Cacktales: the stories behind the world's classic drinks

Cheers, Oct, 2005 by Gary Regan

june 5th, 2005: I'm sitting in an aisle seat in the middle row of a plane destined for Paris. Two seats away from me is Toby Cecchini, a guy I called arrogant and over-educated in print. He's also the bartender who invented the Cosmopolitan, though it can be tough to get him to admit it. "Why do you deny creating what must be the most popular drink in the country?" I asked him this a few days later as we rolled through the French countryside discovering the joys of Cognac. He had a good answer. Not surprising. He's over-educated.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Cecchini's book, "Cosmopolitan: A Bartender's Life," details how the Cosmo was created. Mesa, a woman who tended bar with Toby at Manhattan's Odeon in 1987, introduced him to a drink called the Cosmopolitan that was made with vodka, Rose's lime juice, and grenadine, and although he didn't like the drink, he did like the way it looked, so he set to work to improve it. His version, made with Absolut Citron, Cointreau, fresh lime juice, and cranberry juice, soon became a hit at Odeon, and other bars started to make the drink too. A star was born. Why doesn't this arrogant soul admit to inventing it? "Nobody believed me when I lay claim to it," he told me, "so I took to denying it instead." Not a bad ploy.

It's tough, and often impossible, to pin down the moment of birth for most of the classic drinks. The names of their creators are often lost to history, so we tend to rely on folklore rather than fact, in order to get a handle on where various drinks got their start. But some fanciful tales turn out to be based on recorded history, so it's not good to dismiss them out of hand.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Take the Negroni, for example. This delicious mixture of Campari, sweet vermouth and gin is often touted as being the brainchild of a certain Count Negroni, a tale that, after researching many old cocktail books, I dismissed as being yet another marketing gimmick. A friend of mine recently proved me wrong, though.

David Wondrich, author of "Killer Cocktails"--a great book that's packed with seriously delicious recipes, and lots of attitude, to boot--discovered the story of the birth of the Negroni in an Italian book. It's called "Sulle tracche del Conte: la vera stroria del cocktail 'Negroni,'" by Lucca Picchi, head bartender at Caffe Rivoire in Florence, Italy. Turns out, according to Picchi, there actually was an Italian count, Camillo Negroni by name, and he was the guy who took the soda out of the Americano--made with Campari, sweet vermouth, and club soda--and added gin to the mixture to give it more of a kick. The bar he frequented in Florence circa 1920 was called Bar Casoni, and the bartender there went by the name of Fosco Scarselli. Well done, Mr. Wondrich. (I told you it wouldn't be long before I stole this story.)

Who'll Take Manhattan?

The birth of the Manhattan is lost to history. Recipes for the drink start appearing in cocktail books in the 1880s, but nary a word is printed about its origin. Some people say that it was created at the Manhattan Club, a classy place that used to stand opposite the site on which the Empire State Building now sits, and in "Straight Up or On the Rocks," author William Grimes writes that the club's official history states as much, but gives no other details save for a recipe that calls for equal amounts of whiskey and vermouth with some orange bitters.

The story I find most plausible about the creation of the Manhattan, though, lies within the pages of a book called "Valentine's Manual: 1923," wherein William F. Mulhall, a bartender who plied his trade at New York's Hoffman House in the 1880s, wrote this: "The Manhattan cocktail was invented by a man named Black who kept a place ten doors below Houston Street on Broadway in the [eighteen] sixties--probably the most famous drink in the world in its time." In its time? The darned thing is still going real strong in 2005, nearly 150 years after "its time" in the 1860s. Why do I believe this story? It's the only one I've heard that mentions a person, a place, and a period of time that makes sense. Plus a bartender wrote the story and we all know that bartenders never lie ...

The story of the creation of the Dry Gin Martini must always follow the tale of the Manhattan since, as far as I'm concerned, the Martini started out as a variation on the Manhattan. It goes like this: Grimes states--and I never argue with Grimes--that a drink called The Martinez is detailed in an 1884 cocktail book by someone named O.H. Byron, "who described the drink as a Manhattan in which gin is substituted for whiskey." So now we have a drink named the Martinez that's made with gin, sweet vermouth, and orange bitters.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In the early 1900s the Dry Martinez, calling for dry vermouth instead of sweet, starts appearing in various cocktail books, and in 1906 the drink mysteriously changes its name to the Dry Martini in a book by Louis Muckensturm titled "Louis' Mixed Drinks with Hints for the Care and Service of Wines." Why did the name change? Hold on to your hat, this might be hard to take.