Bitters and the first cocktail

A cocktail, strictly speaking, is a bittered drink. That is not a matter of taste or fashion. It is the definition, and it was printed in a small-town newspaper in upstate New York two centuries ago. The bitters in that definition had a history of their own, one that runs from a London apothecary's shop through a Venezuelan military hospital to a pharmacy on Royal Street in New Orleans.

Thirteen May, 1806

The Balance, and Columbian Repository was a Federalist weekly in Hudson, New York. On 6 May 1806 it printed a mocking account of a Democratic candidate's election expenses, and among the items charged to the loss column was a quantity of cock-tail. A reader wrote in. He had never heard of the thing and wanted to know what it was.

The editor answered on 13 May. A cock-tail, he wrote, was a stimulating liquor composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water and bitters. It was known in common speech as a bittered sling, and he joked that it suited electioneering because it made the heart bold while it muddled the head. The pairing of sling and cocktail is the useful part. A sling was spirit, sugar and water. Add bitters and you had a cocktail. The drink we now call the Old Fashioned is simply that 1806 formula with ice.

The word was already in use. Pascal Treguer's survey of newspaper archives finds it in a London paper in 1798 and in The Farmer's Cabinet of Amherst, New Hampshire in 1803, where it appears as a morning restorative. The 1806 item matters because it is the first time anyone wrote down what went in the glass.

The apothecary's elixir

Bitters began as medicine, or at least as something sold as medicine. Richard Stoughton was a London apothecary who finished his apprenticeship in 1687 and set up shop just south of London Bridge. Around 1690 he began selling an alcoholic extract of bitter roots, barks and herbs under the name Elixir Magnum Stomachicum. A spoonful turned a pint of ale or a glass of Canary wine into purl, a bittered drink already popular in the city. Within a few years people were adding it to brandy, and then to gin.

Stoughton claimed twenty-two ingredients and never published them. The imitations that followed agree on gentian and bitter orange peel, which remain the backbone of most aromatic bitters today. In 1712 he obtained a royal patent, only the second ever granted for a medicine. It held off copyists for a while, but by the 1730s the name had become a generic term, and bitters of this kind became a standard apothecary line. The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails is direct about what this means: Stoughton's bitters were the defining component of the original cocktail. The bottle stood on American bars until the middle of the nineteenth century, when newer brands displaced it.

A doctor on the Orinoco

Two of those newer brands came from pharmacists who were trying to settle stomachs, not to improve drinks. Johann Gottlieb Benjamin Siegert was a German army surgeon who had served in the Napoleonic wars. In 1820 he landed at Angostura, a river port on the Orinoco that was Simon Bolivar's political and military base in the Venezuelan war of independence, and became Surgeon-General of the military hospital there. In 1824 he produced a gentian-led tincture he called Amargo Aromatico, an aromatic bitter for the troops' digestion.

Two things about the product are routinely misunderstood. It is named for the town, not for angostura bark, which it does not contain. And it did not stay in Venezuela. Siegert was exporting to England by about 1830, by way of Trinidad, and sailors carried the bottle to ports around the world. He died in 1870, and in 1875 his sons moved production to Port of Spain, Trinidad, to escape political unrest at home. The town of Angostura itself had been renamed Ciudad Bolivar in 1846. The bitters kept the old name, and the oversized label that overhangs the small bottle became, by accident or design, one of the most recognized objects on any bar.

Royal Street

The third bottle belongs to New Orleans. Antoine Amedee Peychaud came from a family of planters who had fled the revolution in Saint-Domingue, the French colony that became Haiti. He trained as a pharmacist and in 1834 bought his own drug and apothecary store at what was then 123 Royal Street in the French Quarter. There he made and advertised an American Aromatic Bitter Cordial, sold as a tonic like everything else of its kind.

The bars of the Quarter took it up. Among them was the Sazerac Coffee House on Exchange Alley, whose house drink of brandy, sugar and Peychaud's bitters became the Sazerac. Peychaud later sold the pharmacy along with the formula and brand name; the Sazerac Company owns it now and still makes it, lighter and more anise-scented than Angostura, with a color closer to rose than to mahogany.

Together these three bottles, Stoughton's descendants in the orange and aromatic styles, Angostura and Peychaud's, map the cocktail's early geography: London, the Spanish Main and the Mississippi delta, all feeding one small drink in a New York glass.

Folklore and fact

Fact: the 1806 definition exists and its wording is known; Stoughton's patent is dated 1712; Siegert's bitters date to 1824 and moved to Trinidad in 1875; Peychaud opened on Royal Street in 1834. Folklore: the story that Peychaud coined the word cocktail by serving his bitters in a coquetier, a French egg cup, which Americans supposedly mispronounced. It is a charming story and it cannot be true. The word was in print in 1806, when Peychaud was a small child, and it was already being defined by then as a bittered sling.

Sources

• 1806: earliest definition of 'cocktail'. word histories, Pascal Treguer, 2019. https://wordhistories.net/2019/09/19/cocktail-earliest-definition/
• Stoughton's Bitters. The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails, David Wondrich, Oxford University Press, 2021, via Spirits and Distilling. https://www.spiritsanddistilling.com/dictionary/acref-9780199311132-e-1415
• Angostura: history. Difford's Guide, undated. https://www.diffordsguide.com/producer/1188/angostura/history
• Peychaud's Aromatic Cocktail Bitters. Difford's Guide, undated. https://www.diffordsguide.com/beer-wine-spirits/201/peychauds-bitters
• JGB Siegert: a taste for adventure. Caribbean Beat, Judy Raymond, 2008. https://caribbean-beat.com/issue-94/jgb-siegert-taste-adventure