Pendennis Club Special

Serve in a

Garnish:

Skewered Luxardo Maraschino cherry

How to make:

SHAKE all ingredients with ice and fine strain into chilled glass.

AKA:

Pendennis Club Cocktail

Review:

Tangy, subtle, sweet, and sour. Depending on your palate and apricot liqueur you may want to add 2.5ml sugar syrup.

Variant:

Cocktail Bill's 1908 Pendennis Club Cocktail
Improved Pendennis Club Special
Improved Improved Pendennis Club Cocktail
Pendennis Club Revisited

History:

Eponymously named after the Pendennis Club in Louisville, Kentucky, the first known reference to this cocktail appears as the Pendennis Club Cocktail in the "Seductive American Cocktails" appendix in William "Cocktail Bill" Boothby's 1908 The World's Drinks and How to Mix Them book with just three ingredients: gin, apricot brandy, and dry vermouth.

By the time it resurfaces in Charles H. Baker Jr.'s 1939 The Gentleman's Companion as "The Pendennis Club's Famous Special" it morphed into a four-ingredient cocktail served over a split fresh kumquat. Modern-day recipes, such as the above, are nearer to Baker's 1939 Pendennis Club Cocktail than Cocktail Bill's 1908 Pendennis Club.

THE PENDENNIS CLUB'S FAMOUS SPECIAL
To 1 jigger of dry gin add ½ jigger of the best dry apricot brandy procurable. Squeeze in the juice of 1 lime or ½ a small lemon, strained of course, and trim with 2 dashes of Peychaud's bitters which has been made for generations in New Orleans. . . . Split a ripe kumquat, now available during the winter in most big grocery or fruit stores; take out the seeds and put the two halves in a Manhattan glass. Stir the drink like a Martini with lots of cracked ice and strain onto the golden fruit.

Charles H. Baker Jr., 1939

Alcohol content:

• 2 standard drinks
• 25.92% alc./vol. (51.84° proof)
• 27.4 grams of pure alcohol