French 75 is a cocktail made from gin, champagne, lemon juice, and sugar. It is also called a 75 cocktail, or in French simply a ('seventy five').
The drink was popular during World War I in a brandy-based form. Barman Harry MacElhone said it was named after a French light field gun of calibre.
The drink was first recorded as the "75" in Harry's ABC of Mixing Cocktails, 1922 edition, by Harry MacElhone, and in the same year in Robert Vermeire's Cocktails: How to Mix Them, which credits the drink to MacElhone. However, the recipes differed from the current form – MacElhone's version consisted of Calvados, gin, grenadine, and absinthe, while Vermeire added lemon juice. This recipe was republished with the name "French 75" in The Savoy Cocktail Book (1930), which helped popularize the drink. Some later cocktail books use cognac instead of gin, such as The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks by David A. Embury.
The French 75 was popularized in America at the Stork Club in New York. It appears in the movie Casablanca (1942) and is referenced twice in the John Wayne films A Man Betrayed (1941) and Jet Pilot (1957). In 2016, it appears in the ITV series Mr. Selfridge, which is set in London in the 1910s and 1920s.
A fanciful alternative story of the invention of the French 75 was related by humorist Jean Shepherd on November 17, 1969, wherein he credits Gervais Raoul Lufbery as the inventor. The mixture, as related by Shepherd, is champagne and cognac on ice with perhaps a twist of lemon. This version is not credible, given the documented earlier version.
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File:Canon de 75 front.jpg|The Canon de 75 modèle 1897 is the source of the name of the cocktail.
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Similar drinks
The recipe of the French 75 is very similar to one of the most popular cocktails, the Tom Collins, with champagne replacing carbonated water. According to the recipe in Harry MacElhone's book Harry's ABC of Mixing Cocktails, a French 75 is supposed to be served in a highball glass. The highball glass, which the Tom Collins cocktail is also served in, supports the theory of the French 75 being a variation of the Tom Collins.
A "French 125" replaces the gin with cognac. A "French 95" replaces the gin with bourbon.
In culture
- In Paul Thomas Anderson's black comedy One Battle After Another, the name "French 75" refers to a left-wing revolutionary group that plays a central role in the plot.