Murder in Piccadilly with a Clover Club

Murder in Piccadilly by Charles Kingston has all the ingredients of a Victorian melodrama - boy with expectations meets a dancer in a nightclub, he fancies her, she fancies his expectations, but the wealthy uncle refuses to stump up any cash (the boy doesn't seem inclined to make his own money). Then there are some shady clubland characters who have an agenda of their own regarding the money, so who wielded the knife that kills the wealthy uncle in the middle of a Piccadilly crowd?

I wonder if careful parents or guardians still worry about their sons coming home with a girl from the chorus line (I feel sure there are villages in the Home Counties where they very likely do)? And whilst this may be the gin talking, just thinking about this book leaves me torn between pulling it off the shelf for a good read, or hunting out my collection of Fred Astaire films - they're both much the same vintage, the book having been published in 1936.

I'd been eyeing up the clover club for a few days, on the one hand it sounded good, on the other it involves raw egg white - which puts me off. In the past whenever a cocktail involves egg white I've simply omitted it, it's there for texture rather than taste so the flavour isn't compromised if you do that. However, I really felt I should make the effort and keep the egg this time - turns out it's not revolting (please don't let me get salmonella on the back of this). The egg white emulsifiers into a frothy head, which is actually quite pretty, and combined with the bright pink colour, and the sherbety hit that the combination of lime and grenadine brings, along with the kick of gin - well it could have been a coctail designed for Lorelei in Anita Loos 'Gentleman Prefer Blondes'.

It's history predates prohibition, apparently it comes from Philadelphia's Clover Club, and it seems to have been around since the very early part of the twentieth century. I made the Savoy cocktail book version partly because it's about the same vintage as the book, so I can assume that anyone in the West end asking for a 'Clover Club' in the 1930's would have had something like this, and also because I prefer the way the recipes are broken down into simple proportions. In this case you take juice of half a lemon or 1 lime, the white of one egg, 1/3 of grenadine, and 2/3rds of gin. Shake well over ice and strain into a glass.

I've seen it suggested that you dry shake (without ice) for up to a minute to get the egg to foam then add ice and shake until cold. I didn't find this neccesary, but I did use a fresh egg (the whites are less runny). In this case the Grenadine adds the sweet element, but I've seen recipes which use raspberry syrup, or in the case of This version from the Martin Millers website, fresh raspberries and sugar syrup (though halving egg whites sounds like a pain). Add a sprig of mint to the glass and you have a Clover Leaf.