Victorian bacchanalians could tickle their gums with anything from a Cowboy’s Delight to a Nigger Girl’s Smile, but a Corpse Reviver was always what a tipsy Englishman hankering for a shot of American ingenuity was likely to slur at a barman. The cocktail assumed a life of its own in Europe, where dozens of ersatz “American drinks” did the rounds.
An anonymous writer for a Boston journal bristled at “an American restaurant totally misrepresented at the Paris Exposition” the frustrated drinker fared no better in London, where he opined that American drinks “have names strange enough but the fact that certain decoctions are called ‘brandy-smashes’, ‘mint juleps’, and ‘sherry cobblers’, scarcely justifies the invention of the Haymarket ‘corpse-reviver’”. Passing through Paris in 1867, Mark Twain was perplexed to find “American bars” that could not even prepare an order for “whiskey straight”, and his was not a lone voice. Some of these so-called “American drinks” mystified connoisseurs of the genuine article. Cocktails symbolised America, and cocktail bars featured prominently in the American exhibits at both the London Exposition of 1862, and the Paris Exposition of 1867 - if only the same could have been said for the Shanghai Expo of 2010. By the 1860s transatlantic potions were appearing in a few London bars, and Jerry Thomas himself had crossed the pond to demonstrate mixology. Victorian England, while content with sherry, ale and hot flips, had a fascination for exotic American beverages. The price of soft power can be awfully steep. Just as Chinese travellers today must grit their teeth and deal with General Tso’s Chicken, so travelling Americans in the 19th century suffered the Corpse Reviver. Well-meaning American diners doing their bit for international relations at the Ming Garden, Centerville, Missouri, would be astonished to learn Crab Rangoon was noxiously foreign to their hapless Chinese homestay. But should you be Chinese, the joy of discovery will be tempered by keen foreboding, because put a Chinese restaurant outside China and it inevitably takes all sorts of culinary liberties. Travel anywhere, from London to La Paz, and you can always find a Chinese restaurant. Sometimes a nation comes up with a cultural export so successful it develops a life of its own. Seamus Harris charts the journey of a stiff re-animator.
3/4 ounce lemon juice, freshly squeezed.2 gin cocktail is a popular addition at craft cocktail bars and an occasional option at brunch joints that embrace the drink’s ability to kick-start the morning. The result is tart, cold and refreshing, precisely what you need to start the day-or the evening, if you prefer to consume your liquor when the sun’s down. This corpse reviver ingredients features gin, Lillet blanc (a French aperitif), orange liqueur and fresh lemon juice. However, the category was a loose one, with no real shared guidelines on ingredients other than they tended to be relatively high-proof and served up, rather than over ice. The Corpse Reviver was a set of cocktails traditionally consumed as a hair-of-the-dog, a hangover reliever to refresh and enliven after a night of heavy drinking.
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