Search Bot Gots: High Class Hooch
Doing investigations for House Cocktails is fun and not just because there is drinking involved. Many drink creation stories have the same veracity as fables or parables. Maybe they hint at the truth of where a drink originated but no one can say for sure who thought it up. Even when a particular drink can be attributed to someone, other interesting history about its ingredients or where it was developed can often be found. This week, my search bot got two stories that make mention of some New Orlean classics while tracking “cocktail history.”
The first of these stories makes passing mention of many cocktails in the Palm Beach Daily society pages. While “mixing it up” at the Flageler Museum, the Whitehall Society celebrated such oldie-but-goodies as pisco punch and the daiquiri. Forget the tipples, though, the life of the man who comissioned the venue makes for entertaining reading. Henry Flagler lost a fortune in salt before doubling down on oil which made him a very rich man. The honeymoon from his first short marriage led to his eventual investments in railroads and hotels in Florida. He later commissioned Whitehall as a vacation home for his third wife after being the only person to benefit from a law he pushed for by divorcing his second wife having declared her to be incurably insane.
At this Floridian celebration of the Gilded Age, another beverage linked to a man of means was served. The Alamagoozlum, credited to J.P. Morgan in a post-prohibition tome, will likely cost you a pretty penny in most bars as it has seven ingredients. I suspect memorizing the components is less challenging than twisting my tongue around its name. That is has egg white, rum, chartreuse, and Angostura has already stuck. Four down, three to go!
Mentioning those aromatic mixers brings back to mind the other “got” from my search bot, a video on New Orleans Cocktail History. In it, SoBou’s Abigail Deirdre Gullo gives us the lowdown on why certain bitters survived Prohibition.
Peychaud’s, invented by a Haitian immigrant 35 years after settling in NOLA, plays a crucial part in two drinks Gullo uses to take us in a whirlwind tour of the Vieux Carré.
Tonight I drank a Ramos Fizz in the name of field research. Light, fluffy, with a slight citrus note… I could get used to gin served this way!
