New Orleans and the Sazerac

Most cocktails have an origin story. The Sazerac has an origin statute. In 2008 the Louisiana legislature wrote it into state law as the official cocktail of the city of New Orleans, and the text of that law repeats a story that historians had already taken apart. That is the Sazerac in one glass: a real drink with a real home and a legend that will not sit still.

The pharmacist

The documented part begins on Royal Street. Antoine Amedee Peychaud, whose family had fled the revolution in Saint-Domingue, bought a drug and apothecary store at number 123 in 1834. There he made and sold an American Aromatic Bitter Cordial, a bitter tonic of the kind every pharmacist of the period offered. He advertised it in the papers, and the bars of the Quarter took it up. An 1857 advertisement quoted by the Sazerac Company says the bitters were in use at the Sazerac House, which is the earliest link between the two names.

Peychaud later sold the pharmacy and the bitters' formula and brand, and in 1873 the rights passed to Thomas H. Handy, the man who by then owned the bar.

The coffee house

The bar itself had a cognac in its name before it had a cocktail. Sewell Taylor had owned the Merchants' Exchange Coffee House at 13 Exchange Alley before giving up the bar to become the local agent for the French house Sazerac de Forge et Fils, and under the owners who followed him, Aaron Bird and then John B. Schiller, the brandy he imported gave the place its identity. In the 1850s, by Difford's Guide's reckoning, a drink of that cognac with sugar and Peychaud's bitters was being served there under the Sazerac name. Who first stirred it is not recorded. A bartender named Leon Lamothe is often credited, with a date of 1858, but the attribution is late and shaky.

Handy, who had been the bar's bookkeeper, took it over in 1869 or 1870 and renamed it the Sazerac Coffee House. He died in 1889, having passed the recipe to a younger bartender, William Boothby, who printed it in 1908. By then the drink had changed its base. Phylloxera devastated the French vineyards in the late 1860s and 1870s, cognac became scarce, and the house switched to rye whiskey, keeping a dash of cognac for a while and then dropping it. A rinse of absinthe entered the drink at about the same time, and that too has a disputed author.

David Wondrich has argued that the chain of events is simpler than the legend. The Sazerac Company, Handy's successor, claimed a trademark in 1895 and was advertising bottled cocktails by 1899, and the Oxford Companion finds no mention in print of a Sazerac cocktail before that year, in a city whose newspapers had been writing about the Sazerac House since the 1850s. In that reading the Sazerac is a branded Old Fashioned with Peychaud's instead of Angostura and a wash of absinthe, and the cognac years are prehistory.

1912 and the herb

Absinthe was banned in the United States in 1912, eight years before the rest of the country lost its liquor, and the Sazerac lost its rinse. The fix came after Repeal. In 1934 two New Orleanians, J. Marion Legendre and Reginald Parker, launched a wormwood-free anise liqueur under the name Legendre Absinthe. Federal regulators objected to the word, and it became Herbsaint, which reads as the French for sacred herb and is also an anagram of absinthe with one letter added. The Sazerac Company bought the Legendre firm in 1949. Absinthe became legal again in the United States in 2007, but most New Orleans bars still rinse the glass with Herbsaint, partly from habit and partly because the drink grew up with it.

The city's drink

The modern Sazerac is built, not shaken: a sugar cube or a measure of syrup, Peychaud's bitters, rye, stirred with ice and strained into a chilled rocks glass that has been rinsed with absinthe or Herbsaint, with lemon peel expressed over the top and, in the classic service, discarded. No ice in the glass.

In 2007 Ann Tuennerman of the New Orleans Culinary and Cultural Preservation Society lobbied the legislature to make it official. Senator Edwin R. Murray of New Orleans filed Senate Bill 6 in March 2008 to name the Sazerac the state cocktail. It failed on 8 April. Amended to make it the official cocktail of the city rather than the state, it passed on 23 June 2008, by 62 votes to 33. The enrolled act, R.S. 33:1420.2, says there shall be an official cocktail of the city of New Orleans and that it shall be the Sazerac, and it authorizes the drink's use on city documents and with the city's insignia.

The act also says the Sazerac was created in the nineteenth century by Antoine Amedee Peychaud in the French Quarter. That is the legend, enacted.

Where the legend came from

The story most people know, that Peychaud served brandy and his bitters in an egg cup, a coquetier, and that Americans mangled the word into cocktail, was set down in 1937 by Stanley Clisby Arthur in Famous New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix 'Em. Arthur was a newspaperman and the first person to take cocktail history seriously, and the Oxford Companion gives him credit for that. It also records that he presented guesses as fact and adjusted evidence to fit them, in one case dropping the word Stoughton's from an early description of a New Orleans cocktail so that Peychaud's bitters would seem to be meant. The egg-cup story fails on arithmetic. Peychaud was born in 1803. The word cocktail was defined in a New York newspaper in 1806.

The Sazerac Company's museum on Canal Street, opened in 2019, tells the story with a careful hedge, and the phrase according to legend appears on its walls. That is the right phrase. The bitters, the coffee house, the rye, the ban, the herb and the law are facts. The pharmacist with the egg cup is a story the city has decided to keep.

Folklore and fact

Fact: the 1834 pharmacy, the coffee house on Exchange Alley, Handy's ownership and his 1873 purchase of the bitters, the 1912 absinthe ban, Herbsaint's 1934 launch and 1949 sale, and the 2008 act. Folklore: Peychaud coining the word cocktail; Peychaud inventing the Sazerac in the 1830s; the name Leon Lamothe and the year 1858 as the drink's birth; and the sequence of who added absinthe when.

Sources

• Sazerac (New Orleans style). Difford's Guide, undated. https://www.diffordsguide.com/cocktails/recipe/3390/sazerac-new-orleans-style
• Peychaud's Aromatic Cocktail Bitters. Difford's Guide, undated. https://www.diffordsguide.com/beer-wine-spirits/201/peychauds-bitters
• Sazerac House now producing and bottling Peychaud's Bitters. Sazerac House, 2019. https://www.sazerachouse.com/media/press-releases/sazerac-house-now-producing-and-bottling-peychauds-bitters/
• Senate Bill No. 6, Regular Session 2008, enrolled. Louisiana State Legislature, Senator Edwin R. Murray, 2008. https://www.legis.la.gov/legis/ViewDocument.aspx?d=503023
• The Sazerac, official cocktail of New Orleans. Distillery Trail, 2016. https://www.distillerytrail.com/recipe/make-sazerac-cocktail-official-drink-nola/
• The Great New Orleans Sazerac Mystery Lives On. InsideHook, Drew Lazor, 2019. https://www.insidehook.com/drinks/the-great-new-orleans-sazerac-mystery-lives-on
• Arthur, Stanley Clisby. The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails, Oxford University Press, 2021, via Spirits and Distilling. https://www.spiritsanddistilling.com/dictionary/acref-9780199311132-e-37
• Herbsaint. Wikipedia, undated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbsaint
• Sazerac. The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails, David Wondrich, Oxford University Press, 2021, via Spirits and Distilling. https://spiritsanddistilling.com/dictionary/acref-9780199311132-e-411
• Herbsaint: a New Orleans invention. New Orleans Magazine, Ron Soodalter, 2009. https://www.myneworleans.com/herbsaint-a-new-orleans-invention/