For those of you who don’t know your early Hollywood history, Douglas Fairbanks was probably the first real superstar action hero and, like Buster Keaton in his own day and Jackie Chan many years later, a superb stunt performer. He played the dashing, ultra-athletic lead in some of the earliest film versions of “The Thief of Baghdad,” “The Mark of Zorro” and “The Three Musketeers,” among many other productions. He was also — and I believe this is a DOTW first for a celebrity-named cocktail — a teetotaler.
Maybe, then, there’s a certain irony in that the flavor of the drink is, despite the presence of a very sweet liqueur, quite dry and tart. Meanwhile, the drink named after Fairbanks’ fellow silent-era superstar and reputed one-true-love, Mary Pickford, is quite sweet. Conversely, she is said to have had an extremely serious drinking problem.
So, yes, we’re talking extremes. You’d better like dry and tart because, even an ounce of a sweet liqueur and egg white can’t make the Douglas Fairbanks into anything but a drink for people who like ’em on the austere side. You’ve been warned.
The Douglas Fairbanks
2 ounces gin
1 ounce apricot brandy
1/2 ounce fresh lemon or lime juice
1/2 egg white (1 1/2 tablespoons of packaged egg white)
Combine the liquid ingredients in a cocktail shaker. If you are using fresh egg white (i.e., out of an actual egg), first shake it without ice to emulsify the egg, being mindful of the mildly explosive properties of un-iced egg white. Next, add plenty of ice and shake again very vigorously. Strain the result into large chilled cocktail glass. Prepare for tartness!
*****
This drink, which should not be confused with another Douglas Fairbanks cocktail which is more in the martini family, cames to me originally from David Embury’s “The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks.” If you really, really love tart flavors, you might prefer his recipe, which would reduce the proportion of sweet apricot brandy by one-half and doubles the lemon juice. Embury actually doesn’t even mention lime juice, but I made several versions using both citrus juices and, for whatever reason, they came out pretty much the same. Lime juice seems to be more popular choice these days for the Douglas Fairbanks, but I say you can use either depending on your preference, what you have in the house, or even cost-effectiveness. (At least here in SoCal, lemon and lime prices vary pretty wildly from month to month.)
I should add that Embury is by no means the inventor of this drink which, according to Vince Keenan, dates back to some 1930s Cuban publications known as “Sloppy Joe’s Manuals.” Whatever the source, we can assume that the once very physically fit, non-drinking Mr. Fairbanks had no say in the matter whatsoever and probably never got anywhere near the drink by the time he died, relatively young, in 1939. By most accounts, the talkies weren’t really Fairbanks’ medium. Apparently, retirement didn’t agree with him and he left the world just as the talkies were really hitting their stride as the world’s dominant entertainment medium.
As for the drink that bears Fairbanks’ name, I found it took some getting used to as I’m a bit of a baby about tart flavors, and no amount of noodling on my part seemed to help that a great deal. I’m not sure why, but apricot brandy — very sweet tasting on its own — simply refuses to sweeten this drink beyond a certain amount of balancing. Using the lime-inflected Tanqueray Ranghpur as an alternative to standard Tanqueray, however, did sort of even things out in an interesting way
