lemon juice more forward (it only needs more than 3 dashes if those are small dashes). In the Old Waldorf Bar Book (1930), a Ping-Pong cocktail is a simple sloe gin-based drink and seems to have forgotten all about Bennett and the Hoffman House. The Waldorf, it states there, had a ping-pong table in its old bar (this seems to be a set-up for a bad joke about drunkenness): it calls for 1:1 sloe gin and dry vermouth with orange bitters—related perhaps, but quite different in effect. Barflies & Cocktails (1927) reproduces the original recipe as well as the attribution of the recipe to Mr. James G. Bennett of the Broken Heart Café, St. Louis, MO, while omitting Mr. Mahoney’s recognition of Mr. Bennett for winning the Police Gazette Bartender’s Medal for 1903.