The Times described the "original recipe" as a mixture of two measures of gin with one of cherry brandy and one each of orange, pineapple, and lime juice.

[9] By the 1980s, in countries such as the United States, the Singapore sling was often little more than gin, bottled sour mix, and grenadine, a mixture showing very little relationship to the recipe used elsewhere under the same name.

By that time both in the Raffles Hotel and Hong Kong, and generally in the UK, the recipe had remained standardised as gin and cherry brandy (in various ratios between 2:1 and 1:2).

[10] The "Singapore sling" has been documented as early as 1930 as a recipe in the Savoy Cocktail Book: Ingredients one-quarter lemon juice, one-quarter dry gin, one-half cherry brandy: "Shake well and strain into medium-sized glass, and fill with soda water.

Also documented in The Sainsbury Book of Cocktails & Party Drinks is the Straits sling (also a Raffles Hotel invention named after the nearby Singapore Strait), which was even stronger, but also added Bénédictine, Angostura bitters, and orange bitters, but its garnish was both lemon and orange slices and it did not have the glacé cherry.