Its origins are murky, but the most common accounts name one Antoine Amedee Peychaud, a young Creole from a distinguished French family, as the originator of the drink.
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being an originalAmerican drink.
Its origins are murky, but the most common accounts name one Antoine AmedeePeychaud, a young Creole from a distinguished French
family, as the originator of the drink.
Peychaud, along with wealthy plantation owners, fled his home in the French controlled portion of the island of Hispaniola during the slave
uprisings of 1793.
Peychaud, trained as an apothecary, settled in New Orleans and set up shop in the French Quarter. Along with his education, he had salvaged an
old secret family recipe for the compounding of a liquid tonic called bitters.
The bitters were good for whatever ailed you. And they added zest to the cognac brandy he served friends and others who wandered into his
pharmacy.
Fame of the concoction spread. Soon the ubiquitous New Orleans coffee houses, as liquor dispensing establishments were then called, were
offering their French brandy spiked with a dash of the marvelous bitters compounded by M. Peychaud.
He had a unique way of serving his brandy libation. He poured portions into a double egg cup. The French speaking population called such a
device a coquetier (pronounced kah-kuh-tyay). The speculation is that the pronunciation of the French word eventually corrupted into the
present day cocktail.
New Orleans based Museum of the American Cocktail displays the first known written reference to the drink on its website,
museumoftheamericancocktail.org. On the front page of May 6, 1806 issue of The Balance and Columbian Repository, a Hudson, N.Y.,
newspaper. In response to a reader's request, an editor defined a cocktail as "a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water
and bitters."
The editor then goes on to say that it is "supposed to be an excellent electioneering potion inasmuch as it renders the heart stout and bold, at
the same time that it fuddles the head. It is said also, to be of great use to a democratic candidate: because, a person having swallowed a glass
of it, is ready to swallow any thing else."