The first cocktail

[jsolomon]

Link via slashdot from Agenzia Giornalistica Italia

The first cocktail ever was made in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago, using wine, beer, apple juice and honey. Patrick McGovern defined the mix as "grog"

And I just thought it was a naval military tradition from post-dark ages. Well, I'll be jiggered!

edit to fix quote tags

Edited September 12, 2005 by jsolomon (log)

[Jamie B]

I thought that, by definition, a cocktail had to have bitters and water as well?

[slkinsey]

I think people have been mixing alcoholic beverages with other ingredients for as long as there have been alcoholic beverages. Not sure that equals "cocktail" though.

[Jason Perlow]

I believe "cocktail" as we define it in the modern era requires the association of bartending and bar culture. So for that, we had to give the nod to New Orleans, not Mesopotamia.

[slkinsey]

Actually, the first printed use of the word "cocktail" comes dates from May 13, 1806, in the magazine Balance and Columbian Repository of Hudson, New York. It was a response to a letter to the editor of asking about the meaning of the word:

Cocktail is a stimulating liquor composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters--it is vulgarly called a bittered sling and is supposed to be an excellent electioneering potion, inasmuch as it renders the heart stout and bold, at the same time that it fuddles the head. It is said, also to be of great use to a Democratic candidate: because a person, having swallowed a glass of it, is ready to swallow anything else.

For sure New Orleans is important in the early history of bar culture. But I'm not positive we can call it "the birthplace of the cocktail." Especially as Antoine Peychaud wasn't doing his thing until the 1830s or so.

Originally, the word "cocktail" was fairly narrowly defined and did not mean "all drinks made with mixed alcoholic beverages" as it does today. At its most narrow, it meant "base spirit, sugar and bitters." Other drinks were called Juleps and Fog Cutters and Slings and Flips and Cobblers and Corpse Revivers, etc. In Professor Jerry Thomas' epochal How to Mix Drinks or The Bon Vivant's Companion of 1862, the section on cocktails is the smallest parf of the book, comprising a dozen or less concoctions. Others are more qualified than I to comment on when the term "cocktail" came to have a meaning closer than the one we have today, but the books in my collection suggest that it happened around the turn of the 19th century into the 20th.