Dr Cook – Recipe from the ‘Old Waldorf Bar Guide’

 (claret glass) 

Juice one-half Lemon

White of one Egg 

Two dashes Maraschino

Three-fourths Gin 

Frappe

Frederick Albert Cook was a surgeon and explorer of note at the beginning of the 1900’s. he is credited with saving the lives of his crew in an earlier Antarctic expedition, and became good friends with Roald Amundsen, the first man to reach the South Pole.

Later however it turns out that Dr Cook was a bit of a cad, or perhaps not quite as competent as he would lead us to believe.

His two major accomplishments as an explorer were being the first to reach the north pole, and being the first to climb Denali, the tallest mountain in North America.

However, both accomplishments have since been refuted, the former after it became apparent there were striking similarities between Cooks account, and a story written by Jules Verne some 40 years earlier. And the latter after it was noticed that photos taken by Cook of the ‘summit’ were of a false summit some distance lower. Sadly, and if it is any type of representation of his character he was later imprisoned for fraud tied into the promotion of oil companies in Texas and spent most of his later years in prison until a presidential pardon from Roosevelt.

Regardless of what he did or didn’t achieve he seems like quite the character, and definitely someone you’d want to go for a drink with, if not someone you’d perhaps invest in, or accept his version of events verbatim.

I suspect the drink in question falls into the category of being named after, versus named as it was his drink, it comes out with a think top snowy layer of foam from the egg white which I suspect is the connection.

The drink itself is good, a nice gin sour, with a little extra body caused by the whole egg white, the maraschino adds a nice layer to the drink as well and it ends up a little reminiscent of key lime pie. Well worth a try.