Darya Munro is a woman of great passion, and she proclaims nothing but contempt for the ladies of the British colony in Borneo. "They're fools. They're the most commonplace, the most narrow-minded, the most conventional people it has ever been my misfortune to live amongst," she tells a startled young Neil MacAdam in the Somerset Maugham story that bears his name. "They're interested in nothing. If you speak of the body they think you improper, and if you speak of the soul they think you priggish."

Mrs. Munro has taken an interest in Neil -- and not exactly in his soul. Recognizing him as a high-minded youth, Darya makes a great show of her disdain for the expat dullards and their insufficient interest in art and literature: "I want them to be interested in mankind. I want them to attach more importance to the things of the spirit than to a gin pahit or a curry tiffin."

Gin Pahit (aka Pink Gin)

2 oz gin
4 or 5 dashes Angostura bitters

  • Dash the bitters into a tumbler, and twirl the glass around to coat the inside with the bitters. Drip out the excess. Add gin and a little water or seltzer. The British fashion is to drink it without ice. That way madness lies.

Gin and (Orange) Bitters

2 oz gin
4 or 5 dashes orange bitters

  • Shake with ice and strain into a Martini glass. Lemon twist.

Tiffin is Anglo-Indian lingo for lunch; the term "pahit" is Malay for "bitter." Thus Gin and Bitters -- a drink favored first by the British navy, and then taken up by Brits all over the far-flung empire -- was known in the Malay Archipelago as Gin Pahit. In just about every other British outpost, it was known by a description of its color rather than its ingredients: Pink Gin.

To say that Gin and Bitters is "pink" is something of an exaggeration. The color comes from the few dashes of red-brown Angostura mixed with the gin. The result is a pale pinkish-khaki hue. Like the quinine tonic water in the Gin and Tonic, the Angostura bitters had a medicinal purpose -- warding off malarial fevers and settling cranky guts. Charles H. Baker Jr., in his "The Gentleman's Companion: An Exotic Drinking Book," says to make a Gin Pahit with four or five dashes of bitters, but allows that "a lot of old India hands whose stomachs are lax find that a lot more Angostura than that is in order to stimulate appetite."

Whether Gin Pahit or Pink Gin, the drink marked one as a navy man or a colonial. In the Maugham story "P. & O.," a rubber farmer named Gallagher is returning to Galway after 25 years working a Malay plantation. Shipboard, he enjoys a drink with a woman he has just met: "the Irishman ordered a dry Martini for her and a gin pahit for himself. He had lived too long in the East to drink anything else." When James Bond is passing himself off as an officious personal assistant to Scaramanga in the Ian Fleming novel "The Man With the Golden Gun," he out-Britishes himself: "Some pink gin," he tells a barman. "Plenty of bitters."

Gin Pahit and Pink Gin had a rosy reputation as long as the Brits were riding high. But once the sun began to set on the empire, and the recriminations began in earnest, the drink took more than its share of the blame for British setbacks. In the months after Pearl Harbor, when "MacArthur's Magnificents" were still holding out on the Bataan Peninsula, newspaper columnist Willis Thornton warned that heroism wouldn't be enough to win the war. It would take a seriousness of undistracted purpose: "It is too late now to bemoan the gin-pahit and polo mind that lost Malaya despite the individual heroism of the men who fought in vain," Thornton wrote.

And goodness knows the Brits themselves associated gin and bitters with a fatalism bordering on defeatism: "Life always repeated the same pattern," muses Scobie in Graham Greene's "The Heart of the Matter." "There was always, sooner or later, bad news that had to be broken, comforting lies to be uttered, pink gins to be consumed to keep misery away." Describing Scobie's efforts to keep misery at bay, Greene gives us the proper way to make a British colonial Gin and Bitters. Scobie "grinned miserably at his glass, twisting it round and round to let the angostura cling along the curve." And yes, I do believe that for Greene the miserable grin was an essential part of the drink's preparation. Drip the excess bitters out and add gin and some water or seltzer. Unless you are committed to an authenticity bordering on madness, go ahead and add some ice as well.

Come the 1970s, English novelist Kingsley Amis declared that "The Pink Gin is a rather d&eacute;mod&eacute; drink." It had become a mark, not of far-flung travels, but of fogeydom. In an interview with the New York Times in 1977, Monty Python stalwart Michael Palin described how his comedy differed from the old British stereotypes: "I'm not your elegant No&euml;l Coward figure, sipping pink gin and trotting out clever epithets." Amis maintained that Pink Gin was "well worth reviving." Alas, it never did see a revival, and now a Gin Pahit is about as rare as a clever Cowardian epithet.

That's a shame, because it is an exceedingly elegant drink. The complicated herbal flavors in the bitters are not unlike the herbal undertones in vermouth. That means a Gin and Bitters bears a close familial resemblance to a Dry Martini.

The resemblance is even more pronounced if, instead of Angostura, one uses orange bitters. In the 1930s it was still common to make a Dry Martini with gin, French vermouth and orange bitters. Take away the vermouth and you have a profoundly dessicated Martini that also happens to be a variety of Gin Pahit. That's how I like to make my Gin Pahit, by tossing several dashes of orange bitters into a shaker with gin and ice, straining the cocktail into a Martini glass and topping it with a lemon twist.

Finding orange bitters, however, can be something of an ordeal. Ask your local liquor store to track down Fee Bros. orange bitters or Gary Regan's brand. If they look at you funny, assure them that no self-respecting package store would dream of being without orange bitters. If that doesn't work, you can order Regan's orange bitters from the Buffalo Trace distillery Web site, www.buffalotrace.com.

Maugham's Darya Munro, by the way, does finally make a brazen play for the mortified MacAdam. He runs from her advances deep into the jungle -- and she follows. If MacAdam won't sleep with her, Darya threatens, she'll tell her husband that he raped her. Neil flees (with the compass) leaving her lost, and doomed to be a tiger's tiffin. At which point I suspect even Darya would have welcomed a Gin Pahit.

Write to Eric Felten at eric.felten@wsj.com