The Singapore Sling , or Straits Sling, a mixture of gin, liqueurs, fruit juices, and soda water that was a mainstay of mid-twentieth-century tippling, bears one of the most storied and romantic names in the annals of mixed drink. It is not, however, a true sling in the original American style, nor was it exclusive to Singapore even before it achieved global fame.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the American Gin Sling had been reformulated by British drinkers, particularly in Britain’s Asian colonies, to include liqueurs and citrus juice. (Already in 1861, Charles Francatelli, the eminent Victorian chef, had included lemon slices in his recipe for the drink; the liqueurs date back at least to 1870, and both combined in 1881.) As a result, as the English mixographer Edward Spencer observed in 1903, “What we call a gin-sling is known in the United States as a John Collins” (a finicky American might rather have labeled it a cooler). See Gin Sling; John Collins; and cooler.
At some point near the end of the nineteenth century, drinkers in Singapore began taking their slings with a splash of cherry brandy in them, a practice first documented in a 1903 reference from a Singapore newspaper to “pink slings for pale people.” See cherry brandy. The first rough recipe for this comes from 1913, in an anecdote about the strategy a member of the Singapore Cricket Club used to get a Sling at the bar there, which considered them vulgar and refused to make them: he simply “ordered one Cherry Brandy, one Domb [i.e., Bénédictine], one Gin, one Lime Juice, some Ice and [soda] water, a few dashes of bitters—and then enjoyed a really decent Sling.” See Bénédictine.
If the Cricket Club was reluctant to make slings, there were numerous other places in Singapore that weren’t. Chief among them in reputation was the bar at the John Little department store, followed by the Long Bar at the Raffles Hotel and the bar at Robinson’s department store. Similar slings, however, were also being made elsewhere in the Straits Settlements (the administrative unit to which Singapore belonged), in the surrounding Federated Malay States, in Shanghai and Hong Kong, and indeed throughout British Asia. There was a good deal of latitude in the recipes for these, with the Bénédictine often replaced or supplemented by curaçao and the cherry brandy (either Heering or Bols) by red wine or sloe gin. See Bols and sloe gin.
Nor was the drink confined to its native turf: as early as 1910, the Anglo-American Bar in Salzburg, Austria, was advertising a “Singapore Gin Sling” on its menu. (Willy, the head bartender, spent his winters at the Savoy Hotel in Cairo, where he must have learned the drink from travelers passing through Egypt on their way from Singapore to Britain.) By the mid-1920s, the drink was known around the world. Over the years, it became more and more become closely associated with the Raffles, as that was the leading hotel in the city and the place most tourists first encountered it, and eventually the bar there claimed ownership over the drink.
Until the 1970s, the Raffles version of the sling was little different from the standard one. Then, with business faltering, Roberto Pregarz, the hotel’s Trieste-born manager, “ ‘improved’ it, keeping the same ingredients but changing the shape of the glass and adding a few other touches to make it more exotic,” as he told a reporter in 1986. He might have been a bit disingenuous here: starting in 1974, when he made over the hotel, there was suddenly a lot less of the pricey Bénédictine and Cherry Heering in the drink, and it now had pineapple and orange juices along with the lime—at first only a little of each, but that would change—plus a little splash of Cointreau. What’s more, this was touted as the drink’s lost “original recipe,” found only in the memory of the veteran Raffles barman Ngiam Tong Boon, who had supposedly invented the drink in 1915. All these changes gave the drink a Raffles-linked history and the hotel a drink that, unlike the boozy, rather austere original, was overtly “tropical” and perfectly adapted to the disco drink era. See mixology, the history of.
While recent years have seen efforts to extricate the original Singapore Sling from the sweet, rather sticky modern Raffles version, they have not generally been successful.
Recipe (1910s version): Combine in ice-filled highball glass: 45 ml gin, 15 ml lime juice, 15 ml Cherry Heering, 15 ml Bénédictine. Top off with chilled sparkling water, stir, and dash Angostura bitters on top.
See also sling.
Cawley, Janet. “Dwarfed by Towers, Storied Raffles Still Alive and Slinging.” Chicago Tribune, December 3, 1986, 24.
“More about Gin Slings.” Singapore Weekly Sun, September 20, 1913, 7.
By: David Wondrich