We open the menu dedicated to movies and TV series for the column Building the Menu with the: Gin Rickey, the cocktail from “The Great Gatsby”.
It is the most famous of the “Rickey” category, which are Fizz without sugar syrup; they are a mixture of a distillate, gin in this case, lime or lemon juice, and soda.
Not to be confused with the Highballs, made only with distillate and soda.
The first was Joe Rickey, invented at the Shoomaker’s bar in Washington in 1880 for Joe Rickey, a democratic lobbyist who loved sugar-free drinks and had soda and lime added to his bourbon
The Gin Rickey became so fashionable during the ’20s that it got a mention in the most prominent novel of the time: The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
The cocktail surfaces in the climax of the book, in chapter 7, where Daisy confesses her love to Gatsby. At the end of the tense scene, Gatsby and Daisy leave in his yellow car, rushing towards the tragic conclusion of the novel.
Jay Gatsby, the brooding and charming protagonist of Fitzgerald’s film adaptation, drinks nothing else, whether in the 1974 version interpreted by Robert Redford (and far better than the more current one!) or in the 2013 by Baz Luhrmann, where Gatsby is played by Leonardo DiCaprio.
It is also mentioned by Brad Pitt in the movie “Babylon” during the extravagant party that opens the film.
- Difficulty: Very Easy
- Cost: Medium
- Preparation time: 2 Minutes
- Cooking methods: No Cooking
- Cuisine: American
- Seasonality: All Seasons
Ingredients
- 2 oz gin
- 0.67 oz lime juice (or lemon juice)
- to taste soda
- to taste ice
Tools
- 1 Glass Tall Tumbler or Collins
- 1 Spoon for cocktails
Steps
Squeeze the lime and strain the juice.
Fill a tall tumbler or a collins with ice, pour the lime juice, add the gin, stir and finish filling the glass with soda to taste.
If you want, garnish with a maraschino cherry.
For other Rickey: substitute the distillate of your choice and use the same doses.
We discovered the Gin Rickey thanks to the cocktail list of the American Prohibition Museum in Savannah during our trip in March 2023 (see above).
With the explosion of gin’s popularity during the prohibition, the Gin Rickey quickly became one of the most popular cocktails of the time, long after Shoomaker fell victim to prohibition.
We had it prepared once we returned home by Freddy, from Freddy’s Factory Bar in Pietra Ligure, the best cocktail bar in the area, who kindly also did a demonstration…
FAQ (Questions and Answers)
Is Francis Scott Fitzgerald famous only for The Great Gatsby?
His most famous work was The Great Gatsby, but it was This Side of Paradise that revealed the author to the world, and his consecration came with The Beautiful and the Damned
