The famous Savoy Hotel is first mentioned in the James Bond canon in Fleming’s 1956 novel Diamonds are Forever, when M reveals to 007 that one of his targets, a diamond importer by the name of Rufus B. Saye, lives at the Savoy. Bond himself, of course, never needs to stay at the Savoy; he lives in London, after all, and no hotel maid service, no matter how distinguished could compete with the services of Bond’s own attendant, May, his “Scottish treasure.” For Ian Fleming himself, however, and for many of Great Britain’s intelligence workers, The Savoy was one of the most important spots in all of London during World War II. Not just because of it’s historic and highly regarded bar; but also because it had its own power supply, which meant that even during power outages caused by German bombing, the Savoy could continue to operate.
Located on the Strand in the City of Westminster in central London and established by theatre impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte, the doors to the regal Savoy first opened in 1889. Carte financed the construction of the hotel primarily with the fortune he’d made producing the operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, whose series of thirteen “Savoy Operas” included enduring hits such as The Pirates of Penzance. With an astounding array of amenities for the late Victorian era — including electric lights, a lift, and hot and cold running water — The Savoy quickly became the preeminent hotel for London society and well-heeled travelers. The Savoy Hotel was also one of the first spots in the United Kingdom — and indeed, in the whole of Europe — to import this new American style “cocktail” and bartending culture, courtesy of bartender Frank Wells, who ran the hotel’s bar from 1893 until 1902. Along with The Ritz in Paris, The Savoy represents the beachfront for the European take on the “American bar” — which is why the bar at the Savoy is known as the American Bar.
The notion of a cocktail being an American invention is widely accepted and, of course, a much more complicated claim than can be easily settled. Pretty much every culture in the world had mixed together some manner of alcohol, juice, bitters, and whatever else they might have within arm’s reach. British sailors and colonial governors were downing everything from grog to punch to gin and tonics. Americans (who were British at the time) were following suit. Between the United States and England, it starts to look a lot like the cricket vs. baseball argument, or the debate about whether punk was invented by the Ramones or the Sex Pistols, which then of course has people citing Iggy and the Stooges and assorted mod groups and, well, before you know it. people are fighting pitched battles in the street over the claim that Mozart was the world’s first true punk rocker. In the case of cocktails, the argument is often over when something stops being a punch, or a “mixed drink,” or an “elixir,” and starts being this thing we today recognize as a cocktail. Picking a point at which the cocktail was born is pointless, albeit a fun way to pass the time between cocktail nerds at the bar. However, history has to start somewhere, and in the case of cocktails, the best we can do is cite the first known mention of them in print.
The first current known use of the word “cocktail” in reference to a beverage is in March of 1798, in an issue of The Morning Post and Gazetteer in London, England, which was unearthed in 2010. In the paper was a story about the proprietor of the Axe & Gate tavern, on the corner of Downing and Whitehall, who had won a lottery and celebrated by forgiving the tabs of all his regulars. Four days after that story ran, a second, satirical story ran in which the make-believe tabs of popular British politicians were expounded upon. Among them was the imaginary tab of a man named Rose, who was charged for “gin and bitters” — a drink we know today as Pink Gin (a personal favorite of Ian Fleming); another man, Mr. Pitt, was charged for:
two petit vers of “L’huile de Venus”
Ditto, one of “perfeit amour”
Ditto, “cock-tail” (vulgarly called ginger)
Both Mr. Rose and Mr. Pitt would seem to enjoy, or so the paper surmised, drinks that would seem very close to what we would think of as cocktails, including one actually called the “cock-tail,” though in the case of Mr. Pitt’s tipple, it is likely a specific drink rather than the category of drinks it would later come to stand for. As the world continues to unearth, archive, and make available forgotten periodicals and tomes, it’s likely the origin of cocktails, both as a singular drink and as type of drink, will be pushed further and further back. We can infer a few things from the list, however, that imply even if the name had not yet been applied, people were definitely enjoying cocktails in the 1700s. For the time being, let’s skip the L’huile de Venus, which might have been a lovely drink at one point but is today a French brand of sexual lubricant (which I suppose it might have been, it its way, in 1798 as well).
For starters, there is Mr. Rose’s gin and bitters. Without knowing the specifics, the best that can be done is a guess, but gin with bitters added to it is known as Pink Gin, most definitely considered a cocktail today, albeit a simple one. Pink Gin originated, like so many things, in the British Navy. As far as cocktails go, it is even simpler than an Americano yet emerges as something more than the sum of its scant two parts, those two parts being Plymouth gin and a dash of Angostura bitters, which lend the drink its titular pink hue.
Pink Gin
3 dashes Angostura bitters
2 ounces Plymouth gin
Into an old fashioned glass, add the Angostura Bitters. A bartender may ask you if you want the drink “in or out” — in means they leave the bitters in, while out means after coating the glass they dump it of any excess bitters before adding the gin. Make sure the type of gin used is Plymouth, not London Dry. Stir and enjoy.
Bitters, in general, are sort of like concentrated little blasts of amaro, similar in that they are a blend of many different herbs and botanicals touted as possessing medicinal and digestive benefits. Most of them are surprisingly potent — a dash or two into a glass filled with gin may not seem like much, but a little bitters goes a long way. Angostura is far and away the best-known and most popular brand of bitters, though since the company was founded in 1824, it’s obviously not the bitters Mr. Rose had in his gin and bitters. The formula for what become Angostura Bitters was devised by Dr. Johann Gottlieb Benjamin Siegert, Surgeon General for the army of Venezuelan military and political leader Simón Bolívar’s army. Dr. Siegert’s mixture enjoyed substantial popularity, so much so that in 1824, he began to sell it commercially, and in 1830 opened a distillery, House of Angostura, dedicated to the production of the bitters in what was then the Venezuelan town of Angostura. In 1875, the operation was relocated to Port of Spain, Trinidad, where it remains still, though it has always retained the Angostura name — which is more than can be said for the town of Angostura, which was renamed Ciudad Bolívar in 1846.
Greene Gin
Promoted early in its lifespan as a cure for seasickness, Angostura Bitters became popular with sailors, particularly in the British Royal Navy, and officers soon took to adding a dash or two of bitters to their ration of gin. It’s popularity among British Navy men endured well into the era of Ian Fleming, who counted Pink Gin among his favorite cocktails. He made sure it made it into at least one James Bond novel, The Man with the Golden Gun (Fleming’s last Bond novel, incidentally), in which James Bond orders a Pink Gin — Beefeater and “plenty of bitters” — in the bar of the Thunderbird Hotel in Jamaica, which is operated by his nemesis for the novel, assassin Francisco Scaramanga. Fleming wasn’t the only British writer of espionage thrillers to feature Pink Gin in one of his books. Graham Greene, a contemporary of Ian Fleming but already established as the premier writer of British thrillers while Fleming was still busying himself with a stop-and-start journalism career, features the drink prominently in his 1948 novel The Heart of the Matter.
Greene was born in 1902, to a modestly successful family — comfortable but certainly not as rich or as highly placed as the Flemings. He suffered severe bouts of depression early in life, even attempting suicide whilst at school and being sent away for psychiatric evaluation. In 1922, he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and attempted, unsuccessfully, to immigrate to the recently minted Soviet Union. Unwelcome in the Soviet Union, he attended Balliol College in Oxford, and in 1925 published his first work, a poorly received book of poetry. He also volunteered to spy on the French for the German secret service and write pro-German articles for the college periodical. Although his paths did not cross with Ian Fleming’s, he did attend Balliol and was acquainted with a man who would become one of Ian’s dearest friends, Evelyn Waugh. Waugh, however, did not think much of the chronically depressed and politically dubious Greene, who he considered “childish and ostentatious. He certainly shared in none of our revelry.” Greene and Fleming himself would not meet until some years later, though then to not much better a result.
After graduating, he converted to Catholicism and began more serious work as a writer and novelist, including stints as a tutor and journalist. In 1929, his first novel, The Man Within, was published to generally favorable reviews. His next two books — 1930’s The Name of Action and 1932’s Rumour at Nightfall — were less successful; Greene himself even disowned them. In 1932, he published Stamboul Train, his first major success. Retitled Orient Express in the United States, it was adapted into a film of the same name in 1936. Shortly thereafter, Greene’s sister, Elizabeth, recruited him to the cause of the British secret service (his affections for Germany have cooled since his college days), and he was stationed in Sierra Leone during the Second World War. His acclaim as a writer grew considerably during the war years. In 1939 he wrote the espionage thriller The Confidential Agent, and a year later followed it up with The Power and the Glory, the book which cemented his reputation as one of the great writers of the 20th century. In 1943 he wrote another spy thriller, The Ministry of Fear, which was adapted into a highly regarded film in 1944, directed by anti-Nazi German expatriate Fritz Lang. The Power and the Glory, controversial and under no small degree of scrutiny by The Vatican, was adapted into a movie as well, but not until 1947 and then under the title The Fugitive, directed by John Ford and starring Henry Fonda.
While working for British intelligence in 1941, Greene was stationed in the espionage hotbed of Lisbon, where he became aware of Joan Pujol Garcia, codename Garbo. Like James Bond inspiration Dusko Popov, Garcia was a double agent, working for British intelligence while in the employ of German intelligence, to whom he would feed extravagant tales of the vast spy network he ran. None of these spies existed, though Garcia’s German handlers believed every word and he himself collected tidy bonuses from the Abwehr (though he did not live the jet setting swinger’s lifestyle of his fellow double agent Dusan Popov). Greene was fascinated by Agent Garbo’s elaborate web of non-existent operatives and by the spy’s proficiency in convincing the Germans that all these pretend spies were real and all this false information he was feeding them was actually true. So able a deceiver was Garcia that he played the key role in convincing Hitler that the Allied invasion of Europe would come through Calais, obscuring the fact that it was actually bound for Normandy. Greene, inspired by this high-stakes game of deception, used the concept as the basis for his 1958 novel, Our Man in Havana.
Greene’s experiences in Africa serve as the core inspiration for The Heart of the Matter, published in 1948. Not coincidentally, it is this very book that 007 brings with him during his African adventure in William Boyd’s 2013 James Bond novel, Solo. Bond’s affection for thrillers about his chosen profession was entered into the franchise during the 1980s, when John Gardner was writing them and frequently portrayed Bond reading or talking about thriller author Eric Ambler, who like Graham Greene was doubtless a major influence on the James Bond novels (Gardner also had a tendency to slip “meta” jokes into his books, like a scene of James Bond watching a Sean Connery movie during a flight). Boyd, like Greene, spent considerable time in Africa — Nigeria, specifically, during the Nigerian Civil War which lasted from July, 1967 until January, 1970. Much of Solo’s setting in the fictional African country of Zanzarim in 1969 is drawn from Boyd’s time in Biafra, just as Greene used a thinly veiled version of Sierra Leone as the setting for The Heart of the Matter. Unlike Greene’s Major Henry Scobie, however, Bond doesn’t drink Pink Gin, preferring instead to tipple from his trusty bottle of Johnnie Walker blended scotch whisky. (According to Bond, whisky is “best for the tropics. It doesn’t need to be chilled. You’re meant to drink it without ice, anyway. Tastes the same in Africa as it would in Scotland.”)
Ian Fleming counts Greene’s thrillers among the most important influences of his own writing career, “because each sentence he writes interests me, both as an individual and a writer.” The two writers, by then on parallel yet very different courses, finally met during a party thrown by Ian’s wife, Ann, whose circle of literary friends held her husband’s potboilers in low regard despite their success. In Greene, Fleming hoped to find a more empathetic reaction, not to mention savoring the chance to meet one of his writing heroes. Greene, however, had not grown any less haunted or socially difficult by this time. Ann Fleming described Greene attending her party as, “very anxious and quite impossible to engage in seductive conversation. He remained demoted from all, totally polite and holding the cocktail shaker as a kind of defensive weapon.”
Fleming, as we well know, was nothing if not dogged, and he continued to pursue both friendship with and artistic praise from his idol. He offered Greene use of the Goldeneye home in Jamaica in exchange for Greene’s writing a dust jacket blurb for the omnibus Gilt Edged Bonds, a play on words referring to a type of financial bond issued by the British government. The omnibus edition included three 007 novels: Casino Royale, From Russia with Love, and Dr. No. Greene agreed to the vacation at Goldeneye but deflated Fleming by saying he preferred to simply pay rent for his use of the villa rather than write anything, even a dust jacket blurb, that was critically supportive of the James Bond novels. Greene further insulted Fleming by accusing the housekeeper at Goldeneye, a Jamaican woman named Violet who Fleming adored to the same degree James Bond adored his housekeeper May, of stealing whisky from him.
It’s no surprise that Graham Greene would find little to enjoy in either the friendship of Ian Fleming or the content of Fleming’s books. Despite sharing careers as British secret agents and as writers, the two men couldn’t have been more unalike. Fleming, a passionate bon vivant who worked during the war in the office of one of Naval Intelligence’s most respected admirals; Greene, a disillusioned and bipolar introvert who spent the war surrounded by the sort of double agents and dirty tricks Fleming was busy devising back in London, and on top of that mentored by a senior intelligence officer named Kim Philby, who was eventually discovered to himself be a double agent, spying on the British for the Soviet Union (where he defected to in 1963, then assuming a role with the KGB). Fleming and Greene took very different things away from their wartime service, and the two sets of experience were not particularly compatible.
Even More Bitter
Equally famous, equally divergent from Fleming, and equally fond of Pink Gin was another of Britain’s celebrated writers, John Le Carre. Pink Gin is the drink of choice of Jerry Westerby in Le Carre’s novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Where Fleming sought to excise real-world politics from his book in all but the vaguest of allusions (“the Soviets are the bad guys — and even that he abandoned in favor of SPECTRE), John Le Carre’s thrillers were considerably darker, more cynical, and more directly related to the realities of the post-WW2 Cold War. In 1966, Le Carre famously trashed Fleming’s creation, saying in an interview:
“I dislike Bond. I’m not sure that Bond is a spy. I think that it’s a great mistake if one’s talking about espionage literature to include Bond in this category at all. It seems to me he’s more some kind of international gangster with, as it is said, a licence to kill… he’s a man entirely out of the political context. It’s of no interest to Bond who, for instance, is president of the United States or of the Union of Soviet Republics.”
Born David John Moore Cornwell in 1931, the man who would later adopt the pen name John Le Carre had a substantially rougher childhood than both the pampered Fleming and the troubled Greene. His mother abandoned the family when Le Carre was only five years old, and his father was a conman who spent time in prison for insurance fraud. He wa an able student but chafed under what he considered to be a rigid and overly harsh academic regime. In 1948, he withdrew from British school system and transferred to the University of Bern in Switzerland. In 1950 he joined the Intelligence Corps of the British Army in Austria, where his proficiency with German got him the assignment of conducting the questioning of political refugees fleeing communist East Germany. He returned to England in 1952 but maintained his covert career, spying on far-left political groups at Lincoln College, Oxford, and looking for possible Soviet spies while in the employ of MI5, British Security Service. By 1958, Cornwell was a full-fledged MI5 officer, handling field agents and plotting operations. It was during this time that, encouraged by his friend, fellow spy, and author of crime thrillers John Michael Ward Bingham, 7th Baron Clanmorris, to write a novel. Lord Clanmorris himself would become one of the two models (the other being Vivian Hubert Howard Green, one of Le Carre’s professors at Lincoln College) for the eventual book’s main character, the semi-retired secret agent George Smiley. The book, which Cornwell published under the pseudonym John Le Carre (he was by then in the employ of the Foreign Office, and agents for the Foreign Office were forbidden from publishing anything under their real name), was titled Call for the Dead.
Although they share an affinity for whisky and work for British intelligence, there is little else similar between Fleming’s James Bond and Le Carre’s George Smiley (arguably the second most famous British spy in literary history, after Bond of course). Smiley is chubby, bookish, unhappily separated from his wife, and possessed of considerably more empathy (and stolid British politeness) than 007. He would appear frequently in Le Carre’s novels, sometimes as a main character, other times among the shadows in the background, and has been portrayed by actors as disparate in style and appearance as Rupert Davies, James Mason, Alec Guinness, and Gary Oldman, the last two both appearing in adaptations of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Le Carre’s third novel, the bitter and bleak The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, is widely regarded as one of the best espionage stories ever written, and like Graham Greene before him, the game of deception and false intelligence reports so proficiently devised by Agent Garbo became in part the inspiration for Le Carre’s 1996 novel, The Tailor of Panama (which was made into a film in 2001 starring then James Bond Pierce Brosnan).
As different as their writing styles might have been from one another’s, it’s hard to think of a more quintessentially British circle of espionage novelists than Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, and John Le Carre (I suppose if you could work John Buchan in somehow; he, at least, probably would have gotten along with Fleming and appreciated James Bond) . One could easily imagine them sitting (uncomfortably) at a table together at The Savoy, ordering a round of Pink Gins.
Cock and Bull Stories
Back in the 18th century, the bar tabs of tipsy Mr. Pitt and Mr. Rose include another notable drink: Mr. Pitt’s “cock-tail, vulgarly known as a ginger.” As for what exactly it was, we shall probably never know. However, if we hazard an assumption based on his contemporary Mr. Rose’s affection for gin and bitters, it’s entirely possible that Mr. Pitt’s mysterious cock-tail was gin and ginger, which in the parlance of modern cocktails, would something perhaps not entirely unlike a Ginger Mule (though that cocktail wouldn’t come about until the middle of the 20th century, as a variation on the Moscow Mule invented in 1941 as a way to promote vodka and Cock ‘n’ Bull brand ginger beer). As for why this drink was called a “cock-tail,” well that’s another one shrouded entirely in legend and hearsay, some of which claims the word was British slang for a woman of easy virtue, others claiming it was a reference to the American habit of ruining perfectly good gin by adding other ingredients to it — a cock-tail that became known as the cocktail.
Another story claims the name was invented by French soldiers drinking in an American tavern in 1779, where the proprietor Betsy Flanagan adorned her drinks with feathers plucked from a rooster’s tail, resulting in the convivial soldiers shouting, “Vive le cocktail!” The only problem with this origin story is that Betsy Flanagan wasn’t a real person; she was a character from James Fenimore Cooper’s seminal work of espionage fiction, The Spy, published in 1821. Still another tale — perhaps the most plausible, is that the name was derived from colloquial American English, in which “cock” was a term referring to the tap on a barrel of spirits and “tail” a term referring to the dregs at the bottom of said barrel, which would be mixed together and sold at a reduced rate as a “cocktail.”
Whatever the etymology of the word, Mr. Pitt certainly ordered himself one, and regardless of whether the phrase was born in England or the United States, and regardless of how far back you want to trace the concept of mixed drinks being “cocktails,” the concept of cocktails as we know them today, and of the culture surrounding them, most definitely begins in the United States, in New York City, at a place called the City Hotel.
Cocktails in New York
In 1790, New York City was the capital of the fledgling United States of America. George Washington had been sworn in as the country’s first President the previous year, on the steps of Federal Hall and not far from Fraunces Tavern, a popular drinking spot where Washington met with his officers to raise a mug and bid them farewell at the end of the American Revolution. Federal Hall, the site of Washington’s inauguration, was demolished in 1812. Fraunces Tavern, the site of Washington’s drinking with his troops, remains to this day, located at 54 Pearl Street at the corner of Broad Street and featuring an excellent whiskey and beer selection. Further uptown however, or at least what counted as uptown in the 1790s, the City Hotel opened at 115 Broadway, between Cedar and Thames streets.
It was the first true hotel in the country, as opposed to the inns and taverns and coach houses that had served as colonial America’s stop off for the night. An opulent 70-room affair, it soon took its place among the best hotels of the world. In his 1864 novel, Vigor, author Joseph Alfred Scoville referred to Jenning’s City Hotel as where “all the great balls and famous dinners came off, and it was at the City Hotel that strangers of any note stopped when they came to the city.” Among the many amenities it could offer its travelers, tourists, and residents, was a bar. And in that bar, just a couple decades after the hotel first opened, worked a man named Orasmus Willard.
Willard was America’s first celebrity bartender, a man who became renown for his skill at mixing drinks. One of eight brothers, and born in 1791 or 1792 in Massachusetts– around the same time the City Hotel would have been getting off the ground — Willard came to New York and started working at the hotel when he was nineteen. Before long, he had worked his way up, and hotel owner Chester Jennings — who had scandalized the city when he introduced the opulent notion of room service in his hotel, an indulgence that was alternately described as a “dangerous blue-blood habits,” “a menace to the foundations of the Republic,” and “a threat to democracy” — made him a partner. Willard’s deftness with a drink — he is credited with being the first man to think of shrinking the common punchbowl concoction down to an individually mixed drink — was second only to his acclaim as a man of incredible grace and consideration. In the book Reminiscences of an Octogenarian of the City of New York: (1816 to 1860) by Charles Haynes Haswell, Willard is mentioned with reverence for his “urbanity of manner and wonderful remembrance of persons.”
Abram Dayton’s Last Days of Knickerbocker Life in New York, published in 1882, also recalls Willard with fondness and recounts the tale of the sharp and witty barman’s incredible ability to recall even the most casually met of hotel patrons years after their first encounter. Dayton describes Willard as “of short, compact stature; had a well-moulded head, thickly covered with short cropped wiry grey hair, small quick twinkling eyes that seemed never at rest. Of an active, cheerful disposition, he had a ready reply to any question, and greeted each new arrival with an assuring smile of welcome. between him and the traveling public there seemed to exist a bond of sympathetic freemasonry.” So tied to the City Hotel was Willard, according to Dayton, that upon the grand opening of the famed Niblo’s Garden by impresario William Niblo (who, like Chester Jennings, is buried in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery), Willard was invited as a guest of honor. Willard, when finally confronted by the night he was to visit Niblo’s Garden, immediately began searching for a reason to defer and stay at his post at the City Hotel. He settled on his lack of a hat as reason enough to stay in, though in this case his friends would have none of it. They spirited him across the street to the shop of hatter Charles St. John, who issued Willard a new hat on the spot and sent him along to his night at Niblo’s. For his part, St. John had been shocked by the whole affair — not because Willard didn’t own a hat, but because he was actually leaving the hotel for a bit.
Nearly as famous as Willard’s memory for a patron and his dedication to exquisite customer service was his handiness behind the bar. Four of his mixed drinks in particular garnered international acclaim: the apple toddy, sling, peach punch, and a cocktail Bond himself would enjoy in Goldfinger, the mint julep. Throughout the 18th century, if there was one drink, one proto-cocktail, that could be said to define American drinking, it was the apple toddy. Proclaimed by some as the drink of the elegant and elite and others as the preferred tipple of the unwashed masses, the apple toddy’s contradiction makes it a particularly suitable drink for the United States. To make his own take on the apple toddy, Willard would roll apples up in brown paper and pile on top of them glowing embers “till they were thoroughly roasted and quite soft; then a fourth part of apples, a fourth part of brandy, a fourth part of water, a lump of ice, and the whole to be rich with a fourth part of sugar,” which Willard remarked made an “agreeable compound.”
Not too far away from the City Hotel, and not too long after Willard made a name for himself as America’s first celebrity bartender, a man named Jerry Thomas came up with his own version of the popular mixed drink. We shall save the bulk of his story for a bit later, but we can talk about his apple toddy now, and in considerable detail since Thomas was, among other things, the first man to think of writing down all his drink recipes and publishing them as a reference guide. In his 1862 book, he proscribes the following for making an apple toddy:
Take 1 large tea-spoonful of fine white sugar dissolved in a little boiling hot water
1 wine-glass of cider brandy (apple jack)
1/2 of a baked apple
Fill the glass two-thirds full of boiling water, stir up, and grate a little nutmeg on top. Serve with a spoon.
The primary difference between Willard’s and Thomas’ apple toddy is in the base spirit. Willard uses brandy, a spirit made from the distillation of wine. Thomas suggests cider brandy, or apple jack, which is distilled — as you might guess — from apples or apple cider. Applejack was one of the most popular spirits during the American Colonial period. In fact, the oldest continuously licensed distillery in the United States (let’s not count Prohibition) was Laird’s, an applejack maker established in New Jersey in 1780 and whose founder, Robert Laird, instructed no less than part-time distiller turned first President of the United States, George Washington, on the craft of making “cyder spirits.” Laird’s is still in the applejack business and makes two versions of the spirit: the common, inexpensive Laird’s Applejack, which has been cut with inexpensive neutral grain spirit in much the same way blended Scotch whisky is comprised of single malts blended with neutral grain spirits (don’t worry — we’ll come to that); and a rare, more expensive apple brandy, of which there are three expressions (Laird’s Straight Apple Brandy, aged in charred oak barrels for three years; Laird’s Old Apple Brandy, aged for 7 1/2 years; and Laird’s Rare Apple Brandy, aged for 12 years). For the purposes of Jerry Thomas’ apple toddy, Laird’s Applejack is not well suited to the task, though Laird’s Straight Apple Brandy is perfectly reasonable.
Like many drinks of Colonial and Gilded Age America, applejack — as well as the apple toddy — was killed off by Prohibition. In the case of the apple toddy, laborious processes like roasting apples over hot coals were simply too complicated for the sort of fast and dirty libations required by the times. And for applejack, it was simply the fact that so much cheap, poisonous rotgut was made under the name applejack that America abandoned the drink, forgetting the days when a good American applejack could have held it’s own against a fine French calvados (the French version of apple brandy) and remember it only as “Jersey lightning,” toxic swill swung at the very seediest of speakeasies. By the time Prohibition was over, Laird’s had weathered the storm and returned to production, but they were alone. In fact, it wasn’t until the 21st century that American distillers would rediscover the rich history and heritage of making applejack, though to date only a very few Americans, like New York’s Harvest Spirits, making applejack.
The tragic fate of applejack was lamented by no less a bon vivant than writer and all-around man of the world Charles Baker, who in his 1931 book The Gentleman’s Companion (still in print under the title Jigger, Beaker, and Glass: Drinking Around the World), wrote, “It is rather unfortunate that our prohibition era through its raw applejack and Jersey Lightning, managed completely to deflect American taste against this fine spirit. Decently aged-in-wood applejack is a fine thing.” He then goes on to detail his own version of an apple toddy, dubbed the Jersey Lighthouse and which he first encountered whilst drinking at a New Jersey inn with acclaimed author William Faulkner, among others:
“Into a tumbler place 2 lumps of sugar, a dash or 2 of Angostura, 3 or 4 cloves, a spiral of lemon peel. Onto this pour two jiggers of ancient applejack, fill with boiling water, float on 1 tbsp applejack at the last and serve blazing merrily.”
America Invades England
By the end of the 19th century, many rich Americans visiting London were staying at the Savoy. The bartender is residence there, a man by the name of Frank Wells, was inspired by the work done earlier in the century by barmen like Orasmus Willard and Jerry Thomas. He wanted to import the craft of making the American cocktail to the Savoy, in part to satisfy the Americans who came to drink at the bar. A keen study and talented bartender, Wells soon turned the bar at the Savoy into one of the most acclaimed cocktail bars in the world. The proficiency with which they mixed these American style drinks resulted in the Savoy dubbing Frank Wells’ domain the American Bar.
When Wells retired from the Savoy in 1902, he handed the American Bar over to Ada Coleman, who would become the world’s first female celebrity bartender and the world’s first bartender to tame the powerful flavor of Fernet Branca and make it work in a cocktail, the Hanky Panky. Her career behind the bar began in 1899, after the death of her father. He had worked at a golf resort owned by Rupert D’Oyly Carte, son of the man who built the Savoy. Fond of the Colemans, Rupert offered Ada a job at one of his hotels, working in the bar at Claridges. Under the stewardship of the bar’s wine butler, young Ada learned how to make cocktails, her first being a Manhattan. She proved such an adept bartender that the job of head bartender at the Savoy;s American bar was offered to her upon Wells’ retirement. While there, she became one of the great icons of turn-of-the-century bartending, mixing drinks for everyone from Mark Twain to “Diamond” Jim Brady. Like Orasmus Willard before her, “Coley” focused not just on the technical aspects of bartending — making drinks — but also on the hospitality side of things. She was beloved by all. Except for one.
While Ada Coleman is known for the Hanky Panky, the fact that it is the only drink attributed to her in the famous Savoy Cocktail Book is almost certainly not a reflection of reality. It is, however a reflection of the prejudices of its author, Harry Craddock, a Brit turned American returned Brit who ran the American Bar upon Ada Coleman’s retirement in 1924, and wrote the legendary Savoy Cocktail Book in 1930. Born in Stroud in 1876, Craddock came of age in the United States, where he became a citizen and worked as a bartender at New York’s famed Knickerbocker Hotel, among others. He made a name for himself as a bartender of exceptional talent, but Prohibition cut his career in the United States short. By his own claim, he shook the last legal cocktail in the United States. The next day, the first day of Prohibition, he was on a ship bound for England, where he quickly found work at the Savoy’s American Bar. And here is where some speculation kicks in.
It’s possible that Craddock, already a seasoned veteran of the cocktail scene (and one with the added exotic appeal of being an American), chafed at the thought of working the cocktail making assembly line. And he certainly did not think he should be working under women, Ada Coleman and her assistant behind the bar, Ruth Burgess. According to The Deans of Drink, a 2013 study of the lives and careers of Harry Craddock and fellow bartender Harry Johnson written by Jared McDaniel Brown and Anistatia Renard Miller, shortly after his arrival at the American Bar, Craddock began a campaign to undermine the position of Coley as head bartender. Craddock didn’t just think that he shouldn’t be subservient to a female bartender; he didn’t think women belonged behind a bar at all (a silly, if not surprising, opinion given the fact that, since the earliest days of taverns, women played key roles as both drink makers and owners). According to Craddock, citing his experience in America as an American, his fellow countrymen would be put off by the presence of a woman behind the bar.
There is absolutely nothing in the career of Ada Coleman as the head bartender at the American Bar to back this up. She was, by all accounts, supremely popular and her skill as a bartender much praised by all for whom she mixed a drink, Americans included. But Craddock was a persuasive voice in the ear of the hotel’s management, convincing the hotel that they would be better off with an American — and a man — in charge. By 1924, he had successfully forced Coleman and Burgess both out of the American Bar. Fearing that such foul treatment of a beloved icon of the Savoy in particular and London in general would result in blowback, The Savoy convinced Ada to frame it as a retirement. In 1925, Harry Craddock was promoted to the position of head bartender at the American Bar. Ada Coleman was transferred.
To the hotel’s flower shop.
Whatever he may have lacked in character as a human being, there’s no denying that Harry Craddock was able to put his money where his mouth was when it came to being a bartender. He was also an exceptionally canny promoter, both of the bar and of himself. He would write articles for papers and challenge politicians tempted to throw their lot in with the temperance movement to taste one of his cocktails and see if they could honestly say it didn’t enhance their enjoyment of a meal and of life. He claimed to have invented over 240 cocktails during his career — three in one day, for a willing journalist. With the publication of Savoy Cocktail Book, he cemented his reputation as the world’s most famous bartender. And indeed the book is a foundation text for anyone interested in the craft or history of cocktails, though one is rightfully incredulous at the book’s implication by omission that, in two decades behind the bar as one of the Savoy’s pioneering mixologists, Ada Coleman ever created one drink worth writing down. Still, as Jerry Thomas’ manual had done a century before, Craddock’s book saved countless cocktail recipes from being forgotten. In fact, the book is considered so important to the art and business of cocktails that it is still in print and still regularly updated as new bartenders at the Savoy create new drinks.
Of the many cocktails Craddock mixed at the American Bar at the Savoy Hotel, none is more identified with him than the White Lady, the drink most favored by the hapless spy Fred Leiser, a naturalized Englishman of Polish background in John Le Carre’s Looking Glass War. Enamored with British culture and self-conscious about his own Slav-ness (in much the same way, perhaps, as Dusko Popov’s best friend, Johnny Jebsen), Leiser studiously attempts to mimic (with only moderate success) the affectations of what he thinks to be an upstanding, standard issue Englishman. Among those affectations is his fondness for the White Lady.
White Lady
2 ounces London dry gin
1/2 ounce Cointreau
1/2 ounce lemon juice
1 egg white
Shake well with cracked ice, then strain into a chilled cocktail glass.
Although Craddock claimed the drink of his own, cocktail historian David Wondrich credits the actual invention of the drink to a bartender by the name of Harry MacElhone. A celebrity bartender in his own right, MacElhone tended bar at the Plaza Hotel in New York before Prohibition chased him, like Harry Craddock, out of the United States. He found employment in London, at the posh Ciro’s Club, before opening his own bar in Paris: Harry’s New York Bar. One of the most famous European cocktail bars of all time. The very place a young James Bond went drinking the night he lost his virginity.
According to Wondrich, MacElhone created the White Lady in 1919 while working at Ciro’s. MacElhone’s original version of the drink (which Wondrich described in a column for Esquire as “the color of chlorine gas and unhealthily sweet, like the smell of orchids”) contained one notable difference from the recipe presented by Craddock in the Savoy Cocktail Book: creme de menthe. However, in the end this proved too much ever for MacElhone, who by the time the drink was being made at his bar in Paris, had replaced the creme de menthe with gin. It is this revision to the recipe that Craddock claims as his own, and while there is no way to prove it one way or another, it seems more likely that a different bartender (Craddock) would make as dramatic a change as swapping out creme de menthe for gin, rather than the man who came up with the creme de menthe in the first place (MacElhone) suddenly having a change of heart.
Creme de menthe is a sweet liqueur made by soaking dried peppermint or Corsican mint leaves in grain alcohol for several weeks. The resultant flavored spirit is then filtered and dosed with sugar (and in some cases, green dye). In the Bond franchise, there is no bigger fan of creme de menthe than SPECTRE’s second in command in the novel Thunderball, Emilio Largo. while he doesn’t go for the creme de menthe version of the White Lady (by the 1960s, that version would have been long forgotten in favor of the gin variation), Largo loves no drink more than he does the creme de menthe frappe, an oddly silly, even childish drink for a character that is otherwise one of the most macho and imposing in any of Fleming’s books.
Creme de Menthe Frappe
Crème de Menthe
shaved ice
maraschino cherry
Fill a cocktail or wine glass to the top with shaved ice. Add the Crème de Menthe, and put the cherry on top. Serve with a straw.
This is not to imply that creme de menthe is incapable of rendering a tasty cocktail. It’s greatest triumph is the Stinger, an exceptional cocktail that Bond himself consumes in the book Diamonds are Forever. The Bond Girl of the story, Tiffany Case, consumes several more throughout the slim volume.
Stinger
1½ oz. Brandy
½ oz. White Crème de Menthe
Shake ingredients with ice, and strain into a cocktail glass.
When it comes to taste in creme de menthe cocktails, the advantage is definitely to Tiffany Case.
The War Room Bar Room
In May of 1939, Ian Fleming joined the staff of Rear Admiral John Godfrey at Naval Intelligence. That same year, Harry Craddock departed The Savoy, so its unlikely the legendary barkeep ever made a cocktail for Fleming — at least at The Savoy. Harry Craddock was replaced as head bartender at the American Bar by a man named Eddie Clark. Clark was the Savoy’s bartender throughout the Blitz (the bombing of London by the German air force). Clark was the bartender when the Savoy became the de facto headquarters of much of the British war effort, especially the covert and clandestine aspects of it. And so it would have been Eddie Clark making the drinks for everyone from Ian Fleming to Noel Coward to Winston Churchill himself. During his tenure behind the bar amid the tumult of the Blitz, Clark created a cocktail for each branch of the armed services: “Eight Bells” for the Navy (as if they weren’t all just drinking Pink Gin), “New Contemptible” for the Army, and “Wings” for the R.A.F.
Clark also enlisted in Britain’s Mercantile Marine War Reserve, and in 1942 he was called up to serve, turning the bar over to his friend and co-worker, Reginald “Johnnie” Johnson, who saw the American Bar through the rest of the war and clear into the dawn of mid-century cocktail culture, retiring in 1954. He created a cocktail, Wedding Bells, in honor of the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip. And in 2012, the Savoy was still innovating — and paying homage to James Bond. As a tie-in to the publication of the James Bond novel Carte Blanche by Jeffery Deaver, the American Bar unveiled the Carte Blanche cocktail. Deaver’s novel is a bit of a reboot of the Bond literary franchise (after all, it’s awful hard in 2012 to talk about 007’s time in WWII or fighting SMERSH) that updates Bond to modern times and makes him a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. It’s also pretty well packed with modern spirits mentioned by name, most of them whiskey. As an homage to Casino Royale and the Vesper, Deaver includes a scene in which Bond invents a new cocktail while sitting at a bar. He didn’t name it, but the Savoy American Bar’s bartender Erik Lorincz did.
The Carte Blanche
2 ounces Crown Royal Whisky
1/2 ounce triple sec
2 dashes Angostura bitters
Add ingredients to a shaker with ice and shake vigorously. Strain into a glass filled with ice and garnish with a twist of orange peel.
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