How Vodka Got Into Cocktails

A spirit nobody expected to succeed

At the start of the 20th century an American who had heard of vodka at all thought of it as a peasant’s drink. A pharmacists’ journal wrote in 1905 that it might suit a Muscovite in the dead of winter but could never become popular in a climate like America’s. The first mention of a vodka cocktail in print came in 1903, in a satirical story in a New York periodical, and the first proper vodka drink on a menu was the Russian Cocktail at the St Charles Hotel in New Orleans in 1911: three parts vodka to two parts Russian cherry liqueur.

The turning point came after the Second World War. Between 1950 and 1955 imports into the United States grew from 50,000 cases to 5 million. Gin and whisky were the reliable spirits of an older generation, and vodka, the new Cold War spirit, could replace either of them in almost any drink.

The Vodka Martini

The first reference to a Vodka Martini is in David A. Embury’s The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks (1948), which notes that vodka can stand in for gin in a classic Martini. A few years later Ted Saucier’s Bottoms Up (1951) called it a Vodkatini: four fifths of a jigger of vodka to one fifth of dry vermouth with a lemon twist. Stephenson’s own version is 50 ml vodka and 10 ml dry vermouth, stirred for at least 90 seconds, strained into a frozen glass and given only a spritz of lemon oil, because peel left floating in the glass makes the second half of the drink taste of nothing but lemon.

The White Russian

Harry Craddock’s The Savoy Cocktail Book (1930) has 750 recipes, and only four of them use vodka. One, the Barbara, combines vodka, crème de cacao and cream and echoes the gin-based Alexander of Hugo Ensslin’s 1916 book. Coffee liqueur only reached the market with Kahlúa in 1936, and a coffee version of the idea appears in The Stork Club Bar Book of 1946 as the Alexander the Great. The White Russian then enjoyed a boom in the 1970s and another in the late 1990s, helped by a film character who drinks them throughout. Stephenson builds it in the glass with 40 ml vodka, 20 ml coffee liqueur and 20 ml cream, stirred with plenty of ice, so there is no foamy top.

Beef broth and vodka: the Bullshot

The Bullshot comes from a marketing problem. In 1952 a public-relations executive was worried about a million unsold cans of Campbell’s Beef Broth, and a Detroit restaurateur, Lester Gruber of the London Chop House, was looking for novelties for his spillover bar. Vodka was turning every liquid it was added to into a cocktail without changing its flavour, and broth was no exception. Stephenson’s own variation, the Umami Bomb, swaps beef for a light stock of kombu, dried mushrooms and white miso with a little amontillado sherry.

The Long Island Iced Tea and the Blue Lagoon

The Long Island Iced Tea is often given a Prohibition story, but the earliest printed recipe the author found is in Betty Crocker’s New Picture Cook Book of 1961. A bartender’s claim to have invented it in 1972 is therefore hard to defend. Stephenson is blunt about the drink, which contains five base spirits where tequila, triple sec, lemon and cola do most of the work. His Wilbury Sour blends Cognac, sherry-cask single malt, aged rhum agricole, citrus vodka and absinthe into one mutant spirit instead.

The Blue Lagoon owes its colour to blue curaçao. The liqueur’s name goes back to the Caribbean island of Curaçao and its bitter Laraha orange, and Bols had blue curaçao in the United States before Prohibition. In 1957 a Bols sales representative asked Harry Yee, head bartender of the Hilton Hawaiian Village in Waikiki, to make a blue cocktail, which became the Blue Hawaiian.

Techniques from the vodka chapter

Three of the book’s vodka drinks use methods that are worth knowing: a pressure cooker turned into a still, for the water distillate in the Exploded Vodka Martini, a clarified raspberry shrub tinted blue for the True Blue, and a method for filling chocolates with a White Russian ganache.

Recipes from this chapter

The vodka chapter’s recipes are collected on this site as drafts until we have permission to publish them: White Russian, White Russian Liqueur Chocolates, Bullshot, Umami Bomb, Blue Lagoon, True Blue, Vodka Martini, Exploded Vodka Martini, Long Island Iced Tea and Wilbury Sour, together with their homemade ingredients.