No One Can Agree On The Correct Way To Make A Shirley Temple
At a table of adults drinking cocktails, a kid can order a Shirley Temple and feel like one of the grownups. Perhaps the most famous mocktail of all time, the Shirley Temple is quick to make and, as you likely already know, very easy to drink.
Sharing a name with one of the most famous child actors of all time, the Shirley Temple drink is similarly perky, bubbly, and sweet. That being said, the history (and proper mixing) of the drink is actually still a hotly contested debate.
What Is The Origin Of The Shirley Temple?
Many people still debate who actually coined the name of the drink. Some speculate it could be Chasen’s or the Brown Derby in Hollywood, or Honolulu’s The Royal Hawaiian, but most people agree on one thing: The Shirley Temple (drink) was created to placate a whining Shirley Temple (the actress), who was allegedly jealous of her parent’s Old Fashioneds because their cocktails were garnished with a plump maraschino cherry.
To save the day, the mystery bartender in question made a non-alcoholic version of the cocktail for Temple, making sure to garnish the drink with a maraschino cherry. And the rest is history.
What Goes In a Shirley Temple?
This is where things get more complicated. As I’ve found, the only contents of a Shirley Temple that are non-negotiable across the board are… the maraschino cherry and grenadine, a ruby red, sweet cocktail syrup.
Everything else, though? Totally up for debate!
The very first Shirley Temple (and what folks think of the most classic Shirley Temple) uses ginger ale as the base, along with grenadine and a maraschino cherry.
If you, like me, always thought the drink was made with Sprite…well, Sprite wasn’t even released until 1961, and the Shirley Temple was invented way back in the 1930s. Oops! That being said, there were plenty of popular lemon-lime sodas (like 7-Up) around in the 30s, so it very well could have been a combo back then, in addition to the original ginger ale creation.
That being said, when you visit restaurants or bars now, you’ll likely be served a Shirley T with Sprite or 7-Up. It will have a bit less of a bite than a ginger ale Shirley Temple, but is thought to have become widely-used if a drink gun ran out of ginger ale, and the bartender needed an alternative in a pinch.
Many purist bartenders claim that ginger ale, the OG mixer, is the end-all-be-all for Shirley Temples. While others, stuck on the nostalgia factor of a Sprite-based Shirley Temple, are team Sprite.
It can depend on the region, too. Some Canadian bartenders apparently always use ginger ale, and even add a splash of orange juice. Others go rogue and use Coke as the base to make an off-shoot of another mocktail called a Roy Rogers. Midwesterners are seemingly majorly Team Sprite, while East Coasters are often riding the Ginger Ale train.
No matter how you mix it, here’s how we make a Shirley Temple (spoiler: our recipe uses Sprite). Want to sit at the grownups' table? Spike it with vodka to make a boozy Dirty Shirley cocktail. Or make a Shirley Temple float that leans more classic with ginger ale but also very Delish (with the addition of a scoop of ice cream).
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