St. Agrestis · Cocktail library
Comet cocktail
Two unrelated drinks share the name: a 1952 brandy and grapefruit drink and a 1937 stirred gin and Lillet cocktail.
Go to the recipe ↓The Comet in David Wondrich's Killer Cocktails is credited to Eddie Clarke of the Albany Club in London in 1952. It keeps the Sidecar's basic shape, but grapefruit juice replaces lemon, Van der Hum is the liqueur, and the drink adds Angostura. An older Comet appears in the 1937 Café Royal Cocktail Book and is credited to Dorothy Perosino. That one is a stirred mix of orange gin and Lillet with a little maraschino. The two drinks need different bottles and different technique, so decide which Comet you are making before you shop.
Cocktail Virgin: 1952 brandy Comet
Contains alcohol
Ingredients
Original recipe quantities.
See the proportions
Share of the measured liquid, before ice. Unmeasured additions and non-volume ingredients are excluded.
Method as published
- Put the VSOP Cognac or Armagnac, yellow grapefruit juice, Van der Hum and Angostura Bitters in a shaker with ice.
- Shake, then strain into a cocktail glass.
Garnish None listed in the recipe.
- The recipe accepts either VSOP Cognac or VSOP Armagnac. Frederic Yarm used Larressingle Armagnac VSOP.
- The juice is specified as yellow grapefruit.
Recipe source: cocktailvirgin.blogspot.com ↗
Cocktail Virgin: 1937 Café Royal Comet, adapted
Contains alcohol
Ingredients
Original recipe quantities.
Method as published
- Make the orange gin half in a mixing glass with 1 1/2 oz Beefeater gin, 1 barspoon Cointreau and 2 dashes Angostura Orange Bitters.
- Add 1 1/2 oz Cocchi Americano for the Lillet half and 1 barspoon Luxardo maraschino.
- Add ice and stir, then strain into a cocktail glass.
Garnish Orange twist. Yarm added this garnish himself.
- The 1937 recipe uses proportions: half orange gin, half Lillet and 2 dashes of maraschino. The ounce and barspoon measures in parentheses are Yarm's adaptation, so the calculator scales his measures and leaves the original proportions as parts.
- Orange gin was hard to find, so Yarm followed adaptation advice from Jeff Masson and Greg Boehm's The Big Bartender's Book. He combined gin with Cointreau and orange bitters, and he used Cocchi Americano in place of Lillet.
Recipe source: cocktailvirgin.blogspot.com ↗
Van der Hum is the bottle to find
The 1952 Comet depends on Van der Hum. CocktailDB describes it as a proprietary South African liqueur flavored with naartjes, a tangerine variety native to South Africa. Yarm adds that it is brandy-based and has some herbal complexity. He also finds it distinct from orange liqueurs in the way that tangerine differs from orange, and he notes that it turns the drink brown. Treat it as a specific purchase. It is not interchangeable with whatever orange liqueur you already have on the shelf.