The French 75 , with gin or brandy, lemon juice, sugar, and champagne—essentially, a Champagne or “Imperial” Tom Collins—is one of the few mixed drinks to rise to prominence during the United States’ fourteen years of Prohibition. It is also reputed, not inaccurately, to be one of the most intoxicating mixed drinks in standard usage and commands a healthy respect among cocktail aficionados.
The drink’s formula and its name first appear together in 1927, in Here’s How!, a Prohibition-defying little book put out by a New York humor magazine, although some drinkers recalled them being found together in America at least since the beginning of Prohibition and among Americans in France during the war years immediately preceding. Both, however, had been in use before. When Charles Dickens entertained visitors to his suite in Boston’s Parker House hotel in 1867, it was with “Tom gin and champagne cups”; that mixture was apparently also a favorite with the Prince of Wales and King Kalakaua of Hawaii, either with or without the lemon juice and sugar. As for the name, in 1915, the popular Broadway columnist O. O. “Odd” McIntyre reported that war correspondent E. Alexander Powell had “brought back from the front” a cocktail named the “Soixante-Quinze—the French Seventy-five.” This one, however, consisted of gin and calvados (or applejack) with grenadine and sometimes a dash of absinthe or lemon juice. While it enjoyed some currency in Europe, it was entirely eclipsed by the American drink that usurped its name.
The drink achieved a certain transatlantic notoriety after Harry Craddock included it in the widely popular Savoy Cocktail Book in 1930. See Craddock, Harry Lawson. It was the perfect embodiment of the Jazz Age: heady, extravagant, and irresponsible. Some aficionados, such as the American actress Tallulah Bankhead, preferred theirs with cognac instead of gin, whether due to the taste or because it eliminated the anomaly of having a “French” drink based on an English spirit.
The French 75 retained some popularity during the Dark Ages of mixology and came roaring back with the cocktail renaissance, along with the arguments surrounding it: gin or cognac, up or on ice, flute or highball glass. See cocktail renaissance. Indeed, one of the stations of the cross of the modern cocktail cult is partaking of its namesake at Arnaud’s French 75 bar in New Orleans, where the drink is made with cognac and served up, in a flute—all three counter to the original recipe, yet in this case accepted by even the staunchest traditionalist.
Recipe (traditional): Stir 5 ml sugar into 15 ml lemon juice. Add 60 ml London dry gin, shake, and strain into a highball glass filled with cracked ice. Top off with chilled champagne.
Arnaud’s version (recipe by former head bartender Chris Hannah): Shake 37 ml VSOP cognac, 7 ml lemon juice, and 7 ml simple syrup; strain into chilled champagne flute, and top off with 75 ml chilled brut champagne.
“Notable Apartments.” New Haven Register, March 22, 1885, 3.
Judge Jr. Here’s How! New York: John Day, 1927.
By: David Wondrich