Turf Club (1939 recipe)

The Turf Club (1939 recipe) takes its date from Charles H. Baker Jr.'s The Gentleman's Companion, a 1939 travel-and-drinks book and the drink's most detailed period source. Baker set down three variations he had encountered on his travels rather than a single fixed formula. One he traced to Dirty Dick's in Nassau in 1937, another to the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay in 1931, sipped after a race meeting at the Western India Turf Club. A third came from the Havana Country Club in the winter of 1930, built on Old Tom gin in place of dry gin. The Bombay and Havana versions combined gin, French vermouth, absinthe, maraschino liqueur, and bitters, stirred and strained, while the Nassau one leaned on Holland gin with lime and grenadine. Baker recorded the exact company and circumstances in which he drank them. A modern adaptation joins the two closest versions by splitting the base between Old Tom and London dry gin, and softens the absinthe with a little bianco vermouth, a splash of water and a drop of saline.

Baker's recipes sit within the longer, looser lineage of the Turf Club, a gin-and-vermouth drink first printed in 1884 in George Winter's How to Mix Drinks–Bar-Keeper's Handbook, calling for Old Tom gin, Italian vermouth, and bitters. Later nineteenth-century versions varied further, including one built on genever and George J. Kappeler's vermouth-free Turf Club (1895 recipe). Harry Johnson's 1900 recipe then fixed the combination of gin, dry vermouth, absinthe, maraschino, and orange bitters that Baker's recipes echo. The name refers to the turf clubs of the era, gentlemen's establishments built around horse racing and betting.