Hey kids! It’s Jan 1 and you know what that means? What? No, not hangovers! Well, yes – for some it means hangovers but it also means it’s Bloody Mary Day!
The Bloody Mary – a classic American cocktail. Favored by brunch eaters everywhere, popularly believed to cure hangovers (it doesn’t but it explains how Jan 1 became devoted to this particular drink) and a drink of such infinite variety that you could declare it Bloody Mary month and have a different version everyday without duplication. What makes it such a contortionist of a cocktail? The complexity of it and also the simplicity. Sounds contradictory, right? It isn’t.
The basis of the Bloody Mary is vodka and tomato juice. Simple enough. Beyond that, there is a dazzling array of spices and flavors designed to produce a drink both sweet and savoury, sour and spicy.
The vodka and tomato juice are joined by Worcestershire sauce (and/or Tabasco), beef bouillon, horseradish, celery, salt and pepper and lemon juice. That, at least, are the ingredients everyone seems to agree on. Quite often, cayenne pepper, celery salt, and olives find their way in (the cayenne being one of the ingredients initially included before the creation of Tabasco sauce).
Why the lack of definitiveness? Probably linked to the evolutionary nature of cocktails. The Bloody Mary as we know it today came into being in the 1930s but the basic building blocks of the drink came together in Paris (or Florida, depending on who you believe) in the 1920s. In version one, a bartender named Fernand Petiot is working in Paris at Harry’s New York Bar. He mixes equal parts tomato juice and vodka. Version two takes place in Palm Beach at the home of George Jessel who always claimed that HE invented the Bloody Mary. Regardless of when the basic components came together, it is generally agreed that the drink we know today – all spice and sour, sweet and savoury – came to be at the hands of Petiot, who had returned to New York after Prohibition and was working at the time in the St. Regis Hotel.
But what if vodka isn’t your thing? No worries – there’s a Bloody Mary variant for you.
- Replace the vodka with bourbon for a Bloody Derby,
- Use absinthe to get a Bloody Fairy,
- Tequila for a Bloody Maria,
- Gin for a Bloody Margaret.
Want to keep the vodka but mix up the mixers? They’ve got those to. Replace the tomato juice with:
- Clam juice for a Bloody Caesar,
- V8 juice for a Bloody Eight,
- Pineapple juice for a Commander White.
You can also change the format entirely – freezing your way to a Frozen Bloody Mary, leaving the booze out entirely for a virgin Mary (or as they call it in Australia a Bloody Shame) or keeping the booze and spice and forgoing the mixer altogether for a Bloodless Mary.
So next time you’re having folks over for brunch and want to try something a little different, mix up a pitcher of slightly twisted Bloody Marys… hmmmm… a Twisted Mary? What would that be? Maybe one with lime juice instead of lemon? I think I may need to try that out.