In honor of Bastille Day, Bloody Mary’s are in order. The French connection is that a French bartender Fernand Petiot supposedly invented the drink in the early 20’s at Harry’s New York Bar in Paris (click here for story.) (I say supposedly because there is some debate about the BM’s origins.) The following is from Wikipedia’s entry for Monsieur Petiot.
According to Petiot, the first two customers for whom he made the drink “were from Chicago and they say there is a bar there named the Bucket of Blood. And there is a waitress there everybody calls Bloody Mary. One of the boys said that the drink reminds him of Bloody Mary, and the name stuck.”
Following his move to the United States, Petiot first added salt, lemon and Tabasco sauce — now considered essential ingredients — to the Bloody Mary in order to satisfy requests from American customers for a spicier drink. The New Yorker magazine quoted Fernand Petiot as saying: “I initiated the Bloody Mary of today,” he told us. “George Jessel said he created it, but it was really nothing but vodka and tomato juice when I took it over. I cover the bottom of the shaker with four large dashes of salt, two dashes of black pepper, two dashes of cayenne pepper, and a layer of Worcestershire sauce; I then add a dash of lemon juice and some cracked ice, put in two ounces of vodka and two ounces of thick tomato juice, shake, strain, and pour. We serve a hundred to a hundred and fifty Bloody Marys a day here in the King Cole Room and in the other restaurants and the banquet rooms.”
In the 1930s Petiot tried without success to change the name of the Bloody Mary to the “Red Snapper.”
At Buzzy’s Country Store, Clyde Ridgell has launched a Bloody Mary kick that features Mrs. T Bloody Mary Mix and a shot of either Smirnoff or Absolut vodka. Pretty good drink, but the best Bloody Mary title still belongs to Rick Meatyard of Tall Timbers Marina: