White Lady

Gin, Cointreau, and fresh lemon — MacElhone's 1920s Harry's Bar Paris creation, the Sidecar's exact structure with London Dry gin replacing cognac.

The White Lady was created by Harry MacElhone in two stages across his career. The first version — White Crème de Menthe, Cointreau, and lemon juice — was created around 1919 at Ciro's Club in London, where MacElhone was working before establishing his own bar. The recipe was revised and definitively fixed in its current form — gin, Cointreau, and fresh lemon juice — at Harry's New York Bar on Rue Daunou in Paris in the 1920s, where MacElhone had returned as owner after purchasing the bar from its original proprietor in 1923. The reformulated White Lady replaced the crème de menthe with gin, transforming it from a Sidecar-adjacent liqueur drink into a spirit-forward citrus cocktail in the Sidecar's gin-based counterpart. Harry Craddock published this gin version in The Savoy Cocktail Book (1930). The drink's structural relationship to the Sidecar is exact and intentional: both use an orange liqueur and fresh lemon juice alongside a base spirit, the White Lady substituting London Dry gin for the Sidecar's cognac. Egg white is sometimes added to produce a silky foam, though this is not universal across historical recipes. The drink was a staple of the London and Paris cocktail bars of the inter-war period and remains a recognized Contemporary Classic.