Intriguing to read in The Comic Book History of the Cocktail that the Million Dollar Cocktail was from the Shanghai Club, that it consisted of “gin, brandy, vermouth, and various juices and syrups” and that “bootleg versions” abounded. The commonly cited recipe in Charles Barker’s book, attributed to the Imperial Hotel, 1926, must be one of the imitations, and notably contains no brandy.
I am curious whether the original a lost recipe?
I am not familiar with the brandy version, but the notes I have on Million Dollar Cocktail says gin, vermouth (italian), grenadine, pineapple juice and egg white. (At least according to Craddock in Savoy book and UKBG along with many other references in the 1930s, including Cafe Royal.).
There’s also the “Twin Six Cocktail” which is identical except it’s Orange Juice instead of Pineapple and this one goes back to Hugo Ensslin in 1916 and was famous enough to spread to Cuba by 1920s with the same name so the flavour combo was definitely a thing.
The earliest reference I can find of “Million Dollar Cocktail” is on page 63 of the 1928 book “370 Recettes de Cocktails par Jean Lupoiu” with the name correct, but the spec being a mashup…
(See EUVS here - 1928 370 Recettes de Cocktails par Jean Lupoiu - Page 90 )
Interestingly, Baker’s reference to the “Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, Japan, 1926, 1931 & 1932“ seems to agree with the fourth edition of “O’Dell’s Book of Cocktails and Fancy Drinks” which was printed in English & Japanese in 1933. O’Dell’s contains both the Million Dollar Cocktail as outlined above (Page 91) and also a “No. 2” version which seems to be a mashup with dry vermouth and both orange & pineapple.
(Again, EUVS has a copy - 1933 Odell's book of Cocktails and Fancy drinks in English an Japanese (4th edition) - Page 90)
As for true origins, one can only speculate, but Masa from Katana Kitten writes in the Japanese Art of the Cocktail (2021) that Louis Eppinger is responsible for bringing the Million Dollar cocktail to Japan along with the Bamboo in the 1890s…
Seems we don’t have to speculate about the origin at all, but we may have to speculate about the original recipe.
Meanwhile, here’s a photo of the 34-meter-long Shanghai Club bar c. 1920s, from wikipedia.
… and it’s still there:
My interest in visiting Shanghai has now roughly doubled.
The Shanghai Club claimed the invention of the drink, but it spread so rapidly throughout East Asia that the waters were quickly muddied. There are numerous references to it in newspapers and such from the early 1920s. The earliest and sanest recipe I’ve found for the drink dates back to 1922, when J.A. Wolfson, a Manila lawyer, included it in a little cocktails section he contributed to Elsie Gaches’s Good Cooking and Health in the Tropics, published in Manila that year:
Beyond that (as with nearly every early cocktail out of Asia) every recipe is different. The gin, pineapple, egg white and grenadine seem to be bedrock; vermouth, brandy, etc. etc. are all, let us say, grace notes.
I tinkered with this drink quite a bit early this year in preparation for a talk at Tokyo Bar Show on early Asian cocktails and the tastiest version I managed to come up with is this:
Shake well with ice:
1.5 oz/45 ml Plymouth gin
.75 oz/22 ml Martini & Rossi red vermouth
.5 oz/15 ml pineapple juice (canned is acceptable, if not ideal)
.25 oz (heavy)/8 ml lime juice
.5 oz/15 ml egg white
.25 oz (light)/5 ml grenadine
Strain into chilled cocktail glass.
Interesting stuff. I will have to try some of these out when I get back from traveling.
Some rambling conjecture:
I get the impression that this drink shows up roughly concurrent to a major expansion in pineapple cultivation in the Philippines and SE Asia. The Shanghai Club was populated by men of empire/trade/banking that might have held considerable interest in this crop, long associated by Europeans with wealth. (I would think that integrating some well-traveled cognac into the drink would only further bolster what the name of the drink implies.)
Back in the USA, much closer to a major source of pineapples—yet still distant, unless you lived in Florida or the Hawaiian possession—pineapples had already been around a while. However, outside of a few punches and esoteric recipes (William Schmidt, of course), I don’t see a lot of pineapple juice in drinks until the 1920s, which is also when we get the Mary Pickford.
Are these drinks the mainstreaming of pineapple juice in the American bar?
“pineapple became a symbol of wealth. They were initially used mainly for display at dinner parties, rather than being eaten, and were used again and again until they began to rot.” 