The Hanky Panky

The Hanky Panky cocktail—half dry gin, half sweet vermouth, and two dashes of Fernet Branca—is the first canonical cocktail definitively attributed to a female bartender. See Milk Punch and Sherry Cobbler. It was created by Ada “Coley” Coleman (1875–1966) when she was the head bartender at the American Bar at London’s Savoy Hotel. See Coleman, Ada. There are two more or less contemporary accounts of the circumstances, published in London newspapers as 1925 turned into 1926, which agree in their broad details: a few years prior, the actor and impresario Sir Charles Hawtrey (1858–1923), a mentor of young Noël Coward and one of Coleman’s many special customers, came into the bar complaining of fatigue from overwork (“Coley, I’m half dead; what can you do to make me quite alive?,” the Sphere has him asking). “I spent hours experimenting,” Coleman told the People, “until I invented a new cocktail.” Hawtrey either dubbed the resulting drink “the real hanky panky” on the spot, or came in the next day asking for “that hanky panky stuff.” In any case, the name stuck. (At the time, “hanky panky” was a phrase more associated with magic than sexual shenanigans—a relative of “hocus-pocus.”)

A likely date for the drink’s creation was in mid-1921, when Hawtrey was, despite his failing health, both producing and starring in Ambrose Applejohn’s Adventure at the Savoy Theatre, next door to the hotel. Hawtrey was busy in 1921; before that production, he was the producer of multiple shows including Basil McDonald Hastings’s 1919 farce, Hanky Panky John, whose title character is “nicknamed Hanky Panky because he had invented a cocktail so-called.”

The Hanky Panky is the only one of Coleman’s drinks known to survive—although it is possible that a number of drinks in the 1930 Savoy Cocktail Book, written by Harry Craddock, who pushed her out of her job in 1926, are actually hers. See Craddock, Harry Lawson. A simple variation on the Martini, it is one of the first cocktails to make use of Fernet Branca (available in Britain since at least 1887), which in the small quantity Coleman used brings a surprising richness and depth to it without making it overtly bitter.

Recipe: Stir with ice 60 ml London dry gin, 30 ml sweet vermouth, and 5–10 ml Fernet Branca; strain into a chilled cocktail class and twist orange peel over the top.

“Cocktails as a Guide to Character.” People, December 20, 1925, 2.

Haigh, Ted. Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails-Deluxe Edition. Gloucester, MA: Quarry, 2009.

Regan, Gary. “Masters of Mixology: Ada Coleman.” Liquor.com. http://www.liquor.com/articles/masters-of-mixology-ada-coleman/#gs.TsvbZVA (accessed February 15, 2021).

“Thumbnail Interviews with the Great: The Cocktail Queen.” Sphere, January 2, 1926, 28.

West-Ender. “Things Theatrical.” Sporting Times, February 5, 1921, 3.

By: Dinah Sanders and David Wondrich