Corpse Reviver was a nineteenth-century American drink that was unknown in America. It appears to have been an actual drink, served at an American, or American-style, bar in Piccadilly, London, in the late 1850s. Before long, even as the drink itself was forgotten, its name was enrolled by British journalists in their clichéd list of typical American drinks. Yet when British visitors tried to order one over a bar in America, they were invariably greeted with comments like the “What’s that?” from a bartender at the Hoffman House in 1895.
Eventually, “corpse reviver” became a generic term on both sides of the Atlantic for a morning drink, akin to “eye-opener” or the older “anti-fogmatic.” In 1930, Harry Craddock tethered the term to a couple of actual recipes in his Recipe (Corpse Reviver no. 2): Shake with ice: 22 ml each London dry gin, Lillet Blanc, Cointreau, and lemon juice and one dash absinthe; strain into chilled cocktail glass. See also Savoy Hotel’s American Bar. “Could Not Get a Yankee Drink.” New York Herald, October 6, 1895, section 6, 12. Craddock, Harry. The Savoy Cocktail Book. New York: Richard Smith, 1930. “European Gossip.” Detroit Free Press, December 11, 1859, 1. Haigh, Ted. Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails. Gloucester, MA: Quarry, 2004. “How I Stopped the Brownes from Asking Me ‘to Come in the Evening.’” Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, April 5, 1862, 223. By: Dinah Sanders