Russian Cocktail (Baker's)

History

Adapted from a recipe in Charles H. Baker, Jr.'s 1939 The Gentleman's Companion volume II – An Exotic Drinking Book.

THE SO_CALLED RUSSIAN COCKTAIL, a Memory of Peking, in 1926
Inthat year, which seems so very long ago now, Peking was a place of sheer delight. Trade was better after the war, the memory of the Revolution and massacre of White Russians was a vague and tragic business to Russian who were young enough to forget what had been. There was a lovely girl who maintained a shop selling jades and Imperial tribute silks, carved ivories and kingfisher feather screens, at the Grande Hotel de Pekin. And after a while we came to go about to odd parts of the vast city together, and one evening at the small jewel-like house on Pa-Pao Hutung where we had gone for some decent sukiyaki–the only place in Peking where we could see what made up the things we ate! –she commanded ingredients, and after a pause, had them brought to a small room with the sliding screens that gave out on a small garden close to where the magnolias drifted the rose-snow of their petals against the high grey wall; and so she sat there in the bamboo print kimono they gave her to wear, and mixed a trio of these for old times' sake, to Russia as she had quit it ahead of bayonets in 1917, a pale gold haired child of 11 or 12.

Into a crystal goblet put 1 cup of finely cracked ice, and onto this pour 1½ jiggers of good cognac and the same of the best Gilka kümmel, stir for a moment and fill the goblet with chilled extra dry champagne. Garnish with a single flower petal, or bloom. It is not a drink to be taken lightly, but advisedly, reverently.

Charles H. Baker, Jr., 1939