The Bloody Mary as First Described (1939)

A hangover cure at “21”

The mixture itself was older than the name, and gin came first: Broadway was drinking half gin and half tomato juice in January 1929, as The Bloody Mary Before It Had a Name tells. In June 1933 a London society paper, The Bystander, reported that an unnamed actress had taken to adding a tot of vodka to her tomato-juice cocktail. In America a tomato juice cocktail was then a seasoned first course with no spirit, and the vodka drinks that followed were written down by columnists, as The Bartenders Who Wrote Down the Classic Cocktails tells.

The name arrived in November 1939, in Dorothy Kilgallen’s syndicated column “The Voice of Broadway” (in the Trenton Evening Times on November 22): the newest hangover cure at the “21” club, she reported, was called a Bloody Mary. On December 2 Lucius Beebe gave it an owner and a formula in his New York Herald Tribune column “This New York,” describing it as George Jessel’s newest pick-me-up, half tomato juice and half vodka.

That much is documented. Who invented it is not. Jessel, a comedian, claimed it for decades, and in a 1956 vodka advertisement he said he thought he had invented it. Fernand Petiot, a bartender from Harry’s New York Bar in Paris and later the St. Regis in New York, told The New Yorker in 1964 that the drink was only vodka and tomato juice when he took it over, and that the seasoning was his. The oldest seasoned recipe we found, a Red Snapper of vodka and tomato juice with Worcestershire, salt, cayenne and lemon, is in Crosby Gaige’s Cocktail Guide and Ladies’ Companion of 1941.