Cocktail

Q From David Coe; related questions came from Marlena Von Kazmier and others: Being a keen creator and imbiber of these wonderful refreshments called cocktails I would love to track down the origins of the word. Some research has suggested that early mixed drinks may have been decorated with feathers (unlike today’s umbrellas!) but surely there is more to it than that?

A There is certainly much more to the matter than that, though almost all that is written about the origin of the name for this great American institution is spurious. H L Mencken wrote in 1946 that he had found forty supposed etymologies, and a quick look at a few current books on drinks (and, alas, etymology) show that many of them are healthy and still going the rounds.

The problem is that the word cocktail suddenly appears in print in 1806, with no trail of earlier forms that would enable us to determine its provenance. It’s as though some alien had suddenly put it into men’s minds in that year. The result has been a vast flowering of speculation, most of it way out in “here be dragons” territory:

• Betsy (or Betty) Flannigan, an innkeeper of Pennsylvania (or possibly Virginia), used cock tail feathers as swizzle sticks when serving drinks during the American Revolution. Or the same lady served a soldier a mixed drink containing all the colours of a cock’s tail, to which he gave the name. Or she roasted a rooster stolen from a supporter of the English and in triumph decorated the accompanying drinks with the cock’s feathers.
• A meal of bread fortified with mixed spirits, named cock-ale, that was given to fighting cocks before a contest, and which was later taken up by humans and renamed. Or, from the practice of toasting the victor in a cockfight, the one that had most feathers left in its tail; feathers to the number remaining would be inserted into the drinks. (Cock-ale was indeed an English drink at one time, made by a complex recipe that really did include a chicken, but that isn’t the source, either.)
• An old French recipe of mixed wines, called coquetel, was perhaps carried to America by General Lafayette in 1777.
• It comes from cock tailings, the dregs or tailings of casks of spirits, which would be drained out through their cocks (spigots), mixed together, and sold as a cheap drink.
• A cock-tailed horse in the same period was not a thoroughbred, so of mixed blood. The name was transferred to the drink, which was also a mixture.
• From a West African word kaketal for a scorpion, which was transferred to the drink because of its sting.
• The drink cocked your tail like a crowing rooster.
• A Louisiana apothecary in New Orleans named Antoine Peychaud (who also invented Peychaud bitters) is said in the 1790s to have served drinks of brandy, sugar, and water, plus his crucial new ingredient of bitters. He served them to his guests in a sort of double egg-cup, whose name in French was coquetier, in time corrupted to cocktail. (The name Sazerac has also been given to this drink, though it is usually now made with rye whiskey.)

If you hunt around online you can find lots of wild elaborations of many of these stories, plus many others. There’s no evidence that supports any one of them in particular, though some are obviously more silly than others.

The last in the list sounds most plausible, since it’s supported by more circumstantial references as to name, place and date. However, it turns out that the dates are wrong, as the Antoine Peychaud who opened the apothecary’s shop at 123 Royal Street, New Orleans, did so in 1838, not in 1795, too late for him to have been the source of the term. The confusion may have come about because his father did arrive in New Orleans in that year.

One intriguing point about the cocktail is that the first reference to it says that it is “a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters”. Charles Dickens wrote in his Martin Chuzzlewit in 1844 (he was versed in American ways by this time): “He could ... smoke more tobacco, drink more rum-toddy, mint-julep, gin-sling, and cocktail, than any private gentleman of his acquaintance”. A little later still, Thomas Hughes wrote “Here, Bill, drink some cocktail” in Tom Brown’s Schooldays of 1857. All these suggest that the original cocktail was a specific drink, not a generic name for a type of drink. From the description in the 1806 example, it sounds as though it was something like what is now called an Old-Fashioned.