This Wonderful Little Cocktail/Microaggression Against Catholics

You might know “hanky panky” as some kind of fuddy-duddy phrase last heard on Benny Hill or something starring Richard Dawson, god rest his soul. Well, it’s also a cocktail. (Interestingly, there’s a short link between “hanky panky” and some old-school anti-Catholic sentiment in England; in essence it goes some shit in Latin mass to “hocus pocus” to “hanky panky.”)

The apocryphal story goes that some old British actor, looking for a cocktail with some “punch,” whatever that means, found this and called it “the real hanky-panky,” which isn’t really connected at all to the original trickeration connotation or the modern sexcentric meaning. I guess it’s like calling something “the shit,” or even [trying to come up with a phrase like “the shit” but being too inartful in googling it then getting stuck in an eddy of Urban Dictionary so we’ll leave this as a truly inartful placeholder until something comes to mind].

So anyway, the Hanky Panky, which I discovered in the PDT book (page 138) but which is jacked from Harry Craddock’s The Savoy Cocktail Book, goes like this: 8 parts gin, 6 parts sweet vermouth and 1 part Fernet-Branca. I wish I could remember what it tasted like but that was too long ago now.