by Wayne Curtis
I sniffed the air in the shampooing room. I detected allspice, perhaps, and maybe nutmeg or dried orange peel. I asked Roberts about gentian root, and he shrugged, admitting to nothing. I pointed out to him that this is the one and only ingredient listed on the label. Roberts looked at me as if I had greatly underestimated him. He shrugged again.
Whatever it is, the formula has evidently been unchanged since 1824. It was the handiwork of a German named Dr. Johann Gottlieb Benjamin Siegert, an adventurer who became the surgeon general of Simón Bolívar’s rebel army at Bolívar’s base of operations, a town called Angostura up the Orinoco River in present-day Venezuela. (The town is now Ciudad Bolívar.)
Siegert was directed to produce salves and potions to treat the troops, especially for various tropical ailments that proved more fatal to the rebel army than wounds suffered in combat. Siegert concocted remedies and tisanes by gathering herbs, bark, and roots. (Exactly which? Who needs to know?) He infused these in bottles of rum. He spent much of his time tinkering and perfecting one of his infusions, which he called amargo aromatico, or aromatic bitters. When the fight for independence concluded, Siegert remained in Angostura, and seamen who arrived at the river port started seeking him out and asking for his bitters, which not only relieved gastric discomfort but made most drinks taste better.
Today, the four-ounce dark brown bottle of Angostura bitters has an oddly oversized paper label that extends up to where the bottle’s side curves into the bottle’s neck. The label has been aptly described as having the appearance of a child unhappily wearing his big brother’s jacket. The company ascribes this packaging quirk to miscommunication between the printer and the bottler, but the issue went unresolved long enough for the ill-fitting label to become integral to the product’s identity. In 1995, the British Advertising Council voted Angostura bitters as the “world’s worst displayed product.” In the same announcement, the council urged Angostura never to change it.
* * *
—
Angostura’s weren’t the first or even best known bitters of the nineteenth century. During the Haitian revolution of the 1790s, when slaves overthrew their French masters and established the first black republic in history, the family of a French Haitian named Antoine Peychaud fled the island for New Orleans. In his new home, he became a pharmacist and produced bitters concocted of various barks and spices, thought to be the first commercially sold in North America. Most of his customers presumably bought bitters as a tonic to relieve a queasy stomach, but Peychaud had the imagination to add several drops as a flavoring to a cognac, which he served to customers in an eggcup. The French called the cup a coquetier, but it was mangled by English speakers and became “cocktail.”
Et voilà: the first cocktail. At least that’s a popular, if discredited, theory behind the name—etymologists agree chiefly that any reliable documentation about the name’s origin is lost. Other explanations include the odd notion that a strong drink was said to “cock your tail,” which was a way of telling a show dog to keep its tail up. Some suggested that the remains of various kegs—supposedly called cock-tailings—were mixed together and sold in early taverns. Other accounts include roosters in various forms—that the first mixed drink was stirred with a rooster feather, and that topers once toasted the winner of cockfights. These explanations strain credulity, making the coquetier explanation seem reasonable by comparison. Unfortunately, recent research by Phillip Greene, one of Peychaud’s descendents, found that Peychaud actually left Haiti in 1803, when he was less than a year old. The first known appearance in print of the word cocktail referring to an alcoholic drink dates to May 1806, when it appeared in a Hudson, New York, newspaper. “He must have been a precocious little pharmacist at the age of three,” Greene notes drily. So the debate over the name’s origin goes on.
Cocktail is today a generic term, but in the late nineteenth century it meant just one of many types of intoxicating drinks, among them fizzes, rickeys, slings, juleps, and cobblers. A cocktail always included bitters. In its earliest documented use in 1806, a cocktail was defined as “a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water and bitters.” Even as late as the 1880s, more than half the recipes for cocktails in one guide called for bitters.
Bitters were far more common and esteemed then, and discerning drinkers were more sophisticated when it came to using them. Medicinal bitters were particularly popular in nineteenth-century America, especially where local option laws banned liquor sales. Hotstetter’s Stomach Bitters contained 44 percent alcohol and was advertised as “harmless as water from a mountain spring.” Others included Luther’s Temperance Bitters, Drake’s Plantation Bitters, Flint’s Quaker Bitters, and Faith Whitcom’s Nerve Bitters, all of which had an alcohol content somewhere between wine and 90 proof liquor, and none of which probably tasted much worse than the bootlegged liquor then available. Cooling Cups and Dainty Drinks, published in 1869, provides recipes for the home mixologist to make seven types of bitters. Even in 1939, six years after Prohibition ended, a popular bar guide detailed the “eight main bitters” used in drink preparations. In 1944, when Ernest Hemingway departed Cuba to report on the war in Europe, his luggage consisted of a toothbrush, a comb, and “innumerable two-ounce bottles of Angostura bitters,” according to one of his friends, because the novelist had been informed that bitters were in desperately short supply owing to the depredations of German submarines.
Angostura remains the most common bitters in use today, a position earned not only through longevity but through attention to quality—it is a distinguished product, and one that rarely fails in its job of enlivening a cocktail. Peychaud’s may be found more easily these days in liquor stores and specialty markets, as it’s an essential ingredient in the rye-based Sazerac cocktail, a popular New Orleans staple undergoing a well-deserved revival. And in the past decade, the bitters floodgates have opened wide and broad, with dozens of bitters producers now issuing forth with products made from antique formulas once considered lost (including Abbott’s, Boker’s, and Stoughton’s), along with exotic new-wave bitters made from nontraditional ingredients, including hopped grapefruit, Mexican mole, lavender, charred pineapple, Thai peanut, and, inevitably, pumpkin spice.
Future generations will marvel at the range of bitters available in the early twenty-first century, just as many today are astounded at the nineteenth-century bitters cornucopia. The innumerable small, dusty bottles found in the back of their future grandparents’ liquor cabinets may suggest cultlike activities taking place during the great cocktail revival at the dawn of the 2000s, and this may not be far from the truth.
* * *
—
The nineteenth-century appetite for bitters grew as the twentieth century neared, and exotic flavorings eventually came to be mixed increasingly with sugar and water and consumed without alcohol as a refreshment. Bitters and today’s soft drinks are two branches of the same family tree. Early soft drinks were sugary syrups made of infused fruits, nuts, and roots, then diluted with water containing what was then called “fixed air,” later “charged water,” and today carbonated or soda water. Impressively elaborate soda fountains with marble counters and carved back bars cropped up in big cities to serve beguiling new products to an eager public in the 1870s and 1880s, a process as filled with ritual as the opium dens of the Orient.
An 1876 temperance article about an excursion to a saloon noted, “The only unalcoholic drink found in the shop is that known as soda water or sometimes sold in bottles as mineral water, which owes its slightly exhilarating effects to the carbonic acid gas compressed into the liquid and which throws the water into effervescence when the pressure is removed. The pleasant taste is due to the sirups used, and the gentile excitement to the impression of the carbonic acid on the stomach. This is a wholesome and unalcoholic drink.”
The more complex and exotic the ingredients in soda syrups, the more firmly they seized the pu
blic’s imagination. In 1876, a Philadelphia Quaker named Charles Hires trademarked his now-famous root beer, which he boasted was made from no fewer than sixteen wild roots and berries. In 1885, Dr. Augustin Thompson of Lowell, Massachusetts, introduced the world to Moxie Nerve Food, a fizzy drink with an acrid medicinal taste that was curiously soil-like. Thompson sold oceans of it thanks to a story so wildly implausible that people thought it must have been true. He claimed that an adventurous associate named Lieutenant Moxie had in his jungle wanderings stumbled upon an elusive South American tribe that gained superhuman strength by brewing a beverage from a mysterious root. While coyly insisting that his nerve food was not a medicine, Thompson suggested that four glasses daily would prove highly beneficial; it would relieve brain and nervous exhaustion, “loss of manhood,” paralysis, and mental imbecility, among other afflictions. Like Angostura bitters, Moxie is flavored in part with gentian root; it’s still produced today and remains popular in certain precincts of New England. A glass of iced Moxie, it should be noted, mixes splendidly with a jigger of Jamaican or Demerara rum.
Moxie was the nation’s top-selling beverage until the 1920s, when it was overtaken by a soft drink of even more exotic ingredients. Its inventor was a pharmaceutical chemist from Atlanta named John Pemberton. He concocted it with infusions of the coca plant from the Peruvian Andes and the high-caffeine kola nut from Africa, then tempered it with seven secret flavoring agents. Pemberton named the drink after its principal ingredients: Coca-Cola.
Coca-Cola’s taste was distinctive, at once bitter and sweet, and it quickly moved ahead of the mob of nerve tonics and soda fountain drinks. The fledgling company distributed thousands of coupons redeemable for free samples and later established a far-flung network of franchisees that bottled and sold its product. But what brought Coca-Cola to the fore and kept it there was its legendary flair in trademarking and marketing. Early on, the company directors understood the power of a memorable brand, a remarkable achievement when many consumer staples were still purchased as bulk goods. The graceful script logo and the slogan “Delicious and Refreshing” were established by 1887, and by 1913 the company started splashing its distinctive script on the sides of buildings. The same year, the company distributed 100 million items, ranging from matchbooks to baseball cards to metal and cardboard signs, emblazoned with the soon-to-be inescapable Coca-Cola script logo. In 1916, the company started selling its product in a sensuous pale green bottle that was as memorable to the touch as the flavor was to the taste.
From its base in Atlanta, Coca-Cola first captured southern markets, then deployed its troops to conquer a nation. Coca-Cola moved from the corner fountain to the bottling plant in 1894, first in Mississippi, and then nationwide in 1899 after setting up a licensing agreement with a pair of Nashville entrepreneurs. About the same time, Coca-Cola also took its first tentative steps abroad. Canada and Germany were among the earliest global markets for the company, as was one other country that had recently gained its independence: Cuba. And when Coca-Cola crossed the Straits of Florida, a dalliance with the local spirit was never in doubt.
* * *
—
“War is probably the single most powerful instrument of dietary change in human experience,” writes historian Sidney Mintz. Shortages force folks on the home front to change their expectations of what’s for dinner. Expeditionary forces in distant lands not only sample new and exotic foods, but also contaminate local fare with ingredients they’ve brought along.
The same may be said for habits of drink. Soldiers abroad find new and appealing means of intoxication and seek to re-create them when they return; at home, consumers adapt to shortages of old favorites by developing a preference for something more widely available. Such a shift might start begrudgingly and evolve into genuine enthusiasm. The English war against Holland introduced gin to the British Isles in the sixteenth century and launched a lethal mania that took two centuries to quell. The American Revolution disrupted the rum trade and helped usher in whiskey as the American tipple. After massive numbers of American troops left for home from Europe following World War II, they brought with them a new taste for French brandy and wine, along with German schnapps. World War II also introduced a generation of American soldiers to a new kind of rum.
One story suggests that like the daiquiri, rum and Coca-Cola has its roots in the Spanish-American War. In the 1960s, a man named Fausto Rodriguez signed an affidavit that in 1900, while a messenger with the U.S. Army Signal Corps, he and an officer friend (name redacted in the affidavit) went to a local bar, where the officer ordered a Bacardi and Coca-Cola. American soldiers ordered a round for themselves and, finding it to their liking, toasted the officer as the inventor of a new and delightful drink.
It is rare and exciting for a cocktail historian to find a legal affidavit attesting to the invention of a popular drink, but several details render this one suspect. First, it was published in a full-page ad in 1966 by Life magazine—and paid for by Bacardi, which was promoting itself as the source of many famous drinks. More troublingly, Rodriguez was well known in spirits circles as the New York–based director of publicity for Bacardi. As such, the document is only slightly more believable than a man dressed as Santa Claus telling you that he is, in fact, Santa Claus.
A slightly more plausible variation of the creation myth involves similar elements: American soldiers in Cuba, the Spanish-American War, a group of Cubans and Americans in a bar. But this one has the soldiers mixing rum and Coca-Cola and toasting their Cuban comrades in arms by calling out, “Por Cuba libre!”—“to a free Cuba!”
Whatever its origin (and it is the lot of the cocktail historian never to be fully satisfied), it’s clear that the Cuba libre or rum and Coke crossed the Straits of Florida and headed north. It was initially most popular in the American South, like Coca-Cola itself. During Prohibition, Coca-Cola emerged as a handy mixer to mask the taste of the lower grades of rum and other alcohol; after Repeal, rum and Coke continued to gain adherents north and west. Only the most vile and industrial rum can overpower the Coke and spoil the drink. H. L. Mencken noted, presumably in jest, that residents of western South Carolina mixed Coca-Cola with denatured alcohol drawn from automobile radiators: “Connoisseurs reputedly preferred the taste of what had been aged in Model-T Fords,” he said. George Jean Nathan—who spent much of the Prohibition editing Smart Set with Mencken—introduced a writer for Gourmet to the delights of the Cuba libre, evidence that it had also found a home with a swankier crowd.
Rum and Coca-Cola is, by any measure, a drink of inspired blandness, with its two main ingredients both plentiful and cheap. It requires few if any skills to prepare: It is not a cocktail, like the daiquiri, that can be toppled into an overly sweet or tart imbalance with a sloppy pouring hand. It can be made heavy or light on rum, with rum that’s either light or heavy. If you have a lime to add a bit of citrusy zest to a rum and Coke, wonderful. If not, no matter. Some early published recipes make lime a mere garnish—a thin slice dropped in at the end—while others call for substantially more. A 1940 recipe calls for filling nearly half a glass with rum, the other half with Coke, and then squeezing in the juice of half a lime. More exotic versions of the Cuba libre include one (popular before Prohibition) that calls for the addition of gin and bitters. But these are mere curiosities. Basic rum and Coca-Cola was the perfect drink for the masses. It would need only the lightning of popular culture to transform it from what cocktail writer William Grimes has called “a harmless invention” into an enduring icon.
* * *
—
The main action of World War II unfolded in Europe, Asia, and Africa, but another theater of combat had quietly opened in the West Indies. German submarines had taken to sinking cargo ships along trade routes, and they took an especially keen interest in ships carrying oil from the South American coast and bauxite (needed for aluminum production) from island mines.
Not only
did the German submarines inconvenience the war effort, they marked the first direct threat to American shores since the British sacked and burned the U.S. Capitol in 1812. Long protected by two oceans from rival powers, the United States found itself suddenly at risk of attack from a foreign power. As historian Fitzroy Baptiste put it, submarines were a first-generation intercontinental ballistic weapon system, able to bring ruin and mayhem around the globe to American soil with a simple coded message from abroad.
In the summer of 1940, Franklin Delano Roosevelt met with Winston Churchill to address the threat. The deal they hammered out was this: the United States would provide England with fifty Liberty ships and a million rifles to aid the war effort. In return, the United States would get ninety-nine-year leases to construct a first line of defense in the form of bases on British controlled islands that included Newfoundland, the Bahamas, Jamaica, St. Lucia, Antigua, Bermuda, and Trinidad. Within months of the agreement, thousands of servicemen had been deployed to beef up national defenses at the United States’ extended eastern perimeter.
The impact of the military influx on island life was abrupt and profound. Bermuda’s local population of 31,000 soared by 20 percent almost overnight. Trinidad became home to the largest Caribbean naval base, with American military occupying 34,000 acres and the island population of 400,000 swelling with the arrival of 130,000 U.S. soldiers, airmen, and sailors. The great flood of servicemen to the islands resulted in cross-cultural ferment as the soldiers adapted to local flavors and islanders, in turn, clamored for American products. On Bermuda, bartenders reported in 1941 that rum was now beating out beer as the drink of choice among the soldiers, in large part for economic reasons—beer cost 30 cents a glass and rum 25 cents. When the newfound appreciation for the spirit led to rowdiness near bases, bars were ordered closed between lunch and dinner, and an 11:00 p.m. curfew was mandated. The U.S. military brass did their part to keep servicemen from causing trouble by reducing the price of beer to 10 cents on the base.
