Sazerac

History

Around 1850, Sewell T. Taylor sold his New Orleans bar, the Merchants Exchange Coffee House, to become an importer of spirits, and he began to import a brand of cognac named Sazerac-de-Forge et Fils. Meanwhile, Aaron Bird assumed proprietorship of the Merchants Exchange and changed its name to Sazerac Coffee House.

Bird began serving the "Sazerac Cocktail", made with Sazerac cognac imported by Taylor, and allegedly with bitters being made by the local apothecary, Antoine Amedie Peychaud. The Sazerac Coffee House was sold several times, until around 1870 Thomas Handy became its proprietor. It is around this time that the primary ingredient changed from cognac to rye whiskey, due to the Great French Wine Blight.

At some point before his death in 1889, Handy recorded the recipe for Sazerac, which made its first printed appearance in William T. "Cocktail Bill" Boothby's The World's Drinks and How to Mix Them (1908), although his recipe calls for Selner Bitters, not Peychaud's. After absinthe was banned in the United States in 1912, it was replaced by various anise-flavored liqueurs, the most notable product being locally produced Herbsaint, which first appeared in 1934.

By the early 20th century, simple cocktails like the Sazerac had become rare, which eventually rekindled their popularity.

The creation of the Sazerac has also been credited to Antoine Amédée Peychaud, a Creole apothecary who emigrated to New Orleans from the West Indies and set up shop in the French Quarter in the early 19th century. He was known to dispense a proprietary mix of aromatic bitters from an old family recipe. According to popular myth, he served his drink in the large end of an egg cup that was called a coquetier in French, and the Americanized mispronunciation resulted in the name cocktail. This belief was debunked when people discovered that the term "cocktail" as a type of drink first appeared in print at least as far back as 1803—and was defined in print in 1806 as, "a mixture of spirits of any kind, water, sugar and bitters, vulgarly called a bittered sling".

Official cocktail of New Orleans

In March 2008, Louisiana state senator Edwin R. Murray (D-New Orleans) filed Senate Bill 6 designating the Sazerac as Louisiana's official state cocktail. The bill was defeated on April 8, 2008. After further debate, on June 23, 2008, the Louisiana Legislature agreed to proclaim the Sazerac as New Orleans' official cocktail.

In 2011, as a writer for the HBO TV series Treme, Anthony Bourdain penned a scene in which chef Janette Desautel (played by Kim Dickens) tosses one in the face of restaurant critic and food writer Alan Richman (appearing as himself). Richman had angered many New Orleanians in 2006 with an article in GQ in which he criticized New Orleans' food culture after Hurricane Katrina. Despite reservations, he agreed to participate in the scene and called Sazerac "a good choice of weaponry, because it symbolizes the city", despite a running feud with Bourdain over, among other things, the review.

Similar cocktails

A cocktail named the Zazarac was included in the 1910 version of Jack's Manual, an early bartender's reference written by Jacob "Jack" Grohusko, the head bartender at Baracca's restaurant in New York. It is essentially the same cocktail as the Sazerac, but called for bourbon (and not rye) instead of cognac.

Later versions of the drink were spelled Zazarac and added rum, and are thought by some to be a variant of the Sazerac, although it might have originated completely independently of the more famous drink.

Brands

Sazerac is also a brand of rye whiskey produced by the Sazerac Company.