Monkey Gland

The Monkey Gland is a gin cocktail built with orange juice, absinthe, and grenadine that dates to the early 1920s Paris bar scene. Most accounts credit Harry MacElhone, owner of Harry's New York Bar in Paris, as its creator, noting that the drink appears in his own 1922 book Harry's ABC of Mixing Cocktails, where he claimed authorship. Some historians instead point to Frank Meier, bartender at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, who was reported by the Washington Post in the early 1920s to be serving the drink as a specialty at his bar. The true inventor remains disputed between the two men.

The cocktail takes its name from a fashionable and controversial medical procedure of the era developed by Serge Voronoff, a Russian-born surgeon working in France, who grafted monkey testicle tissue onto aging men in the belief it would restore youth and vitality. The drink's provocative name capitalized on the notoriety of Voronoff's rejuvenation experiments, which were widely publicized in the press during the 1920s before falling out of favor as quack medicine by the following decade.