Bloody Mary
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jeffr ey m. po ga sh
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t h e o r i g i n s o f one of the world’s be-loved – a nd complex – cockt a i l s appear rooted in early 20th century Paris, possibly wending their way from fabled Harry’s New York bar across the Atlantic to the St. Regis’ King Cole bar. But success has a thousand fathers, and the Bloody Mary has at lea a few, including legendary bon vivant George Jessel and the St. Regis’ legendary bartender Fernand Petiot, whose rivalry animates this winsome chapter in the hiory of modern mixology. j e f f r e y m. p o g a s h i s a worldrenowned spirits speciali, collecor of cocktail recipes, books and ephemera relating to the bar and bottle. He has lecured and written extensively on the marvels of mixology, and is author of the book “How to Read a Wine Label.” p l e a s e l o o k f o r other Thornwillow Libretti by Louis Begley, Harry Belafonte, Jonathan Galassi, Lesley M. M. Blume, Peter Matthiessen and other celebrated artis and writers. thor n w i ll ow.com
Bloody Mary
jeffrey m. pogash
Bloody Mary
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jeffr ey m. pogash
thor n w i ll ow pr e s s 2011
To my dearest wife Jocelyne, for her constant support and encouragement, to my daughter Jessica and her husband Damon, my son Jonathan and his wife Megan and to the newest member of the family, our dear Benjamin. And to my dearest mother. jmp
copy r ight Š 2 0 1 1 by jeffr ey m. poga sh
bloody mary
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t ’s the co ckta i l w i th a k ick of spice, the world’s be-loved hangover tonic, the only mixed drink unabashedly red, and the only one brash enough to sport, on occasion, a raffish celery alk. Yet what do we know–really–about the Bloody Mary? So much and yet so little. This is a drink whose very definition is in dispute. Perhaps that’s not surprising, given that its one unqueionable ingredient– tomato juice –is ascribed to a fruit also known as a vegetable. (Botanically, the tomato is a fruit; culinarily, it’s a vegetable.) Early recipes simply call for vodka to be mixed with the juices of tomatoes and lemons. Worceershire sauce is a latter-day addition, so too the cayenne pepper, black pepper and salt. But both have valid hiories. So which is the true Bloody Mary? The name itself is in doubt. Intertwined with the Bloody Mary’s colorful pa are mentions of a suspiciously similar, vodka-based concoction, possibly its precursor, the aptly named Red Snapper: both so soothing and salubrious, so hearty and tomato-ey and red, so welcomed by
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too-hearty imbibers as the perfec hair of the dog. Each of the two drinks wends its way back to a likely place of origin, but in each, more than one legendary mixologi is credited for the creation. To confuse matters further, one possible progenitor moves from one of those locales to the other, apparently bringing his recipe with him toward the end of the cocktail-crazed days of Prohibition, and emerging in, of all places, the King Cole bar of the St. Regis Hotel. We may never know all there is to know about a drink so shrouded in the mis of alcoholic hiory. But there are paths to pursue, and characers to trace, and possibly an answer to the searing question that hangs over all: who was Bloody Mary?
• Remarkably, one man ands at the dawn of the cocktail culture that gave us the Bloody Mary: a mid-1 9 th century mixologi and author named Jerry Thomas, better known as “the professor,” who in his heyday at the Occidental Hotel in San Francisco earned a reported $100 a week tending bar, an aronomical sum that exceeded the salary
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of the sitting Vice President of the United States. Thomas dazzled drinkers on both coas with his Blue Blazer, a cocktail of his invention that involved lighting whiskey on fire and passing it from one mixing glass to another in an arc of blue flame. He toured Europe with a set of solid-silver bar tools, affeced ylish suits, kid gloves and a gold Parisian watch. Among the four bars he opened in New York was one below Barnum’s American Museum in New York City, on Broadway between 21 and 2 2 nd reets, a magnet for the curious and thiry of all classes (currently the site of a hardware ore). In 1 8 62 , he wrote a popular book that was to become a classic, The Bar-Tender’s Guide, with the subtitle, How to Mix Drinks or The Bon-Vivant’s Companion. After Thomas’ death in 1 8 8 5 , unfortunately haened by bad ock market bets and apoplexy, The New York Times ran an obituary that noted, “at one time [he was] better known to club men and men about town than any other bartender in this city.” It is with Thomas’ maerful work, the fir-ever “cocktail book,” that a truly organized cocktail culture developed, allowing bartenders throughout the United States to make the same drinks,
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using andardized recipes. Cobblers, punches, juleps, slings, cups, bitters and shrubs had exied prior to Thomas, but they were not written down for the world to see, until publication of The BarTender’s Guide. Strikingly, the Bloody Mary is nowhere to be found in this compendium. By the turn of the 2 0 th century, the late professor’s handy book, along with peace and prosperity, led to a “Golden Age” of cocktails, nowhere more evident than in Manhattan, where wealthy gentlemen and ladies convened to sip at the city’s top hotels, among them a trio of Aor-owned establishments: the Waldorf-Aoria (its two halves opened in 1 8 93 and 1 8 9 7, respecively), the Hotel Aor (19 04) and the St. Regis (also 19 04). Here a new generation, captains of the Indurial Age, hoed some of the mo lavish private parties ever seen in New York. New drinks were created daily, either for a well-known political or theatrical ar or an event that caught the public’s imagination, like a royal wedding or the opening of a popular Broadway show. The Martini emerged from this giddy period of madcap mixology, so too the Old Fashioned and the Manhattan. It was this conant creative experimentation with
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new cocktails, and the refinement of classic drinks, that ultimately led to a drink in a category all its own. Exacly when the fir Bloody Mary appeared, and where, are issues of controversy, perhaps never to be resolved. We do know this, however: it could not have appeared before 1 9 17, at lea as an easily concocable bar drink. We know this because every variant, in every venue, relies on tomato juice. And until 19 17, there was no tomato juice. Let us clarify: technically, pre-1 9 17, tomatoes exied, and an indurious fellow could have produced juice from them. But no one did. The earlie account of tomatoes being juiced traces to that fateful year, when a French chef came to Indiana to preside at the French Lick Springs Hotel, a popular resort and spa. Assigned to impress a group of powerful gues, the chef was agha one morning to learn that the hotel’s kitchen had run out of oranges. A spa breakfa without orange juice? Incroyable! With creativity born of desperation, the chef squeezed some tomatoes for their juice, added sugar as well as his own special sauce, and voila! The tomato juice cocktail was born.
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This was a spa drink: no alcohol marred its healthful effecs. As such, and only as such, the tomato juice cocktail caught on, fir in nearby Chicago, then around the country. Its popularity pushed several manufacurers to can it: two in Indiana, then the nationally-diributed Welch, and finally College Inn, which put its spiced tomato juice on sale in the autumn of 19 2 8 and did so well with it that by 1934 , Time magazine noted that the rise in tomato juice sales “has been the mo specacular of any food indury during the Depression,” with College Inn garnering more of the market than any rival. "Delicious, rich, pre-seasoned,” College Inn’s ads proclaimed. “Before or between meal treat. JUST RIGHT morning, noon, and night. Come on–Tae it !" Now all that was needed was the genius to combine tomato juice with vodka.
• Fernand Petiot may have been that man, at Harry’s New York Bar in Paris, circa 19 23 .
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“Harry’s” had opened originally as The New York Bar in 1 9 1 1 , at 5, rue Daunou, in the 2nd arrondissement, near the Place de L’Opera. It served American cocktails to Parisians infatuated, as always, with American culture. That the bar’s owner was an acclaimed American jockey, Todd Sloan, excited the Parisians almo to rapture: if there was anything they loved more than cocktails, it was horse races, and after an afternoon at Longchamp or Auteuil, they flocked to the one bar in Paris where grasshoppers and ingers could be savored with a bartender who really knew his horses. Petiot had joined The New York Bar’s aff in 19 1 6, at the age of 1 6, working fir as a kitchen boy. In those wartime days, he became an unofficial banker to lonely American soldiers, guarding their bankrolls at their reque and doling out drink money prudently enough that they had a little cash left to wire back home. The American doughboys called Petiot “Pete.” They also called him the Frog but, as he said years later in an interview, “the nickname was a friendly one.” By the time a Scotsman named Harry McElhone bought the place in 19 23 and changed the
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name to Harry’s New York Bar, Petiot was tending bar. He may have even replaced McElhone, who’d mixed drinks at The New York Bar before buying the joint. “Harry’s” became more popular than ever, a favorite haunt of Erne Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and the re of the po-World-War-I Lo Generation writers. Cocktails were key, but McElhone further enlivened the place with a musical cabaret. Three of his musicians – O. O. McIntyre, Roy Barton, and Leo Deslys– created the famous barfly song BUZ-BUZ, with these immortal lyrics: We buz buz buz and when we buz buz buz we buz buz buz because. When we buz buz buz there’s a reason for our buz buz buz buzzzzz. Petiot himself never claimed to have invented the Bloody Mary at Harry’s New York Bar, but in a 19 64 “Talk of the Town” profile in the New Yorker, he did say he often made a drink for thiry ex-pats that consied of tomato juice and vodka. He went so far as to say he had “initiated” the Bloody Mary. But he was careful to say he hadn’t called it that, nor at the time added any of the other ingredients that make the drink what
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it is today. Someone else, a careful reader might deduce, mu have come up with the name, if not also the added ingredients. Who? Petiot didn’t say. Might he have felt a lingering twinge of rivalry with the bartender around the corner and down the block? For ju down the Rue de la Paix, at the Ritz hotel in the ately Place Vendome, a legendary mixologi named Frank Meier created – so rumor has it–the cognac-based Sidecar cocktail, and may have helped elevate Petiot’s simple drink of tomato juice and vodka into the world-famous Bloody Mary. Inadvertently, Harry McElhone may have provided a clue to the Bloody Mary’s parentage with his Barflies and Cocktails, a book of recipes whimsically published in 19 27 for an imaginary association of international barflies. (Upon its republication in 2008 by Mud Puddle books, with a new introducion by David Wondrich, The New York Times noted its “whiskey-addled sense of zany humor.”) In it, McElhone credits Fernand Petiot as the third official member of the “Barflies,” ju below himself and O. O. McIntyre. But among his 300 recipes is not one for the Bloody Mary, nor does the author make even a passing mention
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