Didn’t you hear? The ’90s are making a comeback. Yeah, that’s right. Dust off your low-rider jeans, pull out your Furbies and stock up on cranberry juice, we’re drinking Cosmopolitans.
Reaching peak popularity in New York and London during the 1990s, this pretty little vodka drink is tasty and often underrated. A balanced mix of lime juice, cranberry juice, Cointreau and vodka, it’s bright, light and the perfect pre-dinner cocktail. And let’s be honest, who doesn’t like a pink drink?
It’s unclear where and when the Cosmopolitan cocktail was first shaken, but the earliest mention of a cocktail like the modern Cosmo was in the 1934 book, Pioneers of Mixing at Elite Bars. It featured five cocktails called the Cosmopolitan (with slight variations), four of them with the Cosmopolitan’s famously pink hue.
Cheryl Charming (Miss Charming) in her 2018 book The Cocktail Companion attributes the rise of the Cosmopolitan to two separate people, 14 years apart: Neal Murray in 1975 and Cheryl Cook in 1989. But the true champion of the Cosmopolitan cocktail was Carrie Bradshaw in the hit ‘90s TV show Sex and the City. That was then, but the Cosmo is having a major comeback, so it’s time to perfect it at home with this tried-and-tested recipe.
