The Tehran meeting of F.D.R., Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin in 1943 was at times a bloody-minded affair -- in the strategy discussed and the cocktails consumed.
Stalin suggested executing 50,000 to 100,000 German officers once the war was won. President Roosevelt, assuming old Joe had to be kidding, joked that 49,000 would do. But the Soviet dictator was in dead earnest. Churchill argued that war criminals should be tried and get their due, but political mass executions were right out. The rest of the conference, Stalin needled Churchill repeatedly, insinuating that he harbored a secret love of Germans.
There was tension in the rooms, and Roosevelt and Churchill tried to ease it with an abundant supply of drinks. On the first day they met, F.D.R. mixed Stalin a batch of his Dirty Martinis, but it was in the evenings that the liquor really flowed, and none so much as the night of Nov. 30, Churchill's 69th birthday. There was much champagne and, according to the Chicago Tribune's reporter, cocktails that "looked like tomato juice were served. Probably these were the famous middle east 'bloody Marys,' made by mixing vodka and tomato juice."
![[Bloody Mary]](images/Photos/PT-AE812B_Drink_20070302164011.jpg)
I have never been particularly fond of Bloodies, because the drink, as practiced today, is rarely in balance. Sometimes you get a veritable salad of crudités stuffed into the glass. And almost always the drink is ruined by a heavy hand with the spice jars. The standard Bloody Mary seems to be a glass of Tabasco sauce tempered with horseradish.
If that's how you like your Bloody, fair enough. But every now and then it's worth getting back to the basics of any recipe as a touchstone to ward off excess.
In its earliest incarnation, the Bloody Mary was little more than tomato juice and vodka in equal measure employed as a hangover cure. John Steinbeck would later describe its curative powers in terms that embrace the drink's ruddy name and appearance: "It is elixir, it is pretty close to a transfusion."
Comedian, songwriter, movie producer and raconteur George Jessel -- the "Toastmaster General of the United States" -- laid claim to having created the cocktail. In the '50s, he even appeared in Smirnoff ads, declaring "I, George Jessel, Invented the Bloody Mary." In his 1975 autobiography, Jessel told a fantastical story about the morning in Palm Beach when -- after a nonstop night of drinking -- he devised the first Bloody Mary to clear his head for a game of beach volleyball with "Al" Vanderbilt.
Given Jessel's knack for self-promotion, many doubted his claim, and that opened the door for the head barman at New York's St. Regis Hotel. Fernand "Pete" Petiot was serving Bloodies -- under the alias "Red Snapper" -- at the hotel's King Cole Bar by the start of the 1940s. Once the Bloody Mary became a national sensation in the 1950s, Petiot would claim that he had invented it while working at Harry's Bar in Paris in the 1920s.
But dogged etymologist Barry Popik, a consulting editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, has found that the earliest references to the Bloody Mary all credit the drink to Jessel. The first was this 1939 mention in Lucius Beebe's New York Herald Tribune café society column: "George Jessel's newest pick-me-up which is receiving attention from the town's paragraphers is called a Bloody Mary: half tomato juice, half vodka."
Petiot qualified his own claim in a 1964 interview with The New Yorker: "I initiated the Bloody Mary of today," he declared. "George Jessel said he created it, but it was really nothing but vodka and tomato juice when I took it over." Case closed. But of more interest than Petiot's inadvertent admission is how he describes what he did to Jessel's basic drink: "I cover the bottom of the shaker with four large dashes of salt, two dashes of black pepper, two dashes of cayenne pepper, and a layer of Worcestershire sauce." Into the shaker he added lemon juice, two ounces each of vodka and tomato juice, and some cracked ice. And then he gave the most important detail: "shake, strain, and pour."
Not only did the first full-blown Bloody Marys lack horseradish and celery, but they were served without ice. Since then, the drink has morphed into a pint-glass affair, usually with some six or eight ounces of tomato juice on the rocks, spiced within an inch of its life. Even the St. Regis now serves its Bloodies over ice, but it's worth trying the drink according to Petiot's specifications. It is a lighter, more refreshing pick-me-up in which you can actually taste the juice.
But what of the Chicago Tribune man's claim that the Bloody Marys served in Tehran were a "famous middle east" specialty? The drink was rather exotic at the time, and I suspect the reporter mistakenly assumed it had equally exotic origins.
I like to think that Churchill -- who oversaw every last detail of the preparations for his birthday party that night -- chose the drink with a purpose. Could it be that Churchill was getting in a sly dig at the man he toasted that night as "Stalin the Great" by serving the dictator a drink sanguineous in name and appearance, with a Russian spirit at its core?