crescent city cocktail

1 1/2 oz Sweet Vermouth (Cocchi)
3/4 oz White Label Rum (Smith & Cross)
Juice 1/2 Lime (1/2 oz)
2 dash Angostura Bitters
(1 dash Simple Syrup)

Stir with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

One of the drinks on the Anvil's 100 Drink List version 2.0 that had befuddled me was the Crescent City Cocktail. I search high and low in my cocktail book library and on the web, but I could not find the recipe. However, in a package of vintage cocktail books that I recently bought on eBay was the 2nd edition of Angostura's Professional Mixing Guide from 1950, and there I finally spotted the recipe. Overall, the Crescent City Cocktail was much like a Fig Leaf (*). For a rum, I looked on the Anvil's list and it calls for a Jamaican rum; therefore, I used Smith & Cross and needed to add some simple syrup to balance its heat. Perhaps Andrea's suggestion of Coruba would have been better suited here as the rum.
The Crescent City Cocktail began with Smith & Cross' funk with a vague fruitiness from the sweet vermouth and lime. A grape and lime sip led into swallow which offered the rum tamed by the vermouth and finished with lingering allspice and clove notes.

(*) After this post got some activity on eGullet, I learned that the recipe also appears in Embury. From the 1958 edition that sits by my computer:

Crescent City
• 4 parts Gold Label Rum
• 2 parts Sweet Vermouth
• 1 part Lime Juice
• 1-2 dash Angostura
Shake or stir with ice. 

Embury went on to say, "This cocktail, while not particularly good, is interesting in that it is a compromise between the aromatic type and the Sour type." Similar to Embury's style, it is more spirit forward and more tart than the one that I posted. With the one I made, I had to add extra simple syrup -- perhaps more due to the rum, but the lime juice quotient did not help, and Embury's has close to half the sweet vermouth amount.