The White Lady cocktail, the English legend and Boieldieu's opera after Walter Scott

There is a classic cocktail made from gin, orange liqueur and lemon juice: the White Lady. Its name is usually linked to Ella Fitzgerald, who sang about a white lady. But the cocktail itself was devised in London when Ella was still an infant. And in England the image of the white lady had existed long before that, for instance in the old legend of a mystical lady, dressed all in white, who may be met in the wilds. The medieval tale connects the appearance of a white lady before a house with the impending death of one of its inhabitants.

In culture at large, however, a whole legendary canon has been built up around the White Lady. She is mentioned, for example, in the novels of Walter Scott; I do not remember exactly, but I think it is Waverley and The Abbot or The Monastery. It was Scott's interpretation of the lady in white, as if stepped down from the lines of an ancient legend, that inspired the composer Boieldieu and the librettist Scribe to create, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the opera La dame blanche (“The White Lady”), which could well have served as the very reference point for the creation of that cocktail.