It’s easy to lose track of how many Bloody Marys, or Virgin Marys (a Bloody Mary without the vodka), appear in Mad Men: on the conference table at Sterling Cooper for morning meetings, at restaurants, and when the Drapers’ bartender in residence, young daughter Sally, makes Bloody Marys for her parents one Sunday morning. She goes very heavy on the vodka and light on the tomato juice, but Don doesn’t so much as flinch as he downs his first sip.
The Bloody Mary, sometimes called a Red Snapper, is the quintessential “before noon” or brunch cocktail. It’s typically spiced with Tabasco and Worcestershire sauces, and sometimes even horseradish. And when garnished with large olives and a shrimp, as they are at New York’s famed Oak Bar, the Bloody Mary is practically a breakfast by itself.
“Few cocktail recipes are as laden with lore as the Bloody Mary,” writes Anthony Giglio in Cocktails in New York: Where to Find 100 Classics and How to Mix Them at Home (Rizzoli, 2004). As Giglio tells it, a Paris barman named Fernand Petoit accidentally mixed vodka and tomato juice and refused to name the drink. A Chicago entertainer who happened to be at the bar said the drink reminded him of a woman named Mary he knew from a Chicago club called Bucket of Blood, hence the name. However, some say Petoit named the drink either for a girlfriend or for Mary Tudor, the sixteenth-century Catholic queen of England who, in returning England to Catholicism, had 300 dissidents burned at the stake, thus earning the nickname “Bloody Mary.” When Petoit moved to New York and starting tending bar at the St. Regis Hotel (where Pete Campbell plans to meet a potential client in season 3, episode 13; “Shut the Door, Have a Seat”), he embellished the cocktail with salt, pepper, lemon juice, and Worcestershire sauce and renamed it the Red Snapper. Patrons preferred the original name, and so it stuck.
Others doubt the Petoit story, which dates to the early 1920s. Tomato juice wasn’t commercially available until years after Petoit supposedly mixed it with vodka, and making homemade tomato juice was notoriously difficult. Andrew F. Smith, the editor of The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink (Oxford University Press, 2007), points to two other possible origins. The first is that Henry Zbikiewicz, a bartender at New York’s ‘21’ Club, invented the cocktail in the 1930s. The other is that comedian George Jessel, a denizen of the ‘21’ Club, was its creator.
The first published Bloody Mary recipe appears in Lucius Beebe’s The Stork Club Bar Book (Rinehart and Co., 1946). (See Stork Club Cocktail.) In the December 3, 1939 edition of the New York Herald Tribune Beebe wrote, “George Jessel’s newest pick-me-up…is called a Bloody Mary: half tomato juice, half vodka.” When Smirnoff Vodka placed the first national ad for a Blood Mary in 1955, it featured Jessel claiming to be its inventor. It was at that point that the Bloody Mary really took off, and it has remained popular ever since.
We offer two ‘21’ Club Bloody Mary recipes. The “traditional” recipe is from The ‘21’ Cookbook: Recipes and Lore from New York’s Fabled Restaurant by Michael Lomonaco with Donna Forsman (1995). At the height of the cocktail’s popularity, after the Second World War, ‘21’ often served more than 100 of them before lunchtime every day. It’s still a ‘21’ favorite today but bartender Tara Wright, who supplied our second recipe, blends the Bloody Mary mix in a batch and adds it to a glass with vodka over rocks rather then making each drink individually. Her method is especially convenient if you’re mixing for a group. She also adds lemon juice and olive brine to the mix, a lime wedge for garnish, and, if desired, half an ounce of horseradish to each individual cocktail. Either way, a ‘21’ Bloody Mary is a great way to start your day and a Mad Man’s breakfast of champions.
THE ‘21’ CLUB BLOODY MARY
FROM THE ‘21’ COOKBOOK: RECIPES AND LORE FROM NEW YORK’S
FABLED RESTAURANT BY MICHAEL LOMANACO WITH DONNA FORSMAN (BROADWAY, 1995)
11⁄2 ounces vodka
2 ounces tomato juice, chilled
Dash of Worcestershire sauce
Dash of celery salt
Dash of Tabasco sauce
Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
Add ingredients to a shaker filled with ice. Shake well and pour into a chilled cocktail glass.
YIELD: 1 DRINK
COURTESY OF BARTENDER TARA WRIGHT, THE ‘21’ CLUB, NEW YORK, NEW YORK
For the Bloody Mary mix
24 ounces tomato juice
11⁄4 ounces Worcestershire sauce
4–5 drops Tabasco sauce
1⁄8 teaspoon salt
1⁄8 teaspoon fresh ground black pepper
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1⁄2 tablespoon olive brine
For the drink
2 ounces vodka
Lime wedge
1⁄2 teaspoon horseradish (optional)
YIELD: 1 DRINK