Taking Aim at the French 75
The last time a practicing career university professor took their skill set and applied it to the field of cocktails was in 1981, when Rutgers professor Lowell Edmunds produced The Silver Bullet, a now classic study of the history of the Martini and the culture that blossomed around the drink.
Now, more than forty years later, we have The French 75, a slim but illuminating new volume by John Maxwell Hamilton, a professor at Louisiana State University. It is one of a series of new books put out by LSU Press, each devoted to a different cocktail associated with New Orleans.
To chase down the iconic drink’s back story, Hamilton traveled to all the iconic bars associated with the French 75, included Buck’s Club and The American Bar in the Savoy, in London; and Harry’s New York Bar in Paris; as well as the French 75 Bar in his own backyard of New Orleans.
Reading the book, I learned a few things that I didn’t know, such as: famous caricaturist Al Hirschfeld drew a likeness of Savoy bartender Harry Craddock in the 1930s; Oscar Wilde’s son, Vyvyan Beresford Holland, was responsible for some of the witty quips in The Savoy Cocktail Book; and news broadcaster Eric Sevareid knew William “Sparrow” Robertson, the inventor of the Old Pal and a regular at Harry’s New York Bar.
I interviewed Hamilton about his new work. The conversation is below:
THE MIX: How did the French 75 book come about?
John Maxwell Hamilton: Of the books I have written, this is the most serendipitous. One afternoon, I dropped by the office of the director of LSU Press to discuss a book I am still writing. She casually mentioned that she had started a series of cocktail books. The books looked like a fun change of pace, not only subject matter-wise but also length. My last two books ran about a quarter of a million words each. These cocktail books are short. So, I said, “I want to do one.” We hit on the French 75, there and then. The serendipity really kicked in when I started to do the research and found out, first of all, that a great deal of misinformation swirled around the cocktail and, second of all, that the back story, never fully told, was my sweet spot. My last book was a history of the origins of modern government propaganda, in World War I. The French 75 emerged out of a major propaganda drive in the war to celebrate the French 75 mm artillery piece. The weapon, the first modern field cannon, helped save Paris at the start of the war. It was a rally-point for French patriotism. That story had never before been told in full. It was a lucky day when I dropped by the LSU Press office.
Before you started working on the book, were you a fan of the French 75?
JMH: No, I wasn’t, particularly. I had had two or three. They were okay. But nothing like the real thing, which I have come to love. The first version I drank used egg whites, which is cute, perhaps, but did not have much personality. As I was to discover, bars like to slap the name French 75 on a cocktail they have made up because the name sells itself. I suppose you will want to pursue this point a bit later.
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