sardi's delight

1/2 jigger Gin (1 1/2 oz, used 209)
1 spoon Passion Fruit Juice (1/4 oz Ceres brand)
2 dash Grenadine (1/4 oz, used homemade)
1 spoon Lemon Juice (1/4 oz)
2 dash Absinthe (1/4 oz, Henri Bardouin Pastis)
2 drop Bitters (1 dash Angostura)

Shake with ice and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a lemon twist.

After drinking the Ramos Gin Fizz on Sunday night, I began flipping through our copy of the 1934 reprint of Boothby's World Drinks and How to Mix Them to find a recipe to use up the leftover freshly squeezed lemon juice. I spotted the Sardi's Delight; besides the curious name, the recipe's inclusion of passion fruit juice attracted me. I got up and checked out the history of this drink on the web and found a recipe for it on CocktailDB. In the above recipe, the Boothby's is on the left and the CocktailDB's along with the specific ingredients we used are in parentheses on the right. The drink was invented at Vincent Sardi's restaurant in New York City. This major Broadway actor's hang-out was founded in 1927 so the recipe must have been one of their early creations given that it was published in my edition of Boothby's only 7 years later.
One delightful thing about this recipe's balance is that, unlike say Firpo's Balloon, the anise seed flavor was not overwhelming and only gave it a hint of a "Good'n'Plenty" cocktail (Andrea's term for it). The other flavors worked rather well in the drink, with the lemon and Angostura bitters being very detectable over the gin and pastis. The grenadine and passion fruit worked with the lemon juice to round out the cocktail's fruit profile but were not as noticeable as distinct flavors.

(Monster in the photo created by Coffee-Drinker, and some of the Sardi's information was from this great Mae West blog).