- 60 ml Plymouth Gin
- 15 ml Rose’s Lime Juice Cordial
Stir in a mixing glass with ice. Strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a slice of lime.
In the 19th century British sailors were given lime juice, preserved in alcohol, to combat scurvy. Naval provisioner Lachlan Rose invented a lime concentrate that used sugar as a preservative instead, removing the alcohol. This was later marketed as Rose’s Lime Juice Cordial. The officer class had better ideas. To proscribe it to them, Rear-Admiral Sir Thomas Desmond Gimlette, a British naval doctor, allegedly put back the alcohol by way of gin and a cocktail was born.
Contemporary bartenders prefer to mix it from fresh limes and sugar syrup but this is inauthentic. In Raymond Chandler’s 1953 novel The Long Goodbye, Marlowe states:
“a real gimlet is half gin and half Rose’s lime juice and nothing else.”
Quite right too though the ratio might need a tweak for modern sensibilities.