club cocktail

2/3 Old Tom Gin (1 1/2 oz Hayman's)
1/3 Sweet Vermouth (3/4 oz Vya)
2 dash Gum Syrup (1 barspoon Gomme)
2 dash Orange Bitters (Angostura Orange)
1 dash Chartreuse (1/2 barspoon Green)

Stir with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

Last Wednesday as I was cooking dinner, I flipped through my new purchase of William Schmidt's 1892 book, The Flowing Bowl: When and What to Drink and spotted the Club Cocktail. The recipe seemed to be somewhere between a Martinez Cocktail and a Bijou, and I figured that it would make a decent before dinner drink.
The Club Cocktail possessed a surprising amount of orange notes both on the nose and on the sip from the orange bitters and perhaps the orange peel in the vermouth. The sweet, orange and slightly grape sip was followed by a complex swallow full of botanical notes from the vermouth, Chartreuse, and gin. Unlike the orange bitters, the green Chartreuse was surprisingly subtle in the drink and acted more as an accent rather than as a dominant flavor. Perhaps halving the orange bitters and doubling the green Chartreuse would have given me something more approximating my expectations of a Bijou-Martinez hybrid; however, the drink was tasty as it was.