What’s the history of the Bloody Mary cocktail?
In 1917, Chef Louis Perrin, working in a hotel in French Lick, Indiana (what a name for a place) ran out of oranges and used tomatoes instead, inventing tomato juice as we know it today.
(Citation needed, this is a topic with a fair amount of discussion and it's almost certain that Perrin did not actually invent tomato juice. I mean... it's juiced tomato, a fair argument is that it's nature's creation or Gods', whatever keeps your boat afloat. It is mainly put to emphasize that the popularity of tomato juice was burgeoning or resurging at this time.) (I do think he was the first to use it in drinks? But I haven't done any juice research, I beg of you, there is other stuff to talk about (although now; I am intrigued.)
it should also explain why then, in France 1921, we finally have our first claim of the Bloody Mary!
Stating that Fernand Petoit created it in the New York Bar (Now called Harry's New York Bar) in Paris.
The confusion starts here folks!
I don't quite believe Fernand Petoit was the originator of the Bloody Mary. Frankly I'd love to be proven wrong and have this be the easiest question to answer so I can move on with the rest of it's history, but there are two things that frustrate me to think about.
1: I can only find the claim of 1921 being attributed to his grand daughter, rather than him directly. I'd be inclined to just believe historical wear-and-tear on this one, but:
2: He does have a direct quote in 1934 that describes a modernization of the Bloody Mary:
" -it was really nothing but vodka and tomato juice when I took it over"
I may be picking at words. But who says 'take it over' when they are confidently sure they've created it, If it were 1921 -way before all other claims?
To clarify, he's also right. He took the Bloody Mary and ran with it, most people site him as the creator for certain.
All the stories from here get even less clear, to prepare you.
If we zoom a decade forward to the early 1930s, and across the globe to actual New York: We find Henry Zibikiewicz.
There is almost zero information about Henry Zbikiewicz I could find, apart from that he worked as a bartender at 21 Club in New York, and that the bar claims he invented the Bloody Mary.
Let's take a short interval to talk about Henry Zbikiewicz and dead-end research.
I am under the belief that Henry Zbikiewicz was a bartender at 21 Club, and existed. I have found many different utterly too brief ancestry reports and other personal profiles of him (that state that he lived and died, but nothing else), besides this I have no confirmation.
While I would love to search the ends of the earth to discover the truth behind him and his background, I know it either does not exist, or doesn't exist to be found by amateur researchers (self-reference). A lot of information these days is behind pay-walls and internet dives about as deep as the Mariana (trench), and I unfortunately do not have all the time in the world.
What is especially upsetting for me though is finding enough.
I am not certain on anything else.
Let's take a longer interval on the nature of death and memory, along my journey to finally discover the Tumblr max word count.
Throughout my life I have always enjoyed graveyards. They are quiet, serene, undeniably holy/weird/sacred/creepy (change as required); the perfect place to be alone with this feeling of connection still running through the stones and the ground you walk beneath.
I'm quoted as saying 'I could die before you' as a small child, in response to my mother telling us about her refusing medications.
I feel as if this explains my relationship with death quite well, I was aware of it and have interacted with it in a casual way for my whole life.
Ramble, ramble, blah, blah, blah, this is all to say:
I don't fear death. I don't remember a time in my life I did fear death, honestly.
That has always terrified me more than perhaps anything else in this world.
So the grim reaper will have to hold off. Till I do something memorable (I already have, and so have you, it's called being loved and loving).
I hope Henry Zbikiewicz is resting comfortably, I hope somewhere there's a family that is his or a friend that has told a tale of him.
These aren't answerable research questions, they'd be intrusive to find the answers to if they were, but they are so hyper-specific I doubt anyone has taken the time to find and ask.
I'd like to offer my favourite remembrance ritual to you, in trade for giving you existential dread: Go into a graveyard, find a grave (I prefer the older ones or ones that are not up kept, but any is perfectly fine) and recite their name for the week.
This way their memory continues, a little tiny bit of it. A name, alas cannot possibly contain all the things that anything is and was, or all the journeys it went down to end in our same shared fate of belonging to the ground.
A Bloody Mary is in this way quite cyclical. Tomatoes natively grow in France, so along with being a cheap post-war resource, (and good lord did France take a huge blow after The Great War (or WW1) but this is a different subject) it is a symbol of new life. Vodka, is a process of decomposition and fermentation (as all alcohols are) and so I feel represents death in a way.
The other well-known (how much knowledge do normal people have of any of this?) story of invention includes George Jessel, noted 1920's comedian and a socialite named Mary (which is where I swiftly transition from invention to naming).
Apparently he fixed the concoction in order to sober up quickly while hiding the smell of alcohol from his wife, then, when his friend Mary asked to try, it was spilled on her. To which she reportedly said:
'Now you can call me Bloody Mary!'
From the 1920's (anecdotal) it is posited that it was made for a Vladimir Smirnoff (yes, of vodka fame) and named Bloody Mary after the inability to pronounce the Slavic syllables in the name (???).
That absolutely STUMPED me until I actually said it aloud a couple times, in a really bad French accent. The 'Vl' quickly turns into a 'Bl' and can see how the rest slips into place. I hope it was something they were laughing about rather than laughing At Vladimir for.
But according to the manager of that same bar (In the 1920's again, he claims), the drink was named after the first person who ordered it. The first said it reminded him of his girlfriend, who he met in a cabaret called The Bucket Of Blood (naming convention match, not the same show), her name of course being Mary.
But! In the 1930's, where Fernand's cocktail is confirmed, he says himself it was called the 'Red Snapper'!
It was called the 'Mary Rose' in a publication from El Floridita in 1939, and claimed as a new cocktail in Life magazine (MAY be the December 7, 1942 magazine as I can find no other mention of drinks on the extensive list of life magazines (yes I looked through all of them)) as the 'Red Hammer'.
So, everyone says something different, and you have to be a special kind of crazy to look through all of it (you're welcome).
There's one more story, and then I'll leave you, I do hope this has been entertaining, I have worked really hard at this in my spare time to make this awful jumbling mass of spoken word information. I do think I've failed slightly at that.
I'm sure all you brits have been waiting, but bide your time just a couple more seconds before I say one more thing:
There is another story of the Bloody Mary, but I don't want to tell it, because it's not history yet. The violent crime in Chicago and the amount of bars playfully nicknamed 'The Bucket of Blood' there over the years are a later claim to the Bloody Mary. It's a story of a waitress called Mary at one of these 'Buckets' and as much as I think that deserves light shed on it, frankly my mental state is not stable enough to.
I want to try my best to be an ethical source of information, and because of this I do want to mention it, but a longer discussion is not going to be healthy for me right now.
So, with that in mind, I have one last story to tell you.
The nickname 'Bloody Mary' for Mary Queen of Scots, or Mary I is first seen written in a historical series by Charles' Dickens named 'A Child's History of England' in early 1851 to late 1853.
She got her name from the over 280 protestants she had burned during her reign (July 1553- 17 November 1558), although it's disputed whether she was called 'Bloody Mary' by her protestant opponents.
Although this name is indisputably much older than any of the 1900's claims to the name 'Bloody Mary', it's hard to pinpoint if it is the true origin for the cocktail being called the 'Bloody Mary'. If it is the true origin, the people who invented the cocktail have tried very hard to find original reasons to call it that. If it isn't true, it is an odd but not implausible coincidence.
In the very end, when all the Mary dust has settled and all the peppercorns have been crushed into the mix, it's always a story of history and memory.
When the tomatoes are squeezed, the vodka added or left out, celery or parsley garnish presented, lemon juice, salt or just tomato juice.
What is the history of the Bloody Mary?
And who says there has to be one?
My first Bloody Mary was in London in a restaurant I don't remember the name of, before seeing Hadestown, a musical about memory and oral tradition, for my longstanding historical advisor (bullshit checker) 's birthday, it's all memory and perception, even at the beginning.
Now, in this moment, and in the past already for those reading (and you, future Tyler, editor extraordinaire). I sit eating eggs and drinking coffee and writing in a cafe I frequent in my town.
There will be a day I don't remember what the interior looks like, how the coffee tastes, what books I rest one of my arms on, and maybe it will haunt me, or maybe I won't care.
If you haven't had a Bloody Mary before, do!
It might not be your cup of Mary, but it tastes like spicy gazpacho soup and I really like it.
There will be a day you don't remember where you were when you first sipped one, what it tasted like, how much pepper was in it, what kind they used, if it had a full stick of celery in it or just the leafy bits or if it had no garnish at all-
-and maybe it will haunt you. You might go back on your memory and overwrite a grand experience of falling off a cliff, Bloody Mary clasped in one hand as the rocks narrowly avoided, you might tell yourself the harsh bite of the wind rushing by you, you may create perilous rocks below;
But wouldn't you rather have it (the memory) and decide how you feel about it later?
Try new things, or historical revisionism is kinda fine, whichever lesson you'd rather take,
Indirect/various sources:
-A few drinks blog: Who invented the original bloody mary?
-Fernand Petiot: Wiki and Granddaughter blog post
-Life magazine 1942 Archives
-It always begins with a simple search. (Bloody Mary wiki)
Big thanks Henry Zbikewicz, and all the beautiful stories people tell about things, for existing.
And my Sibling, or my historical advisor, for giving me this idea at the restaurant. I almost lost my mind TWICE (Henry Zbikewicz and trying to find the exact Life volume) but it was overall, a very enjoyable experience.
Maybe the next post will take me less than 3 months to write! I doubt it, but the night is young.
