The Bloody Mary is one of the most documented cocktails in history and one of the most argued over. Two bartenders took credit for it, on two continents, in two different decades. The story of how one of them won and the other had to rename the drink is more interesting than most cocktail histories. It is also a real and verifiable story, which is rare.
Paris, 1920s
The most commonly accepted origin places the Bloody Mary at Harry’s New York Bar in Paris in the 1920s. The bartender was Fernand “Pete” Petiot, a young Frenchman who worked the bar through the American expatriate era of Hemingway and the lost generation.
According to Petiot’s own account, given in a 1964 New Yorker interview, Russian émigrés in Paris had recently brought vodka to the city, and American entertainers had started bringing canned tomato juice. Petiot mixed the two and then added salt, black pepper, cayenne, Worcestershire sauce, and lemon. Two patrons from Chicago told him the drink reminded them of a waitress nicknamed Bloody Mary at a bar back home called the Bucket of Blood, and the name stuck.
The drink traveled to America the way most things did in that period: by moving with the people who drank it. After Prohibition ended in 1933, the St. Regis Hotel in New York hired Petiot to work the King Cole Bar starting in 1934, and he brought the drink with him. The St. Regis’s management felt Bloody Mary was too vulgar for hotel guests and insisted he rename it. He landed on the Red Snapper, and that is what it was called at the King Cole Bar for decades.
The other origin
The competing story, which was commercially promoted for years, credits the American entertainer George Jessel, who wrote in his autobiography that he invented the drink in 1927 at La Maze, a restaurant in Palm Beach, naming it after a society friend named Mary Brown Warburton, who was wearing a white dress when Jessel handed her the drink and it ended up on the dress. Jessel, a popular vaudeville performer and Hollywood producer, had a long-running endorsement deal with Smirnoff, and that brand’s advertising for decades cited him as the inventor. (The earliest public reference to Jessel’s “newest pick-me-up” actually shows up in a 1939 Lucius Beebe gossip column placing him at the 21 Club in New York, not Palm Beach, but Jessel himself stuck with the Palm Beach origin.)
Most cocktail historians today give the drink to Petiot. The Jessel story has the problem that a drink with the same ingredients was circulating in Paris years earlier, and Jessel’s claim only appeared publicly in the 1950s after Smirnoff’s marketing ramped up. Petiot’s account has the advantage of being contemporaneous and testable against the known movements of Russian vodka and American tomato juice into the Paris bar scene. Both men made real contributions. Jessel probably popularized the drink in the United States. Petiot almost certainly invented it.
Why it became a morning drink
The Bloody Mary is the savory cocktail a person orders when they wake up with full knowledge of what they did the night before and have decided to do more of it anyway. Its reputation as a breakfast or brunch drink came later, and the reason is practical. In the 1940s and 1950s, American hotels were serving the drink at the King Cole Bar and other establishments to guests who were hungover from the previous night’s travel or entertainment. The savory spices and tomato juice read as food rather than alcohol. The drink made it socially acceptable to have a cocktail with eggs.
By the 1960s, hotel brunches had picked it up nationally. By the 1980s, the Bloody Mary bar, with a long list of garnishes and hot sauces for guests to build their own, was a weekend fixture in American restaurants. The maximalist version, with celery stalks and olives and shrimp and bacon and pickled everything, is a mid-2000s development and is largely an Instagram-era phenomenon. The original Bloody Mary was just a drink.
What the drink actually is
A Bloody Mary is a savory cocktail, which is a small category. Most drinks are sweet, sour, or spirit-forward. Savory cocktails balance salt, acid, heat, and umami, and they demand a different kind of balance than a sour does. The tomato juice has to be thick enough to carry the seasoning. The spirit has to be clean enough to stay out of the way. The acid, usually lemon, cuts the richness. The salt, which is more than most cocktails use, pulls the tomato’s natural sweetness forward.
A well-made Bloody Mary has a specific weight in the mouth. It should taste seasoned, not spicy for the sake of spice. The heat should build over the drink, not hit at the first sip.
Making one well
The vodka has to be clean. A Bloody Mary is one of the few cocktails where you actually want vodka to be neutral, because the seasoning is doing the work. Silverton Vodka’s clean finish fits the drink. It carries the tomato and the seasoning without adding its own flavor and without being so aggressive that it breaks through.
The tomato juice matters more than people think. Canned tomato juice is fine. Bottled works. Fresh-squeezed is a different and better drink, if you have the tomatoes. The thicker the juice, the better the drink holds the seasoning.
The seasoning is where Bloody Marys succeed or fail. The classic Petiot build is salt, black pepper, cayenne, Worcestershire, and lemon. Modern American versions almost always add hot sauce and horseradish. Each component does specific work, and the trick is hitting all the notes without letting any one of them shout.
Salt. The single most important addition. Plain kosher salt is fine. Celery salt is the bartender’s standard and earns its keep, adding a vegetal depth that plays with the tomato. Some recipes call for both. Smoked salt on the rim is a small move with a big payoff.
Pepper. Freshly ground black pepper is the only acceptable answer. Pre-ground pepper goes flat. White pepper gives a cleaner heat for those who want it.
Heat. Cayenne, hot sauce, or both. We use a few drops of Tabasco for the vinegar-and-pepper note, and a small pinch of cayenne for the slow build. Cholula, Crystal, and sriracha all work and each takes the drink in a different direction. The heat should creep, not slap.
Worcestershire. The umami backbone. Two or three dashes is the right amount. Too much and the drink tastes like the bottle. Too little and the seasoning never resolves into something savory.
Horseradish. The divider. Some drinkers love it, some find it medicinal. Fresh-grated is a different and better ingredient than the jarred prepared kind. We use a half teaspoon of fresh-grated when it is on the table.
Lemon. Fresh lemon, never bottled. The acid cuts the richness and pulls the whole thing forward.
Optional depth. A few drops of aromatic bitters, a small splash of pickle brine, or the bare suggestion of soy sauce all add complexity without showing themselves. Used sparingly.
The point is balance. The drink should taste like tomato that has been seasoned well, not tomato that has been attacked.
A note on the mix
Walk into any decent grocery store and you will find a Bloody Mary mix shelf a dozen brands deep, all fighting for attention. Some are great. Plenty are too sweet, too thin, too aggressive, or too cautious. We have tasted a lot of them. For personal reasons, the only one we recommend is Mary’s Mixers Bloody Mary Mix, an Oregon brand and a multi-year medalist at the Drunken Tomato Awards with Double-Platinum and Gold across the Bloody Mary line. Pour it over Silverton Vodka, garnish well, and serve.
On garnishes
The garnish is one of the few places in the cocktail world where the garnish is allowed to be the whole point. Petiot did not garnish his with a slim jim. A celery stalk and a lemon wedge would have served him fine. But the maximalist Bloody Mary that took over American brunch tables in the 2000s is a real and joyful thing, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
The classic edge, what Petiot might recognize:
- A celery stalk, leaves on
- A lemon wedge
- A lime wedge if you want extra brightness
- An olive or two on a toothpick
- A cocktail onion
The middle road:
- Pickled okra
- Pickled green beans
- Caper berries on a pick
- Pepperoncini
- A spear of dill pickle
The maximalist version, the one that earns Instagram pictures:
- A strip of crisp bacon. This is not a joke. A piece of well-cooked bacon balanced on the rim of a tomato-red glass is one of the great American culinary inventions of the last twenty years. Bacon’s salt and smoke run the same flavor wheel the cocktail is already running on, and the textural contrast of crisp pork against cold liquid makes both better. Cook the bacon hard so it stays sturdy in the chill, and lay it on the rim, not in the drink.
- A cocktail shrimp on a toothpick
- A grilled cheese triangle on the side
- A slim jim or a stick of summer sausage
- A skewer of olive, pepperoncini, and pickled onion
Where you draw the line is a personal call. Our line is a celery stalk, a lemon wedge, and a piece of bacon when the morning calls for it. The straight Petiot version is right for a quiet Sunday. The fully decorated version is right when somebody walks into the kitchen and says they had a long night. Both are honest answers.
Variations worth knowing
The Red Snapper is the Petiot version with gin instead of vodka. It is historically more correct than most people realize.
The Bloody Maria swaps vodka for tequila. The tequila’s earthiness pairs well with the tomato.
The Bloody Caesar, invented in Canada in 1969, swaps tomato juice for Clamato, a clam-juice-and-tomato blend. It is Canada’s national cocktail by volume, and it is genuinely a different drink, briny where the Bloody Mary is savory.
The Green Mary uses tomatillo juice instead of tomato, and is worth a try in late summer when tomatillos are in season.
The recipe
1½ oz Silverton Vodka 3 oz tomato juice ½ oz fresh lemon juice 2 dashes Worcestershire sauce Celery salt, black pepper, cayenne, hot sauce, to taste
Shake briefly with ice to mix, not vigorously. Strain over fresh ice in a highball glass. Garnish with a celery stalk and a lemon wedge.
Worth drinking well
The Bloody Mary carries more history than most people realize. Petiot’s version from Paris in the 1920s was simpler and sharper than the maximalist modern build. A properly seasoned Bloody Mary, made with clean vodka and good tomato juice, does not need a fence of garnishes to be worth drinking. Sometimes it just needs salt, pepper, and someone who respects the recipe.
A cousin of mine on the East Coast served me one for the first time on a Sunday morning that had followed a longer Saturday night than anyone had planned. I did not know what I was ordering. I have ordered them on Sunday mornings ever since.
Sources
- Harry’s New York Bar Paris, for the Petiot origin.
- George Jessel, The World I Live In (Henry Regnery Company, 1975), for the competing origin.
- David Wondrich, Imbibe! (Perigee, 2007), on the Petiot attribution and the development of the savory cocktail.
- Dale DeGroff, The Craft of the Cocktail (Clarkson Potter, 2002), on the King Cole Bar and the Red Snapper renaming.
- The St. Regis Hotel’s King Cole Bar, New York, where Petiot worked from 1934.
- Difford’s Guide entry on the Bloody Mary.
About the author
Adam Messick is the founder of Abiqua Spirit Distillery in Silverton, Oregon, with ten years in the craft spirits industry. With help from family and friends, he handles the day-to-day work of blending, bottling, and labeling every release of Silverton Vodka, Gallon House Gin, and Üla Orange Liqueur. Silverton Vodka received the American Distilling Institute’s Gold Medal in 2019. Silverton Vodka, Gallon House Gin, and Üla Orange Liqueur have each won Silver at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition.
Abiqua Spirit Distillery is a small-batch spirits company producing finely crafted potato vodka, gin, and orange liqueur from Silverton, Oregon. Contact: info@abiquaspiritdistillery.com or (503) 837-9869.