Food & Drink

Did Ernest Hemingway Really Invent the Bloody Mary?

Trying to uncover the history of the most famous Sunday morning drink of them all.

• Margaret Eby
• Jul 18, 2018 11:24 AM EDT

Who made the first Bloody Mary cocktail? It depends on who you ask. The origin story of that most cherished brunch staple is, unlike the contents of the drink, muddled. In one, the drink originated in Paris in the 1920s, when vodka, long popular in Russia and Eastern Europe, was first showing up at bars and lounges in Western Europe and North America.

According to popular legend, it was bartender Fernand “Pete” Petiot who developed the cocktail at Harry’s New York Bar, a favorite of American expats, including Ernest Hemingway, who is also rumored to have had a hand in the creation—or at least popularization—of the cocktail. Petiot then brought his tomato juice and vodka concoction to the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis Hotel in New York. There, it developed into the Red Snapper—a variation on the tomato juice and vodka combination that includes Worcestershire sauce, cayenne pepper, and lemon, much closer to the modern drink on brunch menus everywhere.

But something about this origin mythology didn’t quite sit right with cocktail historian Jeffrey Pogash, who spent 18 years in the communications department at Moët Hennessy before retiring in 2011. So he started digging into what archival information he could find on the drink, and came up with a different origin story, which he published in his book Bloody Mary.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

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