Monster in a Glass

Episode #41 takes us once again to New Orleans to sit down with a lesser known yet still classic cocktail, the Arnaud’s Special. In 1918 a French wine merchant, Arnaud Cazanave, moved to New Orleans to open a restaurant, aptly named Arnaud’s, and live the American dream.  Unfortunately, in the next year Prohibition threatened to end that dream.  With everything on the line, Arnaud basically ignored the law and continued serving alcohol at his establishment in secret rooms or in coffee cups.  He was eventually found out and imprisoned, but as a popular citizen of the city and a little of his famous entrepreneurial charm he had the charges dismissed.  At this point he acquired the unofficial title of Count.  He gives us a pretty comprehensive understanding of Mr. Cazanave and his role in building the French Quarter of New Orleans.  He was pretty much the king of the town, owning blocks of the city and transforming them into restaurants and lounges; he made the French Quarter what it is. Unfortunately, Jay couldn't find very much on this drink to indicate how special it is.  The popular Ambrosia Arnaud served at his restaurant got much more attention than this drink.  It’s a blend of scotch, dubonnet rouge, and orange bitters that makes a strong but pleasing combination

Kevin and Rachel enjoyed this drink; Bethany and myself were a little leery.  It's a scotch drink, so it's made for scotch drinkers.  Definitely a complex blend, but still relying heavily on the scotch as its base.

Occasionally we will find cocktails where you can see a clear linear progression or evolution. This ain’t one of those. In this episode, we tackle the messy and minty history of the Mint Julep. While there is a pretty standard recipe nowadays for a Mint Julep, its early iterations varied from state to state and bartender to bartender. It might be change from brandy to bourbon or add fruit, or lots of fruit, or in one case ice cream and rosebuds. There was also a whole bunch of different methods for how to handle the mint. Just don’t crush it, or it could end up in a duel.

You can’t discuss the Mint Julep without talking about the Kentucky Derby. We run through the origins of the Kentucky Derby from Meriwether Lewis Clark, Jr. bringing the derby idea to the Kentucky from Britain, to it becoming a gambling powerhouse, to the floppy hat event we see today.

Join us as we explore possibility of the Mint Julep’s originating as medicine to treat stomachaches in the 18th century, whether the addition of fruit to the Mint Julep was a northern slight against the south during the Civil War, the most expensive and largest Mint Julep in history, and how being a colonel in Kentucky is like being knighted.K

Oscar Wilde said, “When good Americans die, they go to Paris”.  Not long after, many Americans came to Europe and died in the first World War.  When the war ended many Americans stayed in Europe, often the more intellectual set of writers and artists including Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Dos Passos.  At the time they were discovering the art and culture of their ancestors and a way of life devoted to experiencing the world’s richness, the United States was collapsing in on itself in a schizophrenic panic over loose morals and Communist/anarchist immigrants.  No, the Americans, who had just survived the horrors of war, didn’t want to go home to that.  In this way, they also died as “good” Americans.  Instead, they stayed in Paris and created cocktails.

This episode features another Campari drink with one of the fancier cocktail names: The Boulevardier. This cocktail led us down in an interesting historical path, or maybe a boulevard as it were (Thank you, I will be here all night!). Common consensus points to this originating from one of our oft-mentioned bartenders, Harry McElhone from Harry's New York Bar in Paris. Harry's book Barflies and Cocktails (1927) connects the drink to Erskine Gwynne: journalist, novelist, American socialite with ties to the Vanderbilts, and temporary ex-pat in Paris who created a magazine, titled: Boulevardier.

Join us as we discuss the Boulevardier and its Paris origins. We also dive into the semi-strange life of Erskine Gwynne, and Harry McElhone's military past that may explain why so many of the Lost Generation ended up as denizens of his bar.

The recipe is:

The recipe goes essentially unchanged since the days that Jerry Thomas put the recipe in print in 1862. While many might attribute the recipe to Thomas because it shows up in his recipe book, we know that he, like many bartenders, were trying to fill out the books for publication. If you want to find the origin of the cocktail, you will have to look back before Thomas put the recipe down. Mentions of a Knickerbocker cocktail show up on the menu in Peter Bent Brigham’s oyster saloon in Boston, at the beginning of the 1840s. We know this thanks to 19th century temperance zealot, Charles Jewett writing down and publishing a list of all Brigham’s drinks as a way to expose and chastise the saloon owner. Unfortunately for Jewett, his attempt at striking a blow for the temperance movement proved to be a major advertisement for Brigham’s saloon. The saloon became so popular that Brigham made the menu larger. This list eventually got picked up in newspapers, and the saloon even spawned a poem featuring many of the drinks, including the Knickerbocker. In our search to find out just what a Knickerbocker is, we explore the history of the Dutch in New York, the evolution of what it meant to be a Knickerbocker through the 18th and 19th centuries, and how the Knickerbocker surname may not have actually existed in the Netherlands. None of this would have been possible without the Washington Irving satire A History of New York and the elaborate advertising hoax of Diedrich Knickerbocker. So grab your short pants and join us as we unravel this history of the Knickerbocker cocktail.