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This is the story of the most elusive cocktail ever invented, a drink subversive in its potency. The novelist Alec Waugh called it the most powerful in the world. It does not have one recipe, but many. Prepared properly, it can be delightfully refreshing, or it can be rich and complex. Made badly, it is lifeless bilge. Locating the date of the first-ever French 75 is like fixing the date of the first-ever kiss. You can’t do it. There are no reliable records documenting the birth of individual cocktails. Careful record-keeping is an integral part of the work done by accountants and scientists. Bartenders live under no such injunctions. What we can say is that the French 75 almost certainly originated in France (the name gives that much away at least). Even so, its creation is quite often attributed to a London gentlemen’s club called Buck’s. The club, however, does not acknowledge an association of any kind. Meanwhile, the current standardised version of the cocktail, served around the world, only vaguely resembles its predecessors. It was made famous at the Savoy in London in the 1920s, but the drink the hotel serves today is nothing like the one imbibed back then.
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So, what can we say for sure about it? No one doubts the cocktail got its name from a French 75mm artillery piece. The Canon de 75mm Modèle 1897 was the first modern field gun, firing up to 30 rounds a minute. It was instrumental in stopping the German advance toward Paris. As a tangible symbol of military might, and a reminder of French sacrifice in the field, it became a crucial vehicle for wartime propaganda. This public campaign was initiated one rainy Sunday morning, February 7 1915, when women fanned out across France selling emblems of the cannon suspended from red, white and blue ribbons. By the end of “La Journée du 75”, 22 million of these had ended up in buttonholes and nearly 5.5mn French francs had been raised to provide care packages for men at the front. The propagandising of the 75 cannon did not end there. Songs and poems were composed in homage to the gun. Images of it appeared on romantic postcards (L’Artillerie de L’Amour) and on postcards the military gave to servicemen to send home from the front. The gun was emblazoned on everything from clocks and watches to cigarette papers and chocolates. It was in this frenzy that the eponymous cocktail was born, and, like the weapon, it packed a punch. The earliest known reference to the cocktail is in a “New York Day by Day” column by OO McIntyre that ran in The Washington Herald on December 2 1915, 16 months into the first world war. “There has been brought back to Broadway from the front by War Correspondent E. Alexander Powell the Soixante-Quinze cocktail — the French seventy-five,” McIntyre reported. “It is one-third gin, one-third grenadine, one-third applejack [apple brandy] and a dash of lemon juice.” The following year, the British magazine Sphere noted the mood in war-weary Paris: “The only indication of levity which any restaurant manifests is a cocktail invented by the mixer of the American bar at Ciro’s called a ‘soixante-quinze’, an agreeable blend of Calvados apple brandy and other mysterious ingredients.” The cocktail was not, however, invented at Ciro’s. A better authority, Robert Vermeire’s Cocktails: How to Mix Them (1922), gives priority to Henry’s Bar, around the corner — and even then Vermeire only goes so far as to say that Henry Tépé “introduced” the cocktail.
The French 75 made famous by the Savoy hotel’s bartender Harry Craddock in the 1930s combined gin, sugar, lemon and champagne
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