Any Last Words?
We are currently riding a 20-year wave of cocktail culture creativity. Bartenders in all corners of the USA are leading a liquid renaissance. They are drawing inspiration from traditional cocktails to create variations with complex flavors drawn from unique ingredient combinations. Some modern mixologists have turned to one classic cocktail called the Last Words as a canvas on which to create. This tasty pre-Prohibition drink is the subject of today’s essay exploring another chapter of cocktail connections.
In the history of cocktails, there are two other periods of time that might compare in significance to the present. The first is the Golden Age of Cocktails, generally defined as the 50-year span from 1860 to 1910. Although a few classics like the Old Fashioned, the Mint julep, and the Sazerac, preceded this period, the Golden Age saw the creation of many time-tested cocktails. The period produced the Manhattan, the Daiquiri, the Martini, the Negroni, the Stinger, the Sidecar, and the Cuba Libre.
The second period of significance is one that may come as a surprise. The time of Prohibition, from 1920 to 1933, demonstrated that if something desired is taken away, people will become very creative to eliminate that void. The alcohol produced during that time, whether smuggled rum or bathtub gin, was mostly of poor quality. To hide its bad taste, bartenders in the speakeasies called upon fruit juices, sodas, and sweeteners for flavorful mixing ingredients. The result was a boom in craft cocktails.
There were the rum-based drinks like the Bacardi Cocktail (with lime juice and grenadine) or the Mary Pickford (with pineapple juice and grenadine). There were gin-based mixtures like the Southside (with simple syrup, lime juice and mint), the Bees Knees (with honey and lemon juice), or the White Lady (with Cointreau and lemon juice). And, there was one cocktail that used the forward flavors of two classic liqueurs. They were blended with lime to mask the not-so-great gin of the day and form a Last Word.
The Last Word recipe, like the famous Negroni (future posting for sure), is a straightforward equal-parts mixture. In its case, the unusual combination of gin, chartreuse, maraschino and lime juice works, when all intuition would say otherwise. Chartreuse and maraschino liqueurs are not your everyday ingredients for the home bartender. Therefore, their prominent use in the Last Word warrants first some individual attention.
Chartreuse
Studious, curious, and medicinally-inclined monks in medieval monasteries created several alcoholic mixtures found on today’s liquor store shelves. In most cases, the processes used a base alcohol to draw out beneficial components of a long list of herbs and spices. Chartreuse is one of these attempts to find elixirs of long life. The monks have kept the recipe for Chartreuse a closely guarded secret. However, melissa, arnica, hyssop, vanilla, artemisia, myrrh, coriander, nutmeg, cardamom, pine cone, aloe, mace, and saffron are known to be among its ingredients. The complex mixture is quite a botanical soup.
There is a richness of history and mystery surrounding this bright green liqueur. And thus, another blending of fact and imaginative fiction from the Chronicles of Cocktail Connections rises from this backdrop…
An Elixir of Long Life
Brother Gérome Maubec was doing what he loved best. He was on a solitary walk along the well-worn trails crisscrossing the hills high above the monastery he called home. The year was 1737. Although it was early summer, the morning was crisp and cool at this elevation within the Chartreuse Mountains of the French Prealps.
His daily walks held a threefold purpose; exercise, meditation, and a search for the medicinal herbs needed for his tasks as the monastery’s apothecary. His role was to maintain the health of his fellow monks. He also had inherited the Carthusian’s century-long effort to perfect and restore an herbal recipe for an Elixir of Long Life. An unknown donor discovered an ancient manuscript containing the recipe and gave it to the monks in 1605.
Gérome himself had worked on this elixir for years, and recently had interpreted a mysterious passage from the manuscript as perhaps indicating the dried flowers and leaves of the hyssop plant to be a last missing ingredient. He had in the past found hyssop to be aromatically pleasant, and according to ancient records, it was beneficial for blood circulation, cough suppression, and digestive stimulation. He had none of this plant in his substantial stores of roots, herbs and flowers. Therefore, today, Brother Gérome specifically searched for hyssop flowers. Although the plant was rare, he knew it to grow around some of the rocky outcrops in these very hills.
Having been away for hours with no luck, he was about to give up and head back to the monastery when his eyes beheld a shaft of sunlight shining from between the clouds and falling focused on the path ahead. It was as if the light was pointing his vision to a particular spot, and as he looked more closely he caught sight of the unmistakable glint of hyssop’s purple-blue flowers. “This surely is the final ingredient,” he shouted from the mountainside as he rushed to harvest the fruits of his hard search. “The powers of Heaven have given me a sign.”
Brother Gérome returned to his apothecary workshop and immediately began work to macerate and incorporate a small amount of the hyssop into his previously-prepared mixture of distilled alcohol and 129 other herbs, plants, and flowers. After several months of aging, he bottled a sample, and gave it to his closest companion among the Carthusian residents. Breaking the general monastic rule of silence, he whispered, “Brother Charles, I present you with this elixir of long-life, that will forever be known as Elixir Végétal de la Grande Chartreuse.”
Brother Charles tasted the naturally green potion. As the herbal, spicy, slightly sweet flavors met his tongue, and the drink brought warmth throughout his body, he also uncharacteristically broke silence and exclaimed, “Brother Gérome, you have indeed produced the elixir we have long sought. You must bring this wonder to the outside world, but we should hold the recipe within these walls.”
Brother Charles became the connection to the outside world. He and his mule logged many miles carrying bottles of the Chartreuse to neighboring towns for sale. As a thirst for the green elixir spread throughout Europe, it morphed from a medicine into a drink of pure enjoyment. And to this day, although a company named “Chartreuse Diffusion” is in charge of bottling, packaging, advertising and selling the products, the Carthusians entrust two brothers with the mission of preparation. They work in the greatest secrecy and are the only ones who know the details of preparation.
Maraschino
The recipe for Maraschino liqueur was, according to legend, similarly born in a monastery in the 16th Century. However, the only real certainty regarding its origin is that the seaside town of Zadar in the Kingdom of Dalmatia (modern day Croatia) is its place of birth, being a location where the marasca cherry trees thrived. Subsequently the product evolved from a medicine to a liqueur of pure enjoyment when botanist Bartolomeo Ferrari realized that using the cherry with its leaves and hazelnuts made a more complex liqueur, and Venetian Giuseppe Carceniga optimized the distillation process. Zadar became known as the City of Maraschino, and production of many recipe variations flourished there in the 18th and 19thcenturies.
Girolamo Luxardo moved to Zara with his family in 1817 as a representative of Sardinia. His wife, Maria Canevari, was especially interested in improving the maraschino liqueurs being produced there at the time. After her success, Girolamo founded their own distillery in 1821 to make their version of the liqueur. After 8 years of perfecting the process, he received a valuable and cherished official acknowledgment of the superior quality of the Luxardo product by Austrian Emperor Francis I. Girolamo’s son, Nicolo, and grandson, Michelangelo, carried on the business with Michelangelo building a large new distillery in 1913. Under the fourth generation of Luxardos, the business survived World War I and continued to prosper. However, World War II was not so kind. Allied Forces bombing completely destroyed the City of Zadar including the distillery.
This obviously was not the end of Luxardo, since I have a recently-purchased bottle sitting on my bar next to me as I write. The story of how the business persevered is best told in another Chronicles of Cocktail Connections tale intertwining fact and fantasy…
A Recipe for Survival
Giorgio Luxardo stood on a hillside looking over his property with his arm around his nephew Nicolo. Although he had much to be thankful for, there was also a deep sadness in his thoughts. Thus, it was difficult to discern the cause of the tear on his cheek.
The sadness was the older of his conflicted emotions. He remembered how all the hard work of three generations of Luxardos had been wiped away. First, the World War II bombings ravaged their business, and second, Josip Broz Tito and his partisans persecuted the entire Zadar Italian community. Of the whole Luxardo family, it was only he and his nephew that had survived this two-headed dragon of disaster.
He remembered their perilous journey to Italy in a tiny boat. They had hugged the ragged coast of Dalmatia, pounded by the fierce Adriatic Sea as they hid among the many small islands to avoid the partisans. After narrowly avoiding capture, they had finally reaching safe harbor in Venice. But then, he also had reason to thank the fates and feel uplifted. He remembered receiving an unexpected letter in his temporary residence in Venice. The letter read:
“My Dear Giorgio,
I cannot tell you how joyful I am to learn of your successful escape to Venice. After first enduring the horrors of wartime destruction of our beautiful city and prosperous business, I fled, along with the many thousands of our other fellow Italians, from the atrocities of Tito. Who is to say that our own fascist Italian government has not been guilty of atrocities upon other peoples. Circumstances trapped us in this political eye-for-an-eye world.
In faint hope of some Luxardo family members surviving, I was able to take with me what I consider to be the most valuable of possessions. If you are able to join me at my residence in Padua, I will hand it over to you with great pleasure. I have saved for you the precious Luxardo Book of Recipes compiled over the last 150 years.
Your Dutiful Servant,
Marino Visconi,
Master Distiller
He remembered traveling to Padua and having that book placed in his hands, as he and Marino embraced with joy.
And he remembered one other extremely important gift. On a hunch, he had contacted Professor Alessandro Morettini of the University of Florence. Morettini had started a small nursery of Morasca cherry trees on university property. Indeed, Professor Morettini had brought saplings from Dalmatia to Tuscany a few years earlier. Upon hearing that Giorgio Luxardo was in Italy and desirous of re-establishing Maraschino production, the professor was happy to help. First, he pointed out land in the hills around Toregglia well suited for the Marasca cherry trees. Then, he gifted saplings from his nursery to start new Luxardo orchards.
Now, Giorgio stood with his nephew Nicolo on this warm sunny day in 1955. He looked to his left at the beautiful orchard of Marasca cherry trees in full bloom. The orchard stretched as far as his eyes could see. He looked right and saw the stately fascade of the brand new Luxardo Distillery and Office Complex. There was no doubt that the tear drying on his cheek was one of great happiness.
Today, the 6th and 7th generations of the Luxardo family operate the Company. They export their products to 78 countries around the world. Luxardo continues to produce their Maraschino liqueur according to Maria Canevari’s original recipe. One written down in 1821 and saved for future generations by a brave Master Distiller.
The Cocktail
Those great histories of the liqueur components have brought their European connections to the story. Now, we can now turn to the tale of the Last Word itself. The full history of the Last Word cocktail connects it to two major US cities.
Connection number one is its city of origin, the Motor City of Detroit, Michigan. That story begins with Ted Saucier’s 1951 book, Bottoms Up. It was a huge compilation of cocktails from dozens of the finest eating and drinking establishments around the world. In it was a recipe for the Last Word that Saucier attributed to the Detroit Athletic Club (DAC). The DAC stated that “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.”
Unfortunately, thirty years previous would have been 1921, a couple of non-drinking years into Prohibition. Additional research by others has found that the Last Word was already on the DAC bar menu in 1916. That doesn’t mean that Fogarty had nothing to do with the cocktail. He may not have invented it, but given that he always ended his act with a recitation, the Last Word, at least, may have been named in his honor.
With its flavorful liqueur ingredients to mask bad alcohol, the Last Word maintained its popularity throughout Prohibition. Its popularity extended beyond into the 1940’s and 50’s, eventually finding its way into Ted Saucier’s book. But, during the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s, a desire for the classic cocktails waned and fruitier concoctions took center stage. The Last Word disappeared from menus and braggers forgot it for a time. That is where the second city connection comes in. It is a connection of resurrection in the Emerald City of Seattle, Washington.
We owe its resurrection to Seattle’s Zig Zag Café bartender Murray Stenson. In 2003, he was searching for something different to put on the cocktail menu. Stenson dragged out his collection of old cocktail books and began turning the pages of a beat up old copy of Saucier’s Bottoms Up. With the restaurant’s focus on classic drinks predating Prohibition on his mind, he came upon the Last Word. The rest is history as they say. It first became a cult hit among Seattle’s bar crowd. After, it then took Portland by storm, then spread to cocktail bars in major cities worldwide.
But, that is not quite the last word on the story of the Last Word. It was a cocktail that became the focus for creative adaptation by bartenders everywhere. The reason for this focus was likely twofold. For one, it had a cool name with all sorts of possibilities of wordplay. For two, it had the intriguing recipe of four powerful ingredients combined in equal measures.
In 2007, Phil Ward, then at Death & Co in New York, created a variation he called the Final Ward. He kept the equal parts aspect intact and swapped out the gin and lime for rye and lemon. Other modern favorites inspired by the Last Word include Joaquín Simó’s Naked and Famous and Sam Ross’s Paper Plane. There are now cocktails called Latest Word, Other Word, Next to Last Word, Last Palabra, Loose Talk, Closing Argument, and Bird is the Word.
Phil Ward provided an apropos summary for this influential cocktail when he called the Last Word “a 4-way car crash in which no one is hurt and everyone’s glad they met afterward.”
