Bloody Heaven
A
popular line around our office is to refer to a cigar as a good
“breakfast smoke." That means it's an admirable cigar, but
mild-bodied—the kind of thing you light to wake up your palate in the
morning. Every New Year's I'm reminded of what the best "breakfast
drink" is. You can toast with whatever you want to when the ball drops
the night before, but in the harsh light of dawn it has to be the Bloody
Mary.
When
restoration after an evening of overdoing is in order, there is but one
drink to turn to: this colorful highball that combines vitamins (tomato
juice), stimulants (hot spices) and the fabled hair of the dog (vodka).
But, while it is the quintessential “breakfast drink,” I wouldn’t
exactly refer to it as mild-bodied, given its composition.
Predictably,
as soon as first light stirred the crust from my eyes in 2012, I
started the year with a Bloody Mary. I advise always keeping the
ingredients on hand as you never know when a bout of the Episcopal flu
might set in. In fact, in the tassel-loafer panhandle of Connecticut,
from which I hail, you'd have a riot if any of those ingredients were in
short supply on a New Year's morning-after—or for that matter at any
early-morning engagement—such as an orgy of Christmas-present unwrapping
(if you happen to be visited with children) or a brunch (if you happen
to be metrosexual)—at which one needs to be civil even while feeling
cranky and creaky.
(However, if you are
caught in short supply, certain substitutions can be made as emergency
contingencies. If you have no tomato juice, try ketchup. It allows you
to add more vodka for the purpose of dilution. If you’re out of vodka,
use gin. If your spice cupboard is bare, repair to a bar that opens
early.)
Anyway,
as the weather on New Year’s Day was still rather warm where I
live—it’s bitterly cold now—I decided to join that breakfast drink with a
breakfast lancero (a Macanudo Café Portofino I’d cadged from the
tasting for the December issue). I sat out on my deck and not only drank
a Bloody Mary, but read about the drink as well. It was my first chance
to peruse Jeffrey Pogash’s delightful treatise Bloody Mary,
which was recently published through the Thornhill Press Libretto
series. It’s a testament to both the drink and the book of the same name
that I had any will to read at all that morning.
Pogash,
who until recently represented Belvadere vodka among other Moët
Hennessy products, digs deep into the controversy of who actually
invented the Bloody Mary. While the Bloody is one of the most modern of
our classic cocktails—as Pogash points out tomato juice wasn’t even
commercially available until 1917—its roots are just as murky as the
great drinks born much earlier in the nineteenth century. That’s the way
cocktail heritage is: everyone’s too busy drinking when a new one gets
invented to write down the specifics.
So
the author laboriously traced recipes through his voluminous personal
library of rare cocktails as well as researching periodicals and other
writings of the day. The Bloody Mary seems to have sprung not quite
whole (spices were added later) from the decade of the 1920s. The large
question is who first made it. The major claimants are two. One is
unremarkable. The other is rather odd.
That
Fernand Petiot, who ran the King Cole Bar in New York’s St. Regis
Hotel, would have formulated the drink should strike no one as
surprising. What is something of a poser is that it might have been
Georgie Jessel, a former vaudevillian and self-styled “Toastmaster
General,” who first mixed one up. At least that’s what he claimed in a
series of magazine ads for Smirnoff that ran in the 1950s a few decades
after the Bloody Mary was invented. What the entertainer, who happened
to be a rabid anti-Communist, never explained is why he championed a
drink that is both red and filled with Russian spirit.
You’ll
have to pick up the book to get closer to the bottom of this laudable
drink, but the point is that the Bloody Mary helped me to get a head
start on my New Year’s resolution to read more, even if I’m already
behind on my other one: to drink in moderation.