Sazerac 6

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The Peychaud family were refugees from the 1790s slave uprising in Santo Domingo (which became Haiti), and Antoine Peychaud operated a pharmacy in New Orleans's Rue Royal. He was a Freemason, and his place often hosted lodge meetings. As refreshments, Peychaud would serve a drink based on cognac with his proprietary bitters. For many years, the colorful story of the birth of the word cocktail centered around the small two-sided egg cups in which Peychaud served his drink. The French called these cups coquetries, a word that Americans changed to cocktay, and then cocktail, in the early nineteenth century. Sadly, the Peychaud apothecary story is not the true derivation of the word: Cocktail was first defined in print in Balance and Columbian Repository, on May 13, 1806, when Peychaud was two years old. I hate it when a good story is ruined with the truth. Although Peychaud's pharmacy wasn't the source of the word cocktail, it was the birthplace of the fantastic cocktail that became known as the Sazerac. In New Orleans at the time, the favorite cognac was made by Sazerac de Forge et Fils, in Limoges, France, and hence the name. This American classic is a sublime sipping drink, with all the spices and botanicals of the bitters and lemon oil mingling with the peppery rye and interacting with the bitter anise of absinthe. The Sazerac is made chilled but then served without ice, so the flavors open up immensely as it warms, delivering a new flavor burst with every sip. The drink became legendary in New Orleans, where bars were named for it, like John Schiller's Sazerac Coffee House, which opened in 1859. (Locals were fond of referring to bars as coffeehouses, where women were always welcome to consume alcohol alongside their men, a custom that didn't take hold in the rest of the country until Prohibition, when speakeasies opened their doors to men and women alike ... and why not? It was all illegal.) Note that the preparation of the Sazerac employs two rocks glasses, a tradition born of commonsense at a time when the bartender did not have an array of mixing tools and vessels.