Corpse Reviver #2

Corpse Reviver #2 was brought to my attention by a spirits industry executive and cocktail aficionado in Shanghai. It’s one of the six essential, shaken gin cocktails and the unusual name piqued my curiosity. Research for the most authentic version led me to a compilation of drinks served at the London Savoy Hotel. Written during the art deco period in 1930, it’s an exhaustive tome that documents every libation served there, including wine.

Ancient Recipes

Cocktail nomenclature from the prohibition era presents a problem because they call for measures of cordials, wineglasses, cups and tumblers among others. To understand and interpret these recipes you need the equivalent of the cocktail Rosetta Stone.

Ancient cocktails are also notorious for using obsolete or obscure liqueurs or ingredients that are impossible to find. Corpse Reviver #2 is one of them. It calls for Kina Lillet, a quinine enhanced, fortified wine from the Bordeaux region classified as a tonic. So, we’re tasked with finding a substitute that closely matches the original flavor profile.

The original recipe uses “wineglass” as the unit of measure and my rosetta stone says that’s four ounces. It makes a huge cocktail, quite a bit larger than what we are familiar with today. However, it uses equal parts of the four primary ingredients which allows us to scale down to any size we want. I reduced the measures and finished with a more manageable three and a quarter ounce cocktail.

Rosemary is not in the original recipe, but I couldn’t help myself. It needed a garnish and the fragrance of rosemary fit perfectly with this cocktail. I’m going to claim it WAS part of the original recipe and the editor accidentally red-lined it. Yeah, that’s the story!

The Warning

Because the original recipe made a very large cocktail it came with an annotated warning. “Four of these taken in quick succession will un-revive the corpse!” Print