lalla rookh fizz

Juice of 1/2 Lime (1/2 oz)
1 barspoon Sugar
1/2 oz Vanilla (Navan)
1/2 oz Brandy (Château de Plassons VSOP Cognac)
1/2 oz Jamaican Rum (1:1 Smith & Cross:Appleton 12 Year)
1 barspoon Cream

Stir sugar with lime juice until dissolved. Add rest of ingredients and ice, shake, strain, and fill with soda water (~2 oz).

Sunday night, after shopping for vintage glassware at Felton Antiques (particularly the downstairs) and at a thrift store on Moody Street in Waltham, MA, it was time to put some of our plunder to good use! For a drink to fill our 74 cent highballs, I picked the Lalla Rookh Fizz from Jacques Straub's 1914 book Drinks. The name Lalla Rookh translates to "tulip cheeked" in Persian and is used in an endearing way; moreover, the drink may be a tribute to the work penned by Thomas Moore in the 19th century. One of the ingredients in the recipe was listed as "vanilla" which was probably short for "crème de vanille". Our bottle of Navan that we were sent as a sample seemed like a decent substitute as it is a vanilla-flavored Cognac-based liqueur. For a Jamaican rum, we could not decide whether we should go robust and funky with the Smith & Cross or go dark and rich with the aged Appleton, so we added a half portion of each. Moreover, I was unsure of how much soda water to add and I feared diluting the drink down too much, so I did a portion equal to the unshaken volume instead of filling the glass.
The Lalla Rookh Fizz had a rum funk and vanilla nose from the Smith & Cross and Navan, respectively. The sip was limey and rummy with a pleasant vanilla aftertaste. The cream added an opaqueness and perhaps tamed the flavors and spread out the finish. The drink was a lot sharper than a Ramos Gin Fizz, but it was still very refreshing. Perhaps this extra sharpness is why the drink screamed out to me that it needed an egg or egg white in the mix akin to the Ramos.