Tuxedo

Old Tom gin, vermouth, maraschino, and orange bitters — from Johnson's 1900 Bartenders' Manual, named for the enclave that gave English the word tuxedo.

The Tuxedo Cocktail belongs to the late Victorian tradition of gin-vermouth stirred drinks that preceded the Martini family's consolidation, combining Old Tom gin with dry vermouth, maraschino liqueur, and orange bitters in a formula that appears in Harry Johnson's Bartenders' Manual, published in a revised edition in 1900. The cocktail takes its name from Tuxedo Park, the exclusive private residential enclave established by tobacco heir Pierre Lorillard IV in the Orange County highlands of New York in the 1880s. In 1886, Lorillard's son Pierre Lorillard V introduced a short black evening jacket — replacing the traditional black tailcoat — at the Tuxedo Park Country Club's autumn ball, a fashion statement so influential among the American wealthy that the jacket style became permanently associated with the community's name, producing the word tuxedo for what the British called a dinner jacket. The cocktail's association with this enclave positioned it as a drink of refined, fashionable elegance. Old Tom gin, the lightly sweetened gin style that was the dominant British and American gin before London Dry's commercial ascent in the 1890s, gives the Tuxedo a rounder, less austere character than a London Dry-based preparation would produce, complementing the maraschino's cherry-almond sweetness in a way that the drier London Dry profile would not.