http://www.esquire.com/drinks/ramos-fizz-drink-recipe
Ramos Fizz
Ingredients
2 ounces London dry gin
1 ounce heavy cream
1 egg whites
1/2 ounce lemon juice
1/2 ounce lime juice
2 teaspoons superfine sugar
2 to 3 drops orange flower water
Instructions
Combine in a chilled cocktail shaker with plenty of cracked ice, then shake viciously for at least one minute -- preferably two -- and strain into a chilled Collins glass. Top up with cold seltzer or club soda.
Note: Don't bother substituting orange juice or orange liqueur or orange anything else for the orange flower water; it has a fragrance unrelated to that of the fruit. Also, do not use half-and-half in place of the cream. As for the gin, some old recipes call for Old Tom gin. In this case, reduce the amount of sugar.
The Wondrich Take
The Ramos Fizz, alias the New Orleans Fizz or the Gin Fizz, breaks all the rules. It's fussy, dated, takes a long time to make and uses too many ingredients, one quite hard to find. It's not an everyday drink, yet you can't mix it up in big batches for company (nor should you order one in a bar). You've got to make these babies yourself, one or two at a time. So why bother?
If the Sidecar is jazz, the Ramos Fizz is ragtime. Sure, it's from New Orleans -- cradle of jazz and all that -- but it harks back to 1888, two years before Jelly Roll Morton was born and thirteen years before the great Louis Armstrong joined us. Like ragtime, Henry C. Ramos's creation is a matter of poise, of balance, of delicacy. This isn't a drink to throw together from whatever you've got lying around; every part of the formula is crucial. The egg white gives it body, the cream lends smoothness, and the citrus provides its cool. The sugar tames the citrus, the gin does what gin does, and the seltzer wakes the whole thing up. As for the orange flower water -- that's for mystery.
To sip a Ramos Fizz on a hot day is to step into a sepia-toned world peopled with slim, brown-eyed beauties who smell of magnolias and freshly laundered linen, and tall, mustachioed gentlemen who never seem to work and will kill you if you ask them why.
