The Ramos Gin Fizz , a Silver Gin Fizz cushioned with cream, rendered mysterious with orange flower water, and shaken to a delicate froth, is—along with the Sazerac Cocktail—one of New Orleans’s signature drinks, and is the only one of the great classics of mixology to commemorate the bartender who created it in its name. See Sazerac Cocktail and Silver Fizz. Henry C. Ramos (1856–1928), the New Orleans bartender in question, parlayed his sweet, subtle, lightly alcoholic creation into fame and fortune in his lifetime, and to this day it remains an object of delight and a well-known test of a bartender’s skill. See Ramos, Henry Charles.
Unfortunately, the drink’s precise origins are unknown. The earliest definite notice of it in print is from 1895, when it is both described in an article about Ramos in the New Orleans Times-Democrat and provided with a recipe, as the “New Orleans Fizz,” in George Kappeler’s well-regarded Modern American Drinks, published in New York, although Kappeler’s recipe lacks the orange flower water. Its precursors certainly include the Cream Lemonade, a nonalcoholic drink with citrus, sugar, cream, egg white, and sparkling water that first starts appearing in the 1880s. Significantly, Cream Lemonade was one of Ramos’s specialties in the mid-1880s, when he was keeping a saloon in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
The drink’s precursors must also include the version of a Silver Fizz attributed to “one of the most distinguished Crescent City barkeepers” by the New Orleans Times-Democrat in 1890, which was flavored with orange flower water, apparently the first time that ingredient was included in a Gin Fizz. By that point, Ramos was back in New Orleans and well known for his skill mixing drinks, and it is quite possible that he was the bartender in question. On the other hand, the way the anonymous bartender assembled his Silver Fizz is quite different from how Ramos built his eponymous drink, and for bartenders such matters can be like signatures.
But even if Ramos was not the first to add orange flower water to a Silver Fizz, as far as can be determined the idea of combining that drink and a Cream Lemonade was his, as was the characteristic way he made the resulting fizz, which involved shaking it for several minutes, with the sparkling water already added, until the ice was completely dissolved. Certainly his claim to the drink, which was enormously famous, was unchallenged during his lifetime. It cannot be stated precisely when he shook the first one, but the most likely period is between 1892 and 1894. By 1895, his Imperial Cabinet saloon was known as the “Gin Fizz place.”
By 1900, the “One and Only One,” as Ramos called his fizz, was a New Orleans fixture, one of the boxes a tourist had to check off if he or she visited the city (the drink was considered gentle enough, and Ramos’s saloon genteel enough, for ladies). The drink’s fame soon spread nationwide, aided by the fact that Ramos had no problem giving out his recipe. Prohibition only increased that fame, as the Ramos Gin Fizz became a symbol of the delights that the dry law had taken away.
dry shake. Despite all that attention, though, Henry Carl Ramos’s basic formula still works just fine.Recipe: Stir together in shaker 15 ml lemon juice, 15 ml lime juice, and 10 ml sugar; add 45 ml Old Tom gin, 15 ml egg white, 30 ml heavy cream, and 3 or 4 drops orange flower water. Shake thoroughly with ice and strain into chilled highball glass with 30 ml chilled sparkling water first added.
“A Famous Mixologist.” New Orleans Times-Democrat, September 1, 1895, 28.
“How Late H. C. Ramos Made His World Famous Gin Fizz.” New Orleans Item-Tribune, September 23, 1928.
“Questions and Answers.” New Orleans Times-Democrat, January 6, 1890, 3.
By: David Wondrich