The Tale of Two Derbies (Brown Ones)

A Brown Derby made with either bourbon
or rum. Can you guess which?

When people write about the Brown Derby cocktail, they tend to invoke the glitz and glamour of showbiz, presenting it as “a taste of the Golden Age of Hollywood.” After all, according to the widely accepted history of the drink, it was created in Hollywood during the 1930s, the era of Greta Garbo and Douglas Fairbanks and Busby Berkeley extravaganzas. The Brown Derby looks the part, too—a blend of bourbon, grapefruit and honey with a decidedly golden hue.

There are actually two competing origin stories. The first is that it was the eponymous signature cocktail at The Brown Derby, a three-restaurant chain in Los Angeles. The original location was shaped like an actual derby hat, and its Vine Street outpost was a popular hangout for Hollywood movers and shakers. The other version claims that the cocktail was actually created nearby at the Vendome Club on the Sunset Strip and named, for some reason, in honor of the Brown Derby restaurant.

There's a slight problem with both stories, though: the Brown Derby cocktail doesn’t appear to have come within 3,000 miles of Hollywood at any time during the 20th century.

Tariff Skullduggery and the American Whiskey Trade

In the original draft of Southern Spirits, I addressed many of the tariff issues that influence the whiskey trade in the 19th century. Ultimately, most of that material was too long and geeky to make it into the finished book, but I still have a fondness in particular for the story of how the "Tariff of Abominations" came about. Here it is: a tale of political folly and miscalculation.

In the early 19th century, British factories were flooding American markets with inexpensive manufactured goods at the same time that the plummeting agricultural prices were damaging the export market for American crops. In 1816, Congress for the first time passed a tariff act that was intended not just to raise revenue for the government but also to protect domestic industry and agriculture from foreign competition.

Why Do South Carolina Liquor Stores Have Red Dots?

In my recent post on the origin of the term “package store,” I mentioned that in South Carolina liquor stores are often called “red dot stores.” The reason for that is simple: almost all of the ones in the state seem to have at least one if not multiple big red dots on their signs or painted on the sides of their buildings. But why did owners start painting those red dots on them in the first place?

South Carolinians often speculate various explanations: that it’s because liquor stores owners needed a way for the people who couldn't read could to find their stores, or because it represents a red sun because the states liquor stores were originally opened from dawn to dusk. The real answer lies back in the swirl of odd and often puzzling alcohol control legislation that emerged in the wake of Prohibition’s repeal.

The Fall of the Palmetto Brewery . . . and the Rise of Germania

The original Charleston Brewery, circa 1888. Image courtesy
 Mark R. Jones & The Charleston County Public Library

In Charleston Beer: A High-Gravity History of Lowcountry Brewing, Timmons Pettigrew does a nice job laying out the history of brewing in Charleston, including the rise, fall, and rebirth of the Palmetto Brewery, which operated from just before the Civil War until the early 20th century.  The Palmetto Brewery rose again in 1993, when Ed Falkenstein opened the first post-Prohibition brewery in South Carolina and christened it in honor of the old Charleston brewery, and it’s still going strong today.

One area Pettigrew was unable to flesh out was the transition that occurred during the last two decades of the original brewery’s tenure, when it changed its name and ownership. “At some point between 1895 and September 1896,” Pettigrew writes, “Palmetto Brewing Company became Germania Brewing Company . . . The circumstances are unclear as to why it was sold and why the name was changed.” The folks at the current Palmetto Brewery don’t have much more information, either, noting on the history section of their web site, “We infer this was due to the increasing dominance of German breweries at the turn of the century, as well as lending an air of quality to the beers being made here in Charleston.”

While researching Southern Spirits: 400 Years of Drinking in the American South, I was able to uncover some additional information that sheds light on this transitional period, though it didn’t make it into the final book.

The Origins of the Package Store

In various parts of the country, retail stores that sell liquor are called by all sorts of different names. When they need a bottle of whiskey, North Carolinians might head down to the “ABC Store” (named after the state Alcoholic Beverage Control commission that operates them), while in South Carolina they often say “red dot stores,” because most liquor stores in the Palmetto State display three red dots on their signs. A Michigander might patronize the “party store”, while Pennsylvanians frequent the “state store.”

And then there’s the term “package store,” which is used in various parts of the country, including the Carolinas and New England, where it is often shortened to the “Packy.” Where on earth did that term come from?

One common explanation you hear is that various states, not wanting their citizens to be seen carrying disreputable liquor bottles on the street, mandated that liquor stores sell all their goods in brown paper bags—that is, in packages. This derivation is based upon the method of historical research I like to call “just making stuff up,” for there are no state laws that require that. The real story is a little more interesting.

My Favorite Pimento Cheese Ad

While writing the installment on pimento cheese in my Southern food icons series for Serious Eats, I was reminded of my favorite ad from my collection, which was for Elkhorn Pimento Cheese from the J. L. Kraft & Brothers Company of New York. The best part of all is the little gremlin guy down in the lower right corner, the perfect embodiment of the vogue for industrial food in the early part of the century because of worries about ensure pure, sanitary food.  Click on the ad to enlarge it if you want to read the text, which I think is priceless.

Pimento Cheese Ad, Ladies Home Journal (September 1920)

What We Know About Mrs. Fisher

 I've been researching gumbo for my series on Southern food icons for Serious Eats, and in the process spent some time digging into the story of Abby Fisher. She's the author of a fascinating book called What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking, which was published in San Francisco in 1881. For a time Fisher's was thought to be the first published cookbook written by an African-American (that changed when scholars discovered an 1866 pamphlet written by Malinda Russell). It remains an invaluable insight into Southern cooking in the era immediately after the Civil War.

Very little is known about Abby Fisher's life beyond what it appears in her book. Culinary historian Karen Hess filled in the gaps as best as she could in the afterword to the Applewood Books facsimile edition, which was published in 1995, drawing mostly on the 1880 census record in which Fisher and her family appear. I was able to do a little more digging and turn up additional census records and city directory entries from the 1870s the flesh out the story a little more.

Abby Fisher was born around 1832 in South Carolina, and we can only assume she was born into slavery. The census records list her as “mulatto” and indicate that her mother was born in South Carolina and her father in France. It seems probable, as Hess has suggested, that Fisher was the daughter of a French-born slaveowner and an South Carolina-born slave. 

At some point before the Civil War, the woman who later became Abby Fisher (we do not know her maiden name) wound up in Alabama, where the first four of her eventual eleven children were
born. By 1869, she was living in Mobile with her husband, Alexander C. Fisher, an Alabama-born mulatto minister. In May of that year, Alexander Fisher made deposit in the Freedman’s Savings & Trust Co. on behalf of his young daughter Eliza.

The Fishers stayed in Mobile until around 1876 when, for reasons unknown, they decided to move westward. They were in Missouri at least long enough for their fifth child, Mary, to be born, in 1877, and by 1880 were living in San Francisco, where Abby Fisher made a living as a cook and she and her husband operated a pickle and preserves business.

In 1880, Mrs. Fisher won two medals at the San Francisco Mechanics' Institute Fair for her pickles, sauces, jellies, and preserves. The next year, apparently due to repeated requests from the customers for whom she cooked, Mrs. Fisher dictated her recipes to a committee of nine residents of San Francisco (her “lady friends and patrons”, as she describes them in her preface.) It was published by the Women's Co-operative Printing Office, which had been founded in 1868 to give female printers a place to work in a male-dominated business.

Notice from San Francisco Bulletin (December 29, 1887)

Not much more is known about Mrs. Fisher's life after her cookbook's publication. City directories and newspapers show that she continued her cooking business at least through the 1890s.
She and her husband appear in the 1900, with his occupation noted as "janitor" and none noted for her. In the 1910 census, by which point both are in their 70s, no occupation is listed for them, though two of their daughter, both in their 30s, are living with them and working as a manicurist and as masseur at a doctor's office. I've not been able to turn up an obituary or death notice for Abby Fisher nor for her husband.

What makes What Mrs. Fisher Knows doubly valuable to culinary historians is that it is one of the earliest cookbooks written by an African-American and, paradoxically, that its author could neither read nor write, a fact she freely admits in the book’s preface.

A great many 19th cookbook authors borrowed recipes from any and all sources, so the fact that a recipe appears in a book published in, say, Kentucky, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s an old Kentucky recipe. The author may very well have borrowed it from an English cookbook, and there’s not even a guarantee that he or she had actually tried cooking it.

In Abby Fisher’s case, it is much more likely that a recipe that appears in her book is something she learned to cook during her years in Alabama and South Carolina and that she actually cooked it from memory on a regular basis. And that gives us a very unique and valuable perspective on Southern cooking in the middle part of the 19th century.

Barbecue "Innovations"

Daniel Vaughn has a nice post over at TMBBQ offering a Concise History of American BBQ Innovations. I might quibble with a few of them. For instance, while cattle may have made it to the American mainland a few years before pigs, it would be ludicrous to claim that beef as a "BBQ innovation" antedated pork, considering that in almost all barbecue accounts before the 1770s pig is the animal almost universally mentioned.

But, the rest are pretty good. Two that didn't make the list are backyard "barbecues" (what we in the South call cooking or grilling) and barbecue restaurants. The Luddite resistance to the first is quite common, but almost no one these days objects to barbecue restaurants.

Not so back in the mid-20th centuries, when barbecue stands and restaurants ruled the American highway. Check out the clip below from Rufus Jarman's "Dixie's Most Disputed Dish", which appeared in the July 3, 1954 issue of the Saturday Evening Post.

Being a Luddite about barbecue traditions, it seems, is itself an enduring barbecue tradition. And, yet, barbecue has always continued to evolve right along anyway.

The Downfall of "the Walkist"

Edward Payson Weston, the Celebrated Walkist
Courtesy Library of Congress Prints
& Photographs Division

One of the most delightful things about doing historic research in old newspaper archives is that you sometimes stumble across gems of a story like this one from the Daily Eastern Argus of Portland, Maine, about Edward Payson Weston, the reknowned "Walkist."

Weston, it seems, in 1867 set a record by walking from Portland to Chicago, covering 1,220 miles in 30 consecutive days, if you don't count the Sundays, on which he rested, it being the 19th century.

In July of 1868, Weston attempted a new feat of walking when he attempted to walk 50 miles in eleven hours before a crowd of onlookers in Forest City Park. Weston got off to good start, walking a 25 miles at a brisk pace between 8 am and noon, but then trouble set in.

"He wasted rather unwisely 10 to 15 minutes that afterwards were badly wanted," the Daily Eastern Argus reported, "and partook too heavily of crackers and iced tea, which made him feel somewhat indisposed. He recommenced with great confidence and after a few miles indulged in a cigar, which had an unfavorable effect in his then excited and somewhat peculiar condition."

Weston recovered once again, though, and resumed his pace, though he was slowed in the end by a leg injury. He finished his fifty miles in 11 hours, six and a half minutes, missing his goal by just a tiny margin.

So, here's a little advice to you would-be marathon walkers: lay off the iced tea and cigars.

As for Weston, he went onto greater fame, becoming "the Father of Modern Pedestrianism" and, if you can believe it, making a career as a professional walker. He performed pedestrian feats across the United States--including strolling from New York to San Francisco in 100 days--and toured Europe on numerous occasions, taking on the continent's most feared race walkers.

If this isn't enough to satisfy your interest, check out the recently-published biography by Helen Harris, Paul Marshall, and Nick Harris in A Man in a Hurry: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Edward Payson Weston (2012)

I found this story, by the way, while researching the history of iced tea. Go figure.

Staying Sober, 1830s Style

In 1830, the Macon Weekly Telegraph of Macon, Georgia, printed a letter under the perhaps not totally accurate headline “Temperance”, advising the newspaper’s readers on how to avoid drunkenness. Signed, “A Friend to Temperance,” the letter’s author revealed that he fell into his former drunken ways by “taking a dram in the morning” on the recommendation of an old neighbor, who was fond of morning drams himself. 

“I was told that a glass of bitters before breakfast was an excellent thing to give a body an appetite”, the writer related, and admitted that it did indeed make his blood circulate faster and his appetite stronger. So, he adopted the plan and “every morning took my bitters, mint julip, or gin cocktail.” 

Before long he found his appetite so stimulated that he ate breakfast to excess, and by mid-morning, heavy and languid, needed another dram to pick him up. And then another glass before the afternoon dinner, and a few more afterwards, and the next thing he knew he was never sober at any point of the day.

He tried total abstinence on multiple occasions but kept lapsing back to his old ways. The solution? Never take a drop of spirituous liquor before breakfast, nor anytime afterwards on an empty stomach. By keeping to this rule and drinking only after a hearty meal he had been able to avoid drunkenness for over five years. 

Just passing this along as a public service.

“Temperance”, Macon Weekly Telegraph (June 26, 1830), p103

Introducing the Unexpurgated History of the Sazerac Cocktail

I am fast at work on my latest project, which is a history of booze in the South. In the course of the research, I dug deep into the history of the classic New Orleans cocktails, including the Sazerac.

It's a bizarrely complicated tale, and just uncovering the real story was sort of a step-by-step drama in itself, running down leads and discovering many missteps, bad assumptions, and downright wrongness in so many previous accounts of the drink's history.

As I was working on the draft, it kept getting more and more complicated, and I kept having to go back and change details and elaborate as I dug up more information. In the end, the narrative became so long and complicated that I don't think anyone but a few hard-core cocktail buffs would be interested in reading it. I'm trimming it way back and totally recasting it in the book draft, but, in case you are one of those hard-core cocktail buffs, I figured I might go ahead and publish the whole unexpurgated story here on my blog. I've created it as a separate page that you can read here.

Yes, it's long and detailed, but there are a lot of curious twist and turns in it that I found just fascinating. And it made me quite thirsty, too.

Texas BBQ Sauce's Missing Link?

 Rodney Scott's mop sauce at  Scott's Variety
Store,  Hemingway, SC. Rodney slices lemons
 into his sauce, too.

Daniel Vaughn, the newly named "barbecue editor" of Texas Monthly Magazine and author of the forthcoming book The Prophets of Smoked Meat: A Journey Through Texas Barbecue, sent me a clipping the other day from a Dallas newspaper from 1937. Piggy-backing off the prospect of visitors from Latin America sampling barbecue at the Greater Texas and Pan-American Exhibition, the writer provides a detailed description of the state of barbecue in Texas in 1937.

Of most interest to me was the description of the sauce. In my own barbecue book, I documented how barbecue sauce in the 19th century was pretty much uniform from Virginia all the way out to Texas, and it was a simple blend of vinger, some sort of fat like lard or butter, salt, and red and black pepper. During the early 20th century, cooks began adding a bunch of other stuff into it, which is how it eventually evolved into the wide variety of high-flavored sauces we enjoy today.

The article Vaughn sent me helps fill in the gaps between old and new versions. It describes barbecue sauce in mid-Texas in the 1930s as follows:

It is made simply of vinegar and hot water, melted butter if the purse allows, or rendered beef suet if not, black and red pepper and salt (pioneer sauce stopped there) and generous dashes of catsup and Worchestershire sauce. Onions and sometimes lemons are sliced into it, and canny masters of the grid thicken it slightly with flour and water as thin gravy is thickened, to hold it smoothly together.

This sauce, or "dip", was used to baste the meat while it cooked, and, the writer notes, it would be served with "pitchers of hot sauce made by pouring a little hot water into leftover dip."

And now I'm hungry for brisket.

Washington D.C.'s Barbecue Grove

In Barbecue: the History of an American Institution, I wrote a lot about barbecue's long tradition in American political life. In particular, I dug into early 19th century political barbecues, which evolved from a few local candidates speechifying at rural gatherings into massive, well-organized political events, reaching full maturity during the 1840 presidential election pitting William Henry Harrison against Martin Van Buren.

Here's something I didn't come across in all of my research: during the Jackson Administration James Maher, the Superintendent of Capitol Grounds, directed the planting of two patches of "barbecue trees" on the east lawn of the capital. Their purpose? To provide shady groves in which to hold barbecues, one grove for Whigs and one for Democrats.

Joe Haynes, who writes the Obsessive Compulsive Barbecue blog, dug up the story, and his full write up has just been published in Smoke Signals Magazine. It's a splendid illustration of how entrenched a part of 19th century politics barbecue was. 

Rye Returns to Baltimore

Pikesville Rye Ad from 1937
An Aristocrat in Decline

Last week, I wrote a bit for Garden & Gun in which Doug Atwell, the bar manager at the great Baltimore cocktail bar Rye, concocted a recipe for a local-themed cocktail in honor of the Ravens' trip to the Super Bowl.

As I was chatting to Atwell about the cocktail, I asked him whether he saw rye whiskey making a comeback in Baltimore. I had already written about the rye revival taking place these days in Columbia and Charleston, South Carolina, and was curious to hear how the old spirit was faring in Charm City. Rye has an even deeper history in Baltimore, which made its fall into near oblivion there all the more dramatic.

Whiskeymaking in Kentucky and Pennsylvania dates back to the colonial era, arriving with the first Scotch-Irish settlers, who brought a deep-rooted culture of grain distilling with them. Distilling arrived much later in Maryland, an outgrowth of the city’s commercial boom after the Civil War.

Gilded Age Baltimore sat at the center of a wide network of trade, and among its many merchant houses were dozens of liquor wholesalers, who bought spirits from inland distilleries (most of them in Pennsylvania) and packaged them for sale to retailers throughout the surrounding region, especially in Virginia and North Carolina. A few of these wholesalers, like Charles H. Ross & Co. and the Gottschalk Company, decided to try their hand at making their own whiskey, and by the 1880s a flourishing local distilling industry was underway.

In Pennsylvania and Kentucky, hundreds of small-scale distilleries existed side-by-side with major industrial producers. In Maryland whiskey production was dominated by a handful of large firms. These distillers may have come late to the game, but their brands--Mount Vernon, Melvale, Monument, Pikesville--became some of the most well-known in the country.

“The best rye,” the journalist, humorist, and cocktail authority Irvin S. Cobb wrote in 1936, “has always come from Maryland, just as the best Bourbon has always come from Kentucky.” Cobb attributed the quality to the state’s “radiantly pure spring water” and the softening presence of limestone conjoined with the skill of the traditional distillers.

Cobb wrote those words as the American whiskey industry was trying to stage a comeback after fourteen years of national Prohibition. Unfortunately for Maryland rye, its best years were already behind it. Most of the old Maryland brands had changed hands during the blackout years, and though they were brought back on the market after Repeal, they never regained their former stature.

Why Maryland’s distilleries failed to recover remains a mystery. Some historians have speculated that in Kentucky, bourbon-making families didn’t know any other trade, so they held onto their buildings and equipment during the dark years and returned to the business once it was legal again. In Maryland, whiskey distilling had always been more of a large-scale commercial venture than a family tradition, no different than selling any other manufactured goods. When Prohibition shut their businesses down, the proprietors moved on to more profitable lines of work and never looked back.

It’s as good of a theory as any. The actual causes may be murky, but the unfortunate results were clear: one by one the old Maryland brands disappeared from the market. By the 1970s Baltimore, once one of the country’s most prominent whiskey towns, had moved on to vodka and gin. In 1972, the final barrel of Pikesville Rye whiskey was filled at the old Majestic Distillery and rolled into a warehouse to age. It was the last barrel of rye whiskey produced in Maryland. The Pikesville brand was sold to a Kentucky distillery, though, in a fitting irony, it’s still sold and consumed almost exclusively in Baltimore.

When Doug Atwell and his partners opened Rye in 2011, the whiskey they named their bar after still languished in obscurity. "There were still people drinking Pikesville,” he told me, “but it was a kind of dive bar thing. Old Baltimoreans would drink it, especially in Fells Point, as shots."

Slowly and steadily, though, more and more of patrons have started returning to rye whiskey, and it’s the classic pre-Prohibition cocktails that are driving them toward it.

When Rye first opened, Atwell told me, they focused on what he called ’nouveau classics’--their own inventions inspired by but riffing upon older recipes. Not too long ago, though, “we put a sidebar on menu for classics like Mahattans and Sazeracs, and we started moving a ton of them. People during the holidays were drinking like their uncles and grandfathers.” Within weeks, their top three top sellers were Old Fashioneds, Manhattans, and Sazeracs, all of which are made with rye whiskey.

For Atwell, it’s a satisfying turn of events. “When we opened here in this neighborhood, there were plenty of people who thought we were crazy for doing what we are doing. 'Fells Point, that’s a beer and shot neighborhood',” he says. “Now we’re seeing groups of 25-year-old guys coming in and ordering four Old Fashioneds.”

That’s introducing a whole new generation to the glories of what was once Baltimore’s signature spirit. And it suggest that in the long, proud history of American rye whiskey, there are still plenty of more chapters left to be written.

The Great Mint Julep Controversy of 1933

Eddie of the Astor (L), Irvin S. Cobb (R), and
Heywood Broun (seated) at the Infamous
Mint Julep Trial, July 1933

What's the proper liquor for use in a mint julep? Bourbon whiskey or rye? What about rum or brandy, or even gin? 

Most drinkers today would immediately answer, "Bourbon, of course," but it wasn't always this way. Back in the 19th century, any one of those liquors might be found in a julep. Rum, in fact, was the original base, though it was supplanted by brandy in the early days of the Republic. Whiskey rose to julep prominence only after the Civil War, and Kentuckians and Marylanders debated hotly whether Bourbon or rye was the proper variety for juleps.

Last year in the Charleston City Paper, I speculated that the near-ubiquity of Bourbon as the liquor of choice for mint juleps today was largely due to the Kentucky Derby, at which juleps have been the signature cocktail for over a century. But, the more I look into matters, the more I suspect that the Kentucky-born newspaper man and humorist Irvin S. Cobb might actually share a lot of the blame.

In July 1933, still several months before the repeal of Prohibition, Cobb challenged “Eddie of the Astor”, a well-known bartender from the Hotel Astor, to a mint julep showdown. The challenge was sparked when Cobb overheard Eddie say that a proper julep should be made with brandy. “Brandy?” Cobb reportedly said. “Putting brandy in a mint julep is like putting ketchup in iced tea.” The contest was set for July 13th at Cobb’s Park Avenue apartment.

As late as 1933, it seems, there was still a rich diversity of liquors employed in the julep world. Cobb’s challenge, columnist H. Allen Smith noted, originated out of “a controversy over the potability of the Kentucky mint julep as compared with all other forms of julep.” 

H. L. Mencken, the famed Baltimore journalist and critic, upon hearing of the contest, harrumphed that both Cobb and Eddie were wrong. “In Maryland we use rye whiskey. Bourbon puts too much meat on the consumer,” a perhaps not so veiled dig at Cobb's substantial girth. Mencken declined to participate, saying he had to head back home to Baltimore “to watch the hanging of a gentleman who put Bourbon whiskey in a julep.”

Cobb enlisted Heywood Broun, the popular columnist for the New York World-Telegram, to serve as the contest's judge. For his “Kentucky julep”, Cobb broke out a bottle of Belmont Bourbon distilled in 1901 and obtained from Louisville’s Pendennis Club. Eddie of the Astor was given a bottle of brandy  by Cobb and, when he requested a bit of Jamaican rum for his “Cosmopolitan julep”, he was provided with the closest thing Cobb could find in his basement: Bacardi.

In alternating succession, Broun downed three of Cobb’s Bourbon juleps and three of Eddie’s brandy ones, then retired to a bedroom for a nap. He awoke a half hour later, fortified himself with three cups of coffee, then banged out his decision on Cobb’s typewriter. “Judgment is rendered in favor of Mr. Cobb and the mint julep compounded out of Kentucky Bourbon,” he declared. “Eddie of the Astor is guilty of a heresy in using brandy as a base.” He took the opportunity to take a swipe at rye, too, declaring it “Communistic, Atheistic, and against the dignity of man” to commit “such gross violations of the code as using rye whiskey, or that great abomination, the gin julep.”

Eddie of the Astor, for his part, took the defeat graciously, though he did note that he was a little out of practice, thanks to the whole Prohibition thing, and added, “I wish the press to know that it was not really Mr. Cobb that won, but really his liquor.” He did have  a point: it’s sort of hard to compete with 32-year-old Bourbon when all you’ve got is a bottle of Prohibition-era brandy and some bootleg Bacardi.

Predictably, newspapers in Maryland and in New Orleans cried foul. Marshall Ballard, the editor of the New Orleans Item, protested that what Cobb had actually created was not a mint julep but a mint smash. “Both are good,” he declared, “but the julep demands more solicitude and time.”

With a smash, Ballard explained, either Bourbon or rye is put in a glass with sugar, mint leaves, and crushed ice and agitated with a spoon until the mint leaves are crushed and the outside of the glass coated with a fine frost. For a julep, “you soak as much mint as possible in as much Bourbon as you can afford for about three weeks.” The resulting greenish brown liquor is stored in a jug and mixed with ice and sugar just before drinking, and is, Ballard claimed, a “slightly smoother and mellower product” than the quick-made smash.

Cobb's contest may not have decided the issue once and for all, but in the wake of Repeal more and more Americans turned to Bourbon when stirring up a frosty julep. I, for one, am partial to rye, but almost a full century of Kentucky propaganda puts me decidedly in the minority.

South Carolina's Earliest Barbecue?

During my research for Barbecue: The History of an American Institution, I pored over countless journals and newspapers and other sources, but I was never able to find a single mention of a barbecue being held in Charleston in the colonial era. And that really surprised me, especially since I turned up a good account of a "barbacue house" and the carousing that went on there just down the coast in Beaufort. It's hard to prove a negative, but eventually I had to conclude that, "Though it was firmly entrenched in the daily life of Virginia planters, barbecue does not seem to have played a significant part in the Lowcountry plantation culture of Charleston, South Carolina."

Now, ironically, while engaged in a completely different line of research (seeking out recipes for rum toddy in the colonial South), I have stumbled across a barbecue reference in Charleston--and very early on, too. It's in an imitation of Horace that was published in London's Gentleman Magazine in 1753, and it was written by one "C.W." residing in Charles Town, South Carolina.

The writer is reveling in the spring, the time at the end of the Charleston season when the planters were wrapping up their business in town and preparing to head back to their rice plantations to begin a new growing year. But first, the poet implored, they should should enjoy themselves a little:

Let's each hold a gen'rous barbicu feast,
And with toddy and punch drink rich wine of the best.

So, perhaps barbecue did have a role in colonial Charleston's social life after all.

The full poem is below:

Early Virginia Hams and Bacon

I've been reading the journal of Nicholas Cresswell, a young Englishman who came to Virginia in 1774 with the ambition of making a fortune as a planter. He got sideways with his neighbors after the Revolution broke out and he refused to support the rebellion.  Threatened with "Tar, Feathers, Imprisonment, and the D---l knows what," Cresswell fled Virginia in 1777 and ended up returning to England.

Before he departed, though, he captured in his journal this excellent account of the art of curing bacon and ham in Virginia:

The bacon cured here is not to be equalled in any part of the world, their hams in particular. They first rub them over with brown sugar and let them lie all night. This extracts the watery particles. They let them lie in salt for 10 days or a fortnight. Some rub them with hickory ashes instead of saltpetre, it makes them red as saltpetre and gives them a pleasant taste. Then they are hung up in the smoke-house and a slow smoky fire kept under them for three or four weeks, nothing but hickory wood is burnt in these smoke-houses. This gives them an agreeable flavor, far preferable to the Westphalia hams, not only that, but it prevents them from going rancid and will preserve them for several years by giving them a fresh smoking now and them.

The hogs, he noted, grew fat in the woods on a mast of "acorns, Walnuts, Chestnuts, and all wild fruits").

And now I'm officially hungry.

More Mysteries of the Roffignac Cocktail (Part the Third)

In which depending upon the kind assistance of strangers produces a curious recipe.

[This is part three of a series on the Roffinac.  Start with Part 1 to get the whole saga from the beginning.]

Thanks to a tip from Tom Freeland (a.k.a. NMissCommentor), I reached out to Tom Fitzmorris for more information about the Roffignac cocktail--particularly in its final incarnation as the house cocktail at Maylie's Restaurant.  Fitzmorris--the proprietor of the indispensible New Orleans Menu website, author of Hungry Town and the hot-off-the-presses Lost Restaurants of New Orleans--not only remembered the cocktail from his days as a Maylie's regular back in the 1970s but also conjured up a recipe, taken straight off an old Maylie's menu.

And, without further ado, here is the Roffignac as it was last served in New Orleans:

In a rocks glass filled with ice cubes, add:

1 oz. Cognac
1/2 oz. rye whiskey
Grenadine to taste
Splash of club soda

Add a lemon twist and there you are. 

I wasted no time in stirring one up and, from sip number one, it was quite fine.  In all my permutations before, I never thought to mix Cognac and rye.  I sort of associated Cognac as the original version and rye as the later substitution, so  it's curious to see a recipe with both together.  But I think it really works.

Next steps: try to replicate a Roffignac with himbeer essig syrup in place of the grenadine.  With the "to taste" admonition, I think we can make it work.

Thanks again to Tom Fitzmorris for his generous assistance!

Presidential Barbecue

A team of archaeologists have discovered what appears to be a barbecue pit at Montpelier, the home of President James Madison near Orange, Virginia.  Barbecue has a long, rich history in Virginia, and there are quite a few connections with George Washington, who in his journals recorded attending many barbecues and even hosted a few of his owns.  This establishes a connection with another American president.

Unraveling the Mystery of the Roffignac Cocktail (Part 2)

In which I attempt to contract a febrile affection or two.

(For the story up to now, see Part 1 of Unraveling the Mysteries of the Roffignac Cocktail)

Secrets of Red Hembarig Revealed

I was stuck hard on the identity of the sweetener named Red Hembarig, but I plugged away at it periodically.  A forum thread on eGullet (which included a helpful response from cocktail and punch guru David Wondrich) speculated that "Hembarig" was a corruption of himbeere, the German word for raspberry, and that "red Hembarig" was nothing more than raspberry syrup.

This didn't strike me as fully satisfying--why would Arthur include raspberry syrup as an alternative to raspberry syrup?--but it was just the hint I needed.  Back to the newspaper archives, and with a little trial and error I was able to track down not only "himbeer syrup" in turn of the century New Orleans but something even more interesting: a syrup that pairs himbeer (raspberries) with essig--the German word for vinegar.

And there you have it.  The elusive "Red Hembarig" is, I believe, Arthur's elision of himbeeressig syrup, which means the long-lost ingredient of the great Roffignac cocktail is . . . pause for drama . . . raspberry vinegar syrup!

Now, raspberry vinegar, to modern palates, seems more fit for salad dressings than for cocktails.  But, it  was rather common in drinks a century or more ago.  Like a lot of things in the world of 19th century imbibing, it comes out of the medicinal realm.

You can find raspberry vinegar and raspberry vinegar syrup recipes in any number of 19th century handbooks for pharmacists and chemists.  The formula from the 1884 edition of the National Dispensary is pretty typical: you mix a "convenient quantity" of fresh raspberries with a "sufficient quantity" of sugar (the precision of these pharmaceutical recipes is amazing) and let it rest for 3 days.  Then, you press and strain out the juice and let it sit until it has completely fermented and become clear (which should take a day or less), then filter it.  You mix this liquid with sugar (2 parts of liquid to 3 parts of sugar), heat it to a boil, then strain and bottle.

And what do you do with such a concoction?  The National Dispensary notes that "This syrup has no special medicinal virtues.  It forms an agreeable addition to mixtures, and with water a pleasant drink for febrile affections."  Febrile affections (per Rudy's List of Archaic Medical Terms) means pretty much any medical condition accompanied by a fever, so it might be safe to say that raspberry syrup is good for whatever ails you.  During the Civil War, in fact, a letter writer to the New York Times recommended raspberry vinegar as "a grateful, cooling and wholesome drink for the fevered, sick and wounded."

But why wait until you are sick or wounded?  Pharmacists and bartenders alike (and, in old New Orleans these occupations were often one in the same) discovered somewhere in the mid 19th century that raspberry vinegar syrup made an agreeable addition to cocktails, too.

In How to Mix Drinks (1862), Jerry Thomas includes not one but three recipes for raspberry vinegar syrup.  In one, you first make raspberry vinegar by macerating 30 pounds of raspberries in 7 1/2 gallons of wine or cider vinegar for eight days before pressing and straining it.  Then, you dissolve 80 pounds of sugar in the vinegar, boil it for 2 minutes, then skim and strain.  Another recipe calls for 3 1/2 lbs sugar, 1 pint raspberry juice, and 2 pints of vinegar.

Thomas does not provide, any recipes for drinks using the syrup, but there are plenty out there in other publications, some alcoholic and some not.  Raspberry shrub--a few tablespoons of the vinegar syrup mixed with a glass of water--was a popular summertime beverage, while hot raspberry ade (which added lime juice) was a wintertime refresher.  Amanda Hesser of the New York Times rediscovered raspberry vinegar as a beverage component a few years ago, using it by the spoonful to spruce up a glass of sparkling water or prosecco.  Her recipe, borrowed from a 1900 New York Times article, is for 1-1/2 quarts raspberries macerated for three days in one cup of vinegar, then mashed and strained and made into a syrup by simmering with a half pound of sugar.

Raspberry vinegar syrup was particularly popular in New Orleans, where it was commonly referred to by its German name himbeeressig.  Why the German was used in New Orleans and not elsewhere in the country is uncertain, but New Orleans did have a substantial German-American community, and its members played a prominent role in the city's pharmacy, hotel, and restaurant trade.

Advertisement for Loubat's Syrups for

Soda Fountains

(Times-Picayune, March 5, 1934)

One commercial vendor of himbeeressig syrup in New Orleans was the Loubat Glassware and Cork Company, which dates back to at least the 1870s (and is still in the restaurant supply business today as the Loubat Equipment Company).  In the 1920s, it advertised himbeer essig as one of the 14 flavors of Loubat's Syrups, which it sold to soda fountains in one-gallon jugs for $1.50 a piece.

So, it seems, there was plenty of raspberry vinegar syrup floating around the pharmacies, soda fountains, and bars of New Orleans around the turn of the century.  Little wonder that it made its way into a few liquor drinks.  

The Legacy of the Roffignac Cocktail

And that brings us back to the Roffignac.  Having equipped myself with a bottle of Cognac and dozens of recipes for "Red Hembarig"--that is, himbeer essig--syrup, I was ready to take a crack at constructing perhaps the original Roffignac cocktail

But, first, here's how not to create raspberry vinegar syrup.  Flush with the victory of uncovering himbeer essig, I raced to the Historical Cocktail Testing Facility.   All the recipes I had uncovered called for days and days of steeping, but I was in the heat of the hunt and figured I could cut corners and mix one part of the raspberry syrup made in my previous Roffignac forays with one part cider vinegar.  This, emphatically, does not work, and the pungent vinegar concoction quickly ended up in the Failed Experiment Disposal Unit (a.k.a. kitchen sink drain), wasting an ounce and a half of perfectly good rye whiskey in the process.

I resigned myself to having to wait, using the recipe for raspberry vinegar syrup from Jerry Thomas's How to Mix Drinks and recalculating the proportions to make a more manageable amount.

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Himbeer Essig, or Raspberry Vinegar Syrup


12 oz. raspberries
24 fl. oz. (3 cups) cider vinegar

32 oz. sugar

Put raspberries and vinegar in a large plastic container and let them soak for 8 days.  Strain through a sieve, mashing and pressing the raspberries to extract all their juice.  Put the liquid in a saucepan along with the sugar, bring to a boil over high heat, stirring to dissolve the sugar.  Let it simmer a minute or two, then cool and bottle.

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The preparation of the syrup will give your house a good fumigation and send the wife and kids running for the doors.  But, once it cools and the flavors blend in the fridge overnight, it's a truly remarkable substance: sweet and tangy and complex, the bite of the vinegar mellowed and smoothed by the raspberries and sugar.

Now, there's just one confusing thing about Stanley Clisby Arthur's recipe for a Roffignac.   "Sirup" appears twice in the ingredients list:  1 jigger of whiskey, 1 pony of "sirup", seltzer or soda water, and, finally, "raspberry sirup".   In the instructions that follow, he says simply to add the whiskey, then "the sirup, which may be raspberry, grenadine, or red Hembarig."  So, does this mean you use a pony of regular simple syrup and a splash of raspberry, grenadine, or "red Hembarig"?  Or, do you use a full pony of the flavored syrup?

A Roffignac made with a jigger of rye and a pony of regular raspberry syrup is nicely balanced.  The same drink made with a pony of himbeer essig was quite off: way too pungent and strident.  I loved the zing of the raspberry vinegar, but it was much too strong.  So, I tried a few variations where I moderated the himbeer essig, cut it with plain simple syrup, added in a little bitters, swapped Cognac and rye in and out.

A version made with rye whiskey and a blend of simple syrup and himbeer essig was getting close to the mark, but something about that vinegar tang and the sharp edge of the rye just wasn't quite there.

Finally, I mixed up one with Cognac and himbeer essig diluted 2 parts to 1 with a simple syrup made with demerara sugar, which has a nice pale brown color and a little darker, richer flavor than a syrup made from granulated white sugar.  I stirred it up, took a sip, and and thought to myself, Goddamn.  That tastes almost exactly like Coca-Cola.  With, of course, a very pleasing kick.

Could this be the original Roffignac?  A drink as mild as Coca-Cola but as potent as a Sazerac?

Maybe.

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The Original (Perhaps) Roffignac Cocktail

1.5 oz. Cognac or other good brandy

2/3 oz. simple syrup

1/3 oz. himbeer essig syrup 

soda water

Combine the Cognac and syrups in a rocks glass and stir.  Fill glass with ice, top with club soda, and give one final stir. 

Arthur calls for a highball glass, which would be at least eight ounces, but unless you just drown the thing in soda it leaves it awfully empty.  I generally use a 6-ounce rocks glass, which seems more appropriate

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The Roffignac Cocktail,
Rye Whiskey Version

A Roffignac Rebirth?

While I like my version of the Roffignac, I am painfully aware that I'm totally shooting in the dark, trying to recreate a cocktail I've never tasted before and with ingredients that are murkily established at best.

It doesn't seem possible to me that a whiskey soda with a splash of raspberry syrup would have been special enough to become a signature New Orleans drink, one that would rival the Sazerac or Ramos gin fizz.  My Coca-Cola-esque version seems more like the kind of thing that would have gotten the attention of locals and tourists alike.  But I'm just guessing.

Errol Laborde over at MyNewOrleans.com recently retold an amusing anecdote about Roffignac cocktails taken from an 1892 edition of the Mascot literary magazine.  I'll let you read the anecdote over there, but the fact that the Roffignac passes itself off as a temperance drink further suggests that it would have been very soft drink like in flavor.

Larborde also notes that the Roffignac, which never came back into fashion after Prohibition, lingered on as the house specialty at Maylie's, which opened in 1876 and lasted 110 years.  When Maylie's closed in 1986, Laborde writes, "so did the public life of the Roffignac."

1986, alas, was just a little before my (legal) drinking time, but perhaps someone who remembers the Roffignac from Maylie's could weigh in on the concoction: was it just a raspberry-flavored whiskey-and-soda, or something more subtle and complex?  Does anyone from New Orleans remember seeing a bottle of himbeer essig syrup at soda fountains or elsewhere?

Maybe, just maybe, the public life of the Roffignac is not at its end just yet.