For a better Singapore Sling, the answer is clear (not red)

The Singapore Sling, as we know it, is a patently ridiculous cocktail: bright red, foamy, huge, garnished with fruit salad. It's the kind of drink played for comic irony by hack sitcom writers, perhaps ordered by the nerdy guy on a date or the demure little old lady suddenly cutting loose. If ever a character orders a Singapore Sling, a laugh track is sure to follow.

And yet, we're told the Singapore Sling was once a classic cocktail. We're told that the drink was invented sometime in the early 20th century by Ngiam Tong Boon at the Long Bar of the famed Raffles Hotel in Singapore. We're told it is the sort of libation that Somerset Maugham or Rudyard Kipling would have knocked back while pondering the decline of the British Empire. Charles Baker, in his famously purple-prosed "The Gentleman's Companion: Being an Exotic Drinking Book or Around the World with Jigger, Beaker and Flask," called the Raffles' Singapore Sling "a delicious, slow-acting, insidious thing."

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Much harder to swallow was Baker himself, as in his J.-Peterman-does-the-colonies rumination on the Singapore Sling: "When our soft-footed Malay boy brings the 4th Sling and finds us peering over the window sill at the cobra-handling snake charmers tootling their confounded flutes below, he murmurs 'jaga baik-baik Tuan' . . . or 'take care master' as it means in English."

Perhaps, as can happen in cocktails and in life, the impulse to make something exotic overtakes sense and good taste. In any case, insidious is certainly a fine word to describe the sad decline of the Singapore Sling.

"Strictly speaking, the Singapore Sling is no longer a sling at all," writes Ted Haigh in his 2004 book, "Vintage Spirits & Forgotten Cocktails." A sling, after all, is one of the oldest mixed drinks, really just a cold toddy: liquor, sugar, lemon, water. A sling is the cousin of the rickey and the Collins.

But consider the laundry list of ingredients in the contemporary Singapore Sling: gin, Cherry Heering, Benedictine, Cointreau, pineapple juice, lime juice, grenadine, bitters, soda water. Just buying the liqueurs to make it would cost you close to $100. And what you'd end up with is a toothachingly sweet concoction you'd have to serve in the biggest glass you have on hand. It's the kind of drink you'd accessorize with a tiny umbrella and a tiny sword, and probably also a big hunk of pineapple. Haigh insists that the Singapore Sling is now a "tropical-styled punch, and it is really the prototype of the future Tiki genre."

So what, then, was the original Singapore Sling?

Two of the earliest references to the drink, in Harry Craddock's "The Savoy Cocktail Book" (1930) and Patrick Gavin Duffy's "Official Mixers Manual" (1934), essentially call for a gin sling with the addition of cherry brandy. In fact, in both cases cherry brandy is the predominant spirit.

The Singapore Sling would continue to be listed as a simple drink of gin, cherry brandy, lemon juice and sometimes sugar in cocktail guides throughout the next few decades. By 1962, James Mayabb, in his then-popular book "International Cocktail Specialties, From Madison Avenue to Malaya," offered a Standard Singapore Sling that called for two ounces of gin, a half-ounce cherry brandy, a teaspoon of confectioners' sugar and the juice of half a lemon. Still no pineapple juice or grenadine in sight.