Last Word (Cocktail)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Last word with typical ingredients
Last Word in a frozen martini bowl

Last Word (also: The Last Word , English for “ last word ”) is a cocktail based on gin , green chartreuse and maraschino . The cocktail was created in Detroit during the Prohibition era in the 1920s , and has since been forgotten. In 2004 The Last Word was rediscovered in Seattle , and from there it spread internationally. Because of the place of rediscovery and its pale green-milky color, The Last Word appliesas "definitive Seattle cocktail" - the nickname of the city with the foggy and rainy climate is "Emerald City", so Emerald City .

Preparation and variations

The spirits gin, chartreuse and maraschino are poured in equal parts with lime juice into a cocktail shaker filled with ice cubes and shaken vigorously. American mix recipes usually give 3/4 fl. Oz. (= 2.2 cl ) for each of the four ingredients, in metric recipes 2 cl per ingredient is given. Some recipes reduce the maraschino liqueur to 1.5 cl, others recommend yellow instead of green chartreuse, in each case to avoid tasting the ingredient in question. After shaking, the cocktail is strained with a bar strainer into a pre-cooled cocktail bowl with a stem , whereby the ice remains in the shaker. It is sometimes garnished with a cocktail cherry , alternatively with a lime wedge on the edge. A set is often not used.

Variants are created by exchanging individual ingredients. However, the green chartreuse is almost always retained, which characterizes the cocktail with its color and herbal taste. Variants are:

  • The Final Ward , with rye whiskey instead of gin, for example with Wild Turkey 101 and with lemon juice instead of lime juice. (Created in 2007 by Phil Ward, then a bartender in Death & Co. in Manhattan.)
  • Dernier Mot , with Rhum Agricole (a West Indian rum made from sugar cane) instead of gin.

In other variants, genever , mezcal or arrak are used instead of gin .

history

The Detroit Athletic Club at the approximate time the cocktail was made

The Last Word was first published in 1951 by Ted Saucier, the Waldorf-Astoria's press officer . Saucier took the recipe into his artistically illustrated classic cocktail Bottoms Up! and wrote about the origin:

“This cocktail was introduced around here about thirty years ago by Frank Fogarty, who was very well known in vaudeville. He was called the 'Dublin Minstrel,' and was a very fine monologue artist. "

- Ted Saucier : Bottoms Up! (1951)

According to Saucier, vaudeville entertainer Frank Fogarty introduced the drink in the early 1920s at the Detroit Athletic Club , a social club in Detroit . However, no person with that name is found in the club's records. For The Last Word, Saucier advised the brands Damrak Gin and Luxardo Maraschino in addition to the green Chartreuse , and added sugar to the lime juice. The cocktail was not widely used in the years after Saucier's publication.

In 2004, while searching for new drink ideas, bartender Murray Stenson of the Zig Zag Café in Seattle found the recipe in Saucier's book and began serving it, causing the cocktail to be rediscovered. Stenson was named one of the top ten bartenders in the US by Playboy with a mention of The Last Word in 2007 .

On May 20, 2011, the presenter Rachel Maddow led the preparation of this cocktail under the motto "last word for the end of the world" in her political magazine The Rachel Maddow Show on the news channel MSNBC as an ironic allusion to the predictions of the Christian preacher Harold Camping and the MSNBC news program The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell , which covered Camping's predictions in detail. Camping predicted the so-called rapture day for May 21, 2011 , which would be followed by the end of the world on October 21 of the same year.

literature

  • Bill McGraw: Detroit's cocktail conquers world: Prohibition-era creation makes a renewed splash . In: Detroit Free Press. May 18, 2009, SA3.
  • Ted Saucier: Bottoms Up! : with illustrations by twelve of America's most distinguished artists . Greystone Press, New York 1951. (Reprint Martino, Eastford CT 2011, ISBN 978-1-891396-65-6 .)
  • Tan Vinh: The Last Word, a cocktail reborn in Seattle, is on everyone's lips . In: Seattle Times. March 11, 2009.

Web links

Commons : Last Word  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Tan Vinh: The Last Word, a cocktail reborn in Seattle, is on everyone's lips . In: Seattle Times, March 11, 2009.
  2. ^ AJ Rathbun: Ginger Bliss and the Violet Fizz: A Cocktail Lover's Guide to Mixing Drinks Using New and Classic Liqueurs . Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston 2011, ISBN 978-1-55832-771-9 , p. 137 .
  3. ^ A b Doug Ford: The Last Word with an Asterisk: variations on a classic cocktail . In: Cold Glass from April 1, 2011.
  4. ↑ Camper English: Hardly the Last Word About the Last Word Cocktail . In: fine Cooking from June 10, 2011.
  5. ↑ Paul Clarke: The Last Word on his blog The Cocktail Cronicles (April 2006)
  6. ↑ Marco Beier: The "Last Word" Cocktail. Still not the last word on Mixology magazine's online blog , September 11, 2012, accessed September 11, 2012.
  7. ↑ The Playboy.com A-List: America's Top 10 Bartenders ( Memento January 28, 2007 on the Internet Archive ). In: Playboy Online January 2007.
  8. ↑ Kase Wickman: Maddow celebrates the Rapture with Last Word cocktail on rawstory on May 21, 2011 (includes video of the Rachel Maddow Show (MSNBC) from May 20, 2011)
  9. ↑ Jack Mirkinson: Rapture 2011: Maddow Makes A May 21 Cocktail (VIDEO). . Huffington Post, May 21, 2011.