The White Russian is a cocktail in which coffee liqueur (usually Kahlúa) and heavy cream are shaken up with vodka and enough ice to make the whole suitably frosty. Its origins can be traced to the 1930s, when vodka was still something of a novelty to most non-Slavic drinkers. In that era, a number of cocktail curiosities came into being to put the spirit to use. The Russian Cocktail, as found in the 1930 Savoy Cocktail Book, combined vodka with gin and crème de cacao in equal parts. The arguably more agreeable (and feminine) sounding Barbara, from the same book, blended two parts of vodka with one part each crème de cacao and cream, to make what is essentially a vodka Alexander. See Alexander and cocktail. By 1936, Parisian master barman Frank Meier had stolen the “Russian” name and attached it to the Barbara. See Meier, Frank. Four years later, Crosby Gaige further tweaked that into the “Russian Bear,” a name that the determinedly macho, postwar 1950s preferred to the feminine Barbara. See Gaige, Crosby. This is the likeliest progenitor of the White Russian.
The drink took its final form, and name, in 1965, when Southern Comfort, the American liqueur brand, used the drink to promote its short-lived Coffee Southern spinoff, replacing the crème de cacao with the new liqueur and renaming it the White Russian, to contrast with the then-popular Black Russian (vodka and Kahlúa, the coffee-flavored Mexican liqueur). The drink is closer to light beige than white, but who wants to order a Beige Russian? In any case, it didn’t take long for Kahlúa to replace the Coffee Southern. The result was one of the most successful drinks of its era, and one that still enjoys wide popularity.
To some drinkers it is a guilty pleasure, but its milk-shakey charms are resisted by only the most hard-hearted. It is the sole reason many dive bars grudgingly keep a carton of cream (or, among the less committed, milk), in their lowboy refrigerators. As a motif in the Coen Brothers’ cult film The Big Lebowski—in which the White Russian is the Dude’s main source of sustenance—it has become something of a cult drink, whether consumed ironically or with the Dude’s earnestness.
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Recipe: Shake 45 ml vodka, 22 ½ ml Kahlúa, and 22 ½ ml heavy cream well with cracked ice and strain into an Old-Fashioned glass. This can also be served as a layered drink, with the cream as a float.
See also Kahlúa.
Gaige, Crosby. Cocktail Guide and Ladies’ Companion. New York: Fireside, 1941.
“How to Make 46 Great Drinks the Way the Experts Do” (advertising supplement). Philadelphia Inquirer, March 7, 1965, 8.
Wondrich, David. “How to Make a White Russian.” Esquire, March 8, 2015. http://www.esquire.com/food-drink/drinks/recipes/a3872/white-russian-drink-recipe/ (accessed March 15, 2021).
By: Rosie Schaap