What Was the First Cocktail?

On 13 May 1806, editor Harry Croswell answered a reader question in The Balance and Columbian Repository, a newspaper published in Hudson, New York. The reader had asked what a "cock-tail" actually was.

The answer became the first known published definition: a stimulating liquor composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water and bitters. Croswell added that it was vulgarly called a bittered sling.

It is worth pausing on that. Cocktail was not a catch-all term for mixed drinks. It was the name of one specific category with exactly four components, in the same way punch or sling described their own formats. Everything else was called something else.

Spirit, sugar, water, bitters. No citrus, no liqueur, no shaking. The spirit was "of any kind" per the definition, which in practice meant rum, brandy or gin.

But gin did not mean what you are picturing. London dry did not take hold in America until around 1890. The gin of the period was genever, the malty ancestor from the Netherlands and Belgium, which Americans called Holland gin or simply Hollands, and it was the dominant style of gin in 19th century American bars.

It is no accident that the first definition came out of Hudson, New York either: the stretch between New York City and Albany had been shaped by Dutch settlement since colonial times. American whiskey became the default choice later.

If the recipe sounds familiar, that is because you already know it. It is an Old Fashioned. When bartenders late in the 1800s began building increasingly ornate drinks and still calling them cocktails, a guest who wanted the original had to ask for theirs made the old fashioned way. The name stuck to the drink.

The water in the definition is not a detail to skip either. It is the dilution, the same job the ice does when you stir an Old Fashioned today. The drink is built to change in the glass: strong and spirit-forward at the start, rounder and sweeter as the ice melts.

The cocktail began life as a pick-me-up, and that should be taken literally. An early reference from 1803 describes the drink as something taken around eleven in the morning to clear the head.

Through the first half of the 1800s, cocktails were a morning affair, frequently as a remedy for the night before. The logic was the one you would suspect: the hangover cannot arrive while you are still drunk. We do not recommend the method, but it explains why the word cocktail was for a long time synonymous with a pick-me-up.

Here honesty is required: the origin of the word is disputed, and anyone claiming certainty is overstating the evidence. Several theories compete.

The most discussed comes from drinks historian David Wondrich and involves horse trading in 18th century England. A horse being sold needed to look lively, and one measure of vigour was how high it carried its tail. The trick was called feaguing, or gingering: a peeled piece of ginger was inserted into the rectum of the horse, and the sting made the animal raise its tail and move briskly. A horse carrying its tail high was cock-tailed.

From the horses the expression moved on to slang for stimulants generally, and from there to a stimulating drink. Wondrich points to early citations supporting the link, among them a 1790s note about ginger and hot pepper being put into alcoholic drinks.

Other theories exist. One traces the word to the French coquetier, the egg cup a New Orleans apothecary supposedly served his mixtures in. Another points to cock tailings, the dregs from the bottom of the barrels, and a third to the fact that a cocktail horse was a crossbreed rather than a thoroughbred, meaning something mixed. None of them is proven.

The only safe conclusion is that the word existed as slang before it named a drink, and that New York tied the word to the recipe rather than inventing either half.

You need no equipment beyond a glass and a spoon.

Put a teaspoon of sugar or 7ml of simple syrup in the bottom of a rocks glass. Add two or three dashes of Angostura. Pour 60ml of brandy if you want to be period-correct, or bourbon or rye for the version that won in the long run. Add one large ice cube and stir for 20 to 30 seconds until the glass turns cold on the outside.

Express an orange or lemon peel over the surface and drop it in. Taste it at the start and again after five minutes. The difference between those two sips is the entire point of the drink.