This luxurious cocktail, the Ramos Gin Fizz, featured in Cure: New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix ‘Em, combines the velvety richness of cream and eggwhite with the bright and botanical flavors of gin.
The Ramos Gin Fizz, both sweet and citrusy with floral notes, is the perfect balanced drink to order at Cure in New Orleans. The key to its unique texture is vigorous shaking to achieve a thick, frothy head.
Note: Use a medicine dropper to apply the orange flower water. If you can’t find orange flower water in the baking aisle of your grocery store, look for it in Middle Eastern markets. It’s one of the more ingenious aspects of Ramos’s recipe and part of what separates his gin fizz from other egg-white drinks of the era. Orange flower water is a finicky ingredient that, if overused, has the potential to make cocktails cloying and perfumy. But in small doses, it adds this really enticing and unexpected floral note. If your orange flower water is really fresh and smells strong, you may wish to reduce the number of drops to three; if it’s more muted, keep to seven. In the case of the Ramos Gin Fizz, it helps to tamp down the sulfurous, wet-dog smell you sometimes get from egg-white drinks. Ramos clearly understood his ingredients, which is why he was such a master bartender.
recipe 
yields
Serves 1
½ ounce lime juice
½ ounce lemon juice
1 egg white
7 drops orange flower water
2 ounces London Dry gin
1 ounce simple syrup
1½ ounces heavy cream
2 ounces soda water
Garnish: orange peel
Ingredients
steps
- Combine the lime and lemon juice, egg white, and orange flower water in a shaker tin without ice and dry-shake for 30 seconds. Add the gin, simple syrup, and two 1 ¼ inch (3-cm) ice cubes and whip-shake for 1 minute. Add the cream and shake for 1 minute more. Bang the bottom of the tin against the countertop to settle the drink.
- Add the soda water to a chilled collins glass, then slowly double-strain one-third of the contents of the tin into the glass. Bang the bottom of the tin against the countertop to settle the drink again, slowly double-strain another third of the drink into the glass, bang the tin to settle the drink once more, then slowly double-strain the remainder of the drink into the glass.
- Express the orange peel on the outside of the glass and on top of the foam, then gently rest the orange peel on top of the foam (or discard it, if that’s your preference) and serve with a straw.
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Recipe By
Excerpted from the new book Cure: New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix ‘Em by Neal Bodenheimer and Emily Timberlake, Published by Abrams. Photography (c) 2022 by Denny Culbert. -
Contributing City
New Orleans
