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New Orleans and the Legal, Mixological, and
Etymological History of the Cocktail

 
 
by Brian Huddleston, Senior Reference Librarian,
Loyola University Law Library
 
 
A trademark case before the Louisiana Supreme Court in the late nineteenth century
involved a New Orleans company that manufactured bitters and is, tangentially, related to several of the city’s contributions to the history of alcoholic beverages. Bitters are mixtures of alcohol infused with herbs or other ingredients that are now key components in many mixed drinks but which were originally consumed as health tonics. A dose of bitters was once considered a bracing elixir that helped to stimulate vitality, and so as preventative medicine it was completely different than just slugging back a few shots of whiskey. Bitters, aperitifs, and digestives - all similar products - were also conveniently not categorized as liquor for tax purposes.
 
In the case of Handy v. Commander, 22 So. 230 (La. 1897), plaintiff Thomas H. Handy &
Co. of New Orleans was the maker of “Handy’s Aromatic Cocktail Bitters”. Handy’s Bitters
were represented to be “the most palatable and flavorous ever” and were guaranteed to “stimulate the appetite and invigorate the functions of the stomach, thereby preventing dyspepsia.” Defendant Anthony Commander was an employee of Handy’s who, after learning the recipe for Handy’s Bitters, quit and set up his own company to sell the same formulation under the name “Commander’s Aromatic Cocktail Bitters”.
 
At issue in Handy v. Commander was the trademark that Handy held for the labeling of his bitters and Commander’s unauthorized use of a nearlyidentical trademark. (The formula of the bitters itself was not patented or protected as a trade secret.) The court noted that “in size, in style and color, in lettering and execution, word for word, there is not a point of difference between the trademark of Handy and the trademark put forth by the defendant, except that the latter is styled ‘Commander’s Bitters’ while the former was styled ‘Handy’s Bitters’”. Because of the similar and confusing labels, the court upheld the judgement of trademark infringement and the $450 damage award, which was based on the 88% decline in sales that Handy suffered from Commander’s illegally competing product.
 
The bitters central to the dispute in Handy v. Commander were from a recipe developed
and finessed decades earlier by a New Orleans pharmacist named Antoine Amadée Peychaud, a French Creole immigrant from Haiti. Peychaud had worked on many different types of recipes for bitters and other herbal medicinal aids since arriving in New Orleans in 1793. (His eponymous brand, Peychaud’s Bitters, is still manufactured in New Orleans.) In the scholarship of alcohol, the addition of bitters to mixtures of liquor and water or other mixers is seen as both a historic turning point as well as a categorical delineation between cocktails and, in what at one time was a strict distinction, other mixed drinks such as toddies and slings.
 

In the late 1830s, Peychaud created a pleasing combination of his bitters mixed with
brandy and absinthe, and the recipe for this drink spread beyond his friends and customers and became popular throughout the city. One establishment decided to make it only with a particular type of brandy, which also soon became the concoction’s name, the Sazerac. Now a signature New Orleans drink, the Sazerac is widely acknowledged to be one of the first true cocktails, if not the first. (Modern Sazeracs use Herbsaint or Pernod in place of the absinthe; thank you very much, F.D.A.)
 
But what about that word, cocktail? No definitive derivation of the term has been
established, and some of the more colorful stories are considered apocryphal, such as the one
about the revolutionary war-era barmaid who decorated the mixed drinks she served with a
rooster’s tailfeather. History often shows that the more mundane explanation for something is
most often correct, and that is likely the case here. Besides creating the first cocktail, Peychaud also deserves some credit in this matter. He served his early mixed drinks in a double ended egg cup, called a coquetier and pronounced kah-kuh-TYAY; to the non-French speaking residents of New Orleans, the word was mis-heard, mis-understood, and/or mis-pronounced as “cocktail.” This is less colorful and not really that much more likely than other claimed derivations, but one writer on the subject noted that the esteemed lexicographer Dr. Frank H. Vizetelly (go ahead, Google him) has declared that the coquetier origin story is “the oldest and most positive basis for the word cocktail.”
 
So now that you’ve learned more about New Orleans and the cocktail than you ever
wanted to know, if you’re coming to the 2007 AALL Annual Meeting here are some of the best places in the Crescent City to have a cocktail, a beer, or a glass of wine.
 
 
 
 
 
Updated June 8, 2007