Bloody Mary

Rolling involves pouring the mixture from one vessel into another, multiple times. You can use a julep strainer in one vessel to prevent the ice from splashing the mixture.

Make sure to taste your Bloody Mary before serving it - this is a cocktail that requires a little finesse to adjust it to your palate, or your mood.

Play around with other types of salt (i.e.: celery salt) to add more flavors to the cocktail.

The optional ingredients will add more depth and some heat. Feel free to tweak the quantities to fit your palate.

The Bloody Mary’s history is full of false claims, contradictions and wild stories.

It is very likely that the Bloody Mary is related to the “Oyster Cocktail”: A warm drink, with no alcohol, served in the late Nineteenth Century in the US. This Oyster Cocktail has all the ingredients of a Bloody Mary sans the alcohol. It was relatively popular.

Later on, in the 1920s, several cocktail books contain “Tomato Juice Cocktail”s . These are generally made of tomato juice along with salt, lemon juice, Tabasco and Worcestershire. Still, without alcohol.

Whether he created it or not, George Jessel, a Hollywood star, is involved in popularizing mixing tomato juice and vodka, between the 1920s-1930s.

If you believe Jessel’s story, the name Bloody Mary comes from him offering the drink to a friend named Mary. As it happens, Mary spilled the drink on her white dress, ushering her to exclaim “Now, you can call me Bloody Mary, George!”

Bloody Mary was the moniker given to Mary I of England (1516-1558) by her critics. She was given this name following a number of executions in England and Ireland in an effort to restore catholicism in the region.

Bloody Mary is also the legend of a spirit that can be conjured to reveal the future.

It was in the 1940s that Fernand Petiot, bartender at the St. Regis Hotel in New York, took the vodka and tomato juice combination and spiced it up with the other ingredients we are familiar with today.

The celery stalk as garnish didn’t make an appearance until the 1950s in Chicago, when a restaurant that served Bloody Marys ran out of swizzle sticks.