the drink the Royal Navy made of its antiscorbutic ration: gin and preserved lime cordial, stirred down with ice and strained cold into a small glass, with nothing fresh in it at all
Origin: England
From the journey of Lime.
The gimlet is the only drink in general circulation that began as a public health measure. Scurvy had killed British sailors in numbers no enemy came near, and although James Lind's shipboard trial of 1747 had shown citrus to cure it, it took until 1795 for the Royal Navy to issue lemon juice as a ration and until the Merchant Shipping Act of 1867 for the whole merchant fleet to be compelled to carry an antiscorbutic. At that point the supply was switched from Mediterranean lemons to lime juice pressed on the British plantations of Montserrat and Dominica, on the frankly commercial ground that it came from British soil; and in the same year Lauchlin Rose of Leith patented a way of preserving lime juice with sulphur dioxide rather than alcohol, producing the first commercial fruit cordial anywhere and, incidentally, the first bottle of Rose's Lime Juice. Officers who had gin, and a ration of lime cordial they were required to consume, drew the obvious conclusion. Whether the drink is named for the small hand tool, for a naval surgeon called Gimlette, or for nothing in particular is disputed and probably unanswerable. What is not disputed is that a gimlet is made with cordial rather than fresh juice: Raymond Chandler's Terry Lennox insisted on it in The Long Goodbye, and he was right.
The whole argument about this drink is whether the lime should be cordial or fresh. Historically and by its own logic it is cordial, since the preserved juice is the reason the drink exists, and cordial gives the soft, slightly confected, faintly bitter character that distinguishes a gimlet from a gin sour; those who prefer fresh juice should use 25 ml of lime juice and 15 ml of sugar syrup and expect a sharper, brighter, quite different drink. A home-made cordial made by steeping lime peels in sugar and adding the strained juice is much the best option of all and keeps a fortnight refrigerated. Navy-strength gin at 57 per cent stands up to the sweetness better than a standard 40 per cent bottling. The vodka gimlet is a mid-twentieth-century American variant and is not improved by the substitution.
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