Recipes: 5 Takes on the Singapore Sling

The Many Faces of the Unknowable Tropical Drink.

The DIY Singapore Sling set-up at Singlish.

In the mid-to-late 20th century, certain famous cocktails were not actual recipes. They were vibes.

Most of these vague liquid propositions were tropical or tiki in nature. You could order a Zombie or Mai Tai anywhere in the world, but if you thought that meant you were going to get a certain, specific thing, you were very much mistaken. All you could be sure of was there’d be rum and fruit juice in your glass and, in the case of the Zombie, that the drink would be a strong one. This was partly because the originators of tiki drinks tended to keep their recipes a secret, forcing competitors to guess at the make-up of a popular cocktail. (Although the laziness, sloppiness and cheapness of some of the bars making the drinks must also be taken into account.)

The Singapore Sling was one of these moving targets. But, unlike the Mai Tai and Zombie—which have been largely restored to authenticity in the past two decades—it has remained mired in a bog of uncertainty. Cocktail historians and bartenders have been unable to crack the mystery of its original, one and true formula. I remember cocktail mavens in the aughts debating the Singapore Sling in online chatrooms, trying to get to the bottom of the story, but to no avail. All these years later, the Singapore Sling remains a drink of a thousand faces.

And yet, the Singapore Sling never quite fades away. The reason for this is simple: whatever the recipe, it tends to taste pretty good. It’s difficult to screw up a mixture of gin, cherry brandy and fruit juices—the three constants in any version of the drink. As Jeff Simon, the longtime arts editor for the Buffalo News, put it in 1988 when reviewing the Tom Cruise film Cocktail, “it’s a Singapore Sling of a movie—dumb, sweet, and so eager to please it’s bound to be popular with those who have a dramatic sweet tooth.”