What's in an albumen?

While I was at the library in Winston-Salem surfing voraciously from magazine to magazine (all for free, mwahaha), I came across a recipe for the classic cocktail "White Lady" in Bon Apetit. In said recipe, there was a tablespoon of egg white along with the more expected ingredients of gin and lemon juice. Eggwhite? In a cocktail? Eww! But the recipe insisted that the white was not optional and added a nice smoothness to the drink.

Curious, I came home to experiment. I had no lemon juice, so I cannot replicate the recipe. Instead, I made my usual cranberry juice and gin with a twist of lime, but added a smidge of egg white and shaked the resultant mixture with ice. The resultant cocktail was noticably less alcoholic-tasting. I can still smell the gin strongly, but it was much less harsh on my tongue. There was not nearly enough eggwhite in the drink to make it thicker, but perhaps it just gave the drink a little bit of body that resulted in the noticable smoothness...

Give it a try and tell me what you think. Happy experimenting.