Imbibe! (39 page)

Generally, it’s been assumed that the Cocktail’s origins lie in the hard-liquoring South. But people have been investigating the origin of the Cocktail since the 1880s without turning up a single firm reference to its consumption in the region before the late 1820s. On the other hand, every single one of the drink’s early mentions fits neatly into the triangle between New York, Albany, and Boston (where they were still talking about “bitter sling” as late as 1836). If we follow the available evidence, then the Cocktail originated somewhere in the Hudson Valley, Connecticut, or western Massachusetts. At least, odds are it was a Northern drink, not a Southern one. But then again, the South had fewer newspapers and publishing houses to record people’s doings, so certainty once again eludes us. (We must discount anything contained in the extraordinarily detailed article on “The Origin of the Cocktail” published by the
Baltimore Sun
in 1908, which claims that it was invented in Maryland; the piece is one of H. L. Mencken’s insidious hoaxes.)

Given its distribution in 1803 to 1806, it’s also likely that the Cocktail had been known for some time. In fact, there may be a grain of truth in Cooper’s story in
The Spy
that it was invented during the Revolution at Four Corners, north of New York City on the Albany Post Road—which also, not coincidentally, runs through Hudson (where its first definition was published in 1806). As pioneer food writer Julian Street established in the 1940s, Cooper’s “Betty Flanagan,” whom he credits with the invention, was in fact based on one Catherine “Kitty” Hustler, who had kept an inn at Four Corners during the war. In 1809, she and her husband moved west and opened an inn at Lewiston, near Buffalo, where Cooper boarded while writing
The Spy.
(Lewiston still maintains a local tradition that it’s the birthplace of the Cocktail.)

This still doesn’t solve the conundrum of How the Cocktail Got Its Name. In truth, we may never be able to solve it; that’s not unusual for slang, and especially barroom slang. Why do we call it a “Martini”? People will argue that one until the last trumpet. In the absence of certainty, bullshit blooms. This b.s. can basically be shoveled into four different piles, or schools of thought. There’s the Imported Word school—“cocktail” is an Americanization of
coquetel,
supposedly an ancient Bordeaux drink;
coquetier
, French for “egg cup” (which it is claimed the drinks was originally served in); or “Xochitl,” who was either the Aztec goddess of Agave or a Mexican princess named after her (don’t ask). None of these have ever been supported by any contemporary evidence and are highly unlikely, and I shall trouble them no more.

Then there’s the Rooster Tail school, which derives the name either from the practice of garnishing the drink with a tail feather or from the way the interplay of the drink’s polychromatic ingredients reminds the observer of the interplay of colors on said avian’s tail. This last, a pretty theory, is completely sunk by the fact that Colonial-era liquors were white, tan, or brown; no fancy Technicolor liqueurs for the first Greatest Generation. So a Pigeon Tail, perhaps even a Chicken Tail, sure—but not a Cock Tail. As for the feather in the drink: In all the hundreds, even thousands of contemporary descriptions of mixed drinks I’ve read, not a single one has ever mentioned such a garnish. You’d think something like that would stick out, especially to the many fault-finding British travelers poking around the Republic in its early days, all poised to pounce on any eccentricity or rusticity of manner they found their American cousins practicing. But no, not until the first generation of Cocktail-tipplers was long dead did anyone mention the practice, and then it’s always set comfortably in the old days. It’s funny how we’re willing to kick common sense out the door when it comes to thinking about the past. How would you react if someone stuck a feather yoinked from a bird’s ass in your drink? Precisely.

The Tail Is Ale school, which holds that the name comes from “cock tailings,” the dregs in the bottom of an ale cask, or “cock ale,” ale mixed with a whole lot of God-knows-what and fed to fighting cocks, is not only without proof, but it works on the mistaken root assumption that the Cocktail was a sort of leftovers-hash kind of a drink, that you could put just about anything in it. You couldn’t, at least not until the 1890s (which helps us date that theory).

This leaves the Cut-Tail school. Again, there are two branches, both rooted in the prevalent eighteenth- and nineteenth-century practice of docking draft horses’ tails to prevent them getting caught in the harness. When cut short like this, they tend to stick up like a cock’s tail, which lead to such beasts being called “cock-tailed” horses (this usage is found as early as 1769). This has spawned the conjecture that (as the reader’s letter to the
Balance
implied) the Cocktail was so named because it would cock your tail up in the morning. Possible, but I prefer one based on a secondary usage of the term. Because thoroughbred horses were too “well-blooded” (i.e., valuable) to be used to pull things around, that job fell to ones that were of mixed breed. This led to mixed-breed horses in general being known as “cock-tails,” particularly in the sporting world, where it was applied to a racehorse that was part thoroughbred and part not. This usage doesn’t appear widely in print until the second or third decade of the nineteenth century, but it does turn up in John Lawrence’s popular
A Treatise on Horses
, published in London in 1796 and frequently reprinted (including excerpts in the
New York Magazine
in 1797), where he talks about the difficulty of controlling a “huge cock-tail half-bred.”

It’s safe to say the majority of American loungers, dram-drinkers, “Slingers” (as morning drinkers were called), “eleveners” (as late-morning drinkers were called), and other votaries of the bar would have been intimately acquainted with the ins and outs of racing and its slang, both domestic and imported: Early American newspapers carried an inordinate amount of British turf news. It would have been the work of a moment to transfer the nickname for a fast mixed-breed horse to a fast mixed-breed drink—“Make me a ‘cock-tail’ of Sling and Bitters, if you please” (think of how a “jazz,” a bit of San Francisco baseball slang meaning “vigor” was transferred to a new and conspicuously vigorous kind of music). I can’t say that this is the ultimate truth about the drink’s name, but it’s certainly the simplest explanation that fits the available evidence.

We may never know the true origin of the King of all Cocktails. It’s possible that a definitive answer lies entombed in the crumbling pages of an old newspaper somewhere, waiting for some lucky researcher to stumble upon it, but it’s equally possible that the first meeting of gin and vermouth was one of those momentous occasions that don’t seem all that momentous at the time; that everybody involved took their drinks, smacked their lips, and toddled on home without further remarking the occasion.

What early evidence we have is hazy and contradictory, and as always, that has allowed a number of theories to bloom. Discarding the purely fictional ones regarding Dr. Johnson and Mr. Boswell or eighteenth-century Squires journeying from Boston to Dartmouth, these generally fall into two groups, one centered around San Francisco (we can call these the “Martinez” theories) and the other around New York (the “Martine/Martini” theories); we’ll deal with them both in some detail.

Early on, the drink also appears under a couple of names that suggest another provenance entirely, but alas the “Martigny” Cocktail and the “Martineau” Cocktail both turn out to be dry wells for further research. Then there’s the claim advanced in the
Chicago Times-Herald
in 1900, that the “martinez” was invented by the Maverick financier Joe Leiter. The drink first appeared in print when he was sixteen, so that’s unlikely, but you never know. Ultimately, though, writing history is the art of balancing evidence and probability, and there are really only four theories that make it to round two of the judging.

THE CLAIM:
Jerry Thomas made the first drink with gin and vermouth when he was working in San Francisco in the early 1860s, for a traveler heading for the East Bay town of Martinez who asked for something new. To commemorate the occasion, Thomas named it the “Martinez” and published the recipe in his bartender’s guide.

 

ORIGINS OF THE CLAIM:
First fully stated in a Beefeater’s gin advertisement of the 1960s.

 

PRO:
Thomas certainly worked in San Francisco in the early 1860s and the Martinez does appear in an edition of his
Bar-Tenders Guide
. The first Cocktail book to mention the drink, O. H. Byron’s 1884
Modern Bartender’s Guide
, also calls it the Martinez. Vermouth and Old Tom gin were available in California in the 1860s.

 

CON:
The Martinez appears only in the 1887 edition of Thomas’s book, which of course came out two years after his death.

Furthermore, by the time the Professor died, the Martini was a fashionable and popular drink, yet not a single one of the numerous obituaries devoted to him mentions it. Nor did Thomas himself mention it to any of the many reporters who interviewed him or wrote about him, and he was not the type to hide his light under a bushel. If he had invented it, it is almost inconceivable that nobody at the time would have known it or mentioned it.

Finally, aside from in Byron’s, Thomas’s, and a few other bartender’s guides that plagiarized them, only two other contemporary mentions of the “Martinez” have been found, the one from 1900 claiming it for Joe Leiter and a 1914 menu for a banquet held by the Bartenders’ International League of Fort Wayne, Indiana. Against this, there are hundreds, even thousands of references to the Martini (or “Martina,” as they spelled it in Georgia; I love phonetic English).

 

VERDIC
T: Extremely unlikely.

THE CLAIM:
Julio Richelieu, who kept a bar on Ferry Street in Martinez invented the drink one day in the mid-1870s as change for a gold nugget a miner gave him in return for a bottle of Jesse Moore whiskey. The drink became popular when he moved his saloon to Market Street in San Francisco, across from the landmark Lotta Fountain.

 

ORIGINS OF THE CLAIM:
John “Toddy” Briones, Julio Richelieu’s brother-in-law, as cited in a 1965 article in the
Oakland Tribune
.

 

PRO:
Since the 1950s, Martinez has claimed the drink as a local product. Briones’s account is quite detailed, and some of the details are verifiable. There was a Richelieu Café in San Francisco, across from Lotta’s Fountain. In the late nineteenth century, Jesse Moore was a popular brand of whiskey on the West Coast. Gin and vermouth were available in California in the 1870s. There was a Gold Rush in California.

 

CON:
To begin with, the whole claim falls under a certain pall of suspicion when we learn, from a 1975 article in the
Oakland Tribune
, that it was first advanced publicly in 1950, in a banquet speech to various California civic leaders by the president of Martinez’s chamber of commerce, Claude Patrick Greety. Under those circumstances, a person will say anything. Although Greety stuck to his guns when later questioned about his story, a reporter who nosed about town in 1950 couldn’t find any evidence to corroborate the claim and only a couple of people who had even heard of it. “The city of Martinez,” as he wrote, “has ignored its role in history. There is no Spring Martini festival, complete with martini queen. There is no Old Original Martini house, of the kind New Orleans could prefabricate in a week’s time, complete with candles in bottles.” Given the American propensity to ballyhoo, this made him highly suspicious, and it does me as well.

In any case, if the town of Martinez, which continues to defend this theory to the death (and has even added the Martini festivals), has any actual evidence that Julio Richelieu lived there, or even existed at all, it has not made it public. What is certain is that he does not appear in California census records (and yes, I looked under “Jules” as well, and any other possible spelling). Furthermore, by the 1870s, the Gold Rush had essentially been over for a decade, and it is unlikely that anyone would have still been trying to buy things with gold nuggets or that there would still be a weigh-in scale on the bar, as Briones claimed. Of course, since Briones was ninety-one at the time he was interviewed, and his information was secondhand (he was born in 1874, which many cite as the year of Richelieu’s discovery), he may have been a bit confused.

Judging by the history of the Richelieu Café, that is the case. For one thing, it didn’t open until 1893 at the earliest, nine years after the drink first saw print. Furthermore, although the Richelieu went through three sets of proprietors until it closed in 1917, no Julio Richelieu was ever listed as being among them—indeed, he doesn’t appear in San Francisco city directories at all. “Richelieu” was a popular name for swank cafes at the time, and Café Richelieus appear all over the country, so there need not have been an actual person of that name on the premises to give it its name. And of the dozen-odd newspaper articles I’ve been able to find touching on the place, not one makes any mention of its Martinis—or Martinezes.

Finally, there is the possibility that the drink was in some way connected with the man who ran New York’s second-most expensive restaurant, the Maison Doree on Union Square, in the 1860s: His name, too, was Martinez.

 

Verdict:
Unlikely, and will remain so until Martinez documents its claim.

THE CLAIM:
The Martini was invented at New York’s Manhattan Club by a certain Judge Martine.