50 STATES: Louisiana

WERE there ever a perfect gentleman’s cocktail, it would be the Sazerac. When, in celebration of your return to New Orleans, you raise one of Roger Blais’ expertly crafted renditions of the rye and bitters-based beverage, admiring its burnt-orange color, you’re not just having a drink. You’re sipping American history.

You are also, it turns out, sipping the official cocktail of the city of New Orleans.

Blais, a Michigan native who once slung drinks at Studio 54 and has been in New Orleans since the mid-1990s, is now the head bartender at the Polo Club Lounge inside the elegant Windsor Court Hotel, just steps from the French Quarter.

Here, he’s served drinks to multiple heads of state, to Paul McCartney, and now to you. If you drank a Sazerac here, you might start thinking that perhaps there will be other Sazeracs, both here and at other bars in town. Cocktail aficionado or no, you could get used to this.

And that is where you would be treading into dangerous waters.

AROUND HERE, ONLY THE SYRUP IS SIMPLE

New Orleans puts on a great show of being a fun place. It is the city, should you need reminding, that care forgot. Laissez les bon temps rouler, and all that. When it comes to matters of tradition, though, particularly the old foodways (and drinkways, if that is actually a word), never forget that everything — everything — is taken quite seriously.

For example, let’s start with Roger Blais’ rendition of the Sazerac. Excellent, in a word, and it goes something like this:

Old Overholt Rye Whiskey, half an ounce of simple syrup, one dash of Peychaud’s Bitters.

Stir (never shake) the mixture with ice, then pour into a glass coated with that fragrant local liqueur, Herbsaint, straining contents into the glass, into which you may allow a couple of the ice cubes to fall. Rub a twist of lemon on the rim and drop into the glass. Drink, and do it quickly.

To the untrained palate, Blais has crafted a tasty beverage. According to some experts, Blais has committed heresy. Really. (How can we be sure? At least three experts agree.)

The essential ingredients — Rye, Peychaud’s Bitters, a little sugar, Herbsaint and some lemon — all there. But ice in the glass? That’s a no-no. Others say dropping the lemon peel in the glass is a piker move.

Still more would ask why only one dash of the Peychaud’s bitters instead of generous lashings, and while we’re at it, where are the other bitters, the Angostura, without which many bartenders say a Sazerac cannot be completed? Why, cry others still, this obsession over the Sazerac? How did it come to be the official cocktail of New Orleans, anyway? Such a basic thing. Better it should have been the complex, more decadent Ramos Gin Fizz.

All this drama! It is enough to make you switch to beer. Drinking is supposed to be relaxing, after all.

Pfft. This is New Orleans. If you don’t want to get burned, don’t touch the damn stove.

SO, HOW DID IT REALLY HAPPEN?

In his 1936 book, “Old New Orleans,” Stanley C. Arthur writes that the American cocktail as we know it was born in New Orleans, and that out of that genre came the best known: the Sazerac. This, of course, is 1936, which is why he didn’t say “Cosmopolitan.” Or, “Irish Car Bomb.”

The original Sazerac, Arthur says, was made of “sugar, cognac and aromatic bitters, manufactured by a New Orleans druggist, Antoine Amadie Peychaud, and was known to those who first sampled it as a ‘brandy cocktail.'”

Peychaud was of Haitian extraction. He invented the Sazerac at a time when cocktails were prescribed to cure various ailments. (This sounds like a better deal than popping pills from little burnt-orange bottles.) The Sazerac was popular, soon became known as a whiskey-based cocktail instead, and that’s how we got to where we are today.

One problem, though. Not one person can agree just what the history actually is, which is possibly the reason behind the fact that no two Sazerac recipes are 100-percent alike. Never mind that almost none of them call for brandy anymore, which means that right from the start, you are serving a perversion, if you really want to get legalistic, and you probably don’t.

Furthermore, did Peychaud really invent the Sazerac?

Phil Greene, a Peychaud descendant who by day is an attorney for the US Department of Commerce — and at all other times a cocktail historian — writes in a very academic paper (thrillingly titled “Antoine Amedee Peychaud: Pharmacist and New Orleans Cocktail Legend,” by the way) that his forebear was no doubt a pharmacist from Haiti. However, there is some misgiving as to whether or not Peychaud isn’t just a “mix of fact and folklore in the tradition of Johnny Appleseed, Paul Bunyon and George Washington.”

That said, Peychaud did invent the bitters that bear his name and are still found wherever fine liquors are sold throughout the region. But did he invent the Sazerac, or at least something like it?

“Possibly,” writes Greene, if one can believe the writings of Stanley C. Arthur — which, to make matters more confusing, many say one can’t.

Truth. Who needs truth? New Orleans doesn’t. Start asking around about the Sazerac and you’ll hear it said in no uncertain terms that not only was this was the first cocktail, but also that the cocktail itself was invented right here in New Orleans, New France.

Never mind that, according to Greene’s research, H.L. Mencken, who apparently once looked into this urgent matter, wrote that every story behind the origins of the word cocktail are “somewhat fishy.” (As we all know by now, what Mencken says goes.)

So, in essence, what you have here is a lot of people trafficking in myth, which is sort of like if you went to Germany and a tour guide promised to show you the Hansel and Gretel house. It probably isn’t going to be the Hansel and Gretel house.

Gratefully and for the purposes of saving time, it turns out that the grave matter of confusion RE: the Sazerac has been addressed previously.

Writer David Wondrich, an expert on matters related to drinking, confesses in his book, “Imbibe!,” that untangling Sazerac reality from the Sazerac myth was heavy going, to the point where the untangling was taking pages upon pages, with no end in sight.

At that point, he writes, he spoke with his editor, who proposed that Wondrich simply stop trying. He did, though not without asserting rather firmly that the Sazerac “was in no way the first Cocktail, as it has been asserted time and again by its enthusiastic proponents.”

SAVE THE SAZERAC!

When it comes to proponents of the Sazerac, Ann Tuennerman is about as enthusiastic as they come. She’ll repeat the legend, how it was one of the first cocktails. She will tell you the story of Antoine Peychaud and his shop on Royal Street — which is today, incidentally, a Walgreens. She will also tell you that New Orleans is most likely the birthplace of the cocktail.

Tuennerman isn’t just any enthusiast. She heads up the annual, French Quarter-based “Tales of the Cocktail” festival, now in its seventh year. She is also the founder of the New Orleans Culinary and Cultural Preservation Society, and holds educational programs certifying local bartenders as “Sazeractivists.” After Hurricane Katrina, you could spot her Saturday mornings at the Crescent City Farmers Market selling T-shirts imploring passers-by to “Save the Sazerac.”

She’s also the driving force behind the resolution that passed in Baton Rouge last June declaring the drink to be the official cocktail of the city of New Orleans. She’d wanted it to be the official cocktail of Louisiana, but a lot of legislators from the northern part of the state — the No Fun Zone — had a whole lot to say about that.

Over coffee at a Chartres Street café — it is really too early for anything stronger — she talks about her favorite Sazerac.

“You can tell if it is well made,” she says, “when it’s on its way out.”

As the server approaches your table, you should take a look at the drink: The color should be deep; equal parts red, orange and brown. It dare not be too sweet, though Tuennerman does not profess to have any strong feelings regarding using simple syrup (a time saver) versus the original muddled cube of sugar.

“Properly made,” she says, “it is phenomenal. It can be a huge turn-off, otherwise. Huge.”

Why all this fuss over a cocktail? After all, Louisiana’s rich and unique heritage seems to be alive and well. As Tuennerman sees it, New Orleans is in a race against time to keep the old things of value from fading away.

“The Sazerac is history in a glass,” she says, and thus is the perfect way to get people to connect with the past.

It’s tough, sometimes. Tuennerman bemoans the fact that in a city so well-known for enjoying the odd cocktail, there are so few true cocktail lounges. Bartenders across the quarter sweeten their Sazeracs to please tourists, who associate New Orleans with the sugary goodness of a Hurricane or a Daiquiri.

Now, with the once-forbidden Absinthe now legalized and available everywhere, confusion abounds as to whether or not its substitute, Herbsaint, any longer has a place in the drink. After all, Herbsaint, just 75-years old — again, first made by a local pharmacist — was created as a replacement when Absinthe went underground, on account of making all those people go crazy.

Tuennerman, who personally prefers Herbsaint to Absinthe, later shares her recipe. It calls, interestingly enough, for Absinthe (step towards the authentic), and Angostura bitters (a nod to modern trends.)

At this point, it is impossible not to feel a little bit like David Wondrich, who at a certain point just had to give up on finding the absolute truth. Further reading of his book, though, proves helpful.

He writes that there’s no record of the Sazerac before the twentieth century because why should there be? It’s a simple whiskey cocktail, after all, which he observes could have been ordered in any bar, anywhere in America that served mixed drinks. Which raises a point: Does the world need people obsessing over, say, the Jack and Coke of its time, or does it simply need a Jack and Coke?

When the Sazerac started to get talked about, says Wondrich, was when these simple drinks had been out of style for a time, in favor of, for instance, the Vermouth-based cocktail, and other things more complex. Things that were not complex suddenly became sexy again.

And so, Wondrich points out, they have remained. He’s right — particularly after the nightmare that was Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans seems to have come down with a case of Sazerac fever, the symptoms of which are a renewed passion for simplicity, for a return to the old ways.

If only this passion for simplicity wasn’t making everything so incredibly confusing.

At this point, it seems like the only thing to do is go right back to the very beginning, or at least the very beginning as told by Stanley C. Arthur in 1936: The Sazerac as served in Peychaud’s Royal Street pharmacy. Brandy, bitters, absinthe and a sugar cube. At square one, perhaps the fog will begin to clear.

IT’S KIND OF LIKE HOW YOU CAN’T GET A REAL BAGEL IN MIDTOWN THESE DAYS

Because the city known for its cocktails can be remarkably thin on cocktail lounges, square one turns out to be another hotel bar.

This time, it is the Ritz-Carlton on Canal Street. Daniel Victory, a New Orleans native is the hotel mixologist. Bespectacled, young and energetic, he’s only too happy to indulge a request for a 100-percent authentic Sazerac, for which he uses Courvoisier, just the right amount of the Peychaud’s bitters and a muddled sugar cube. It goes down smooth, which you’d expect when you started out with Courvoisier.

Interestingly, Victory has in this case eschewed the absinthe, which he has on hand and clearly adores. When talking about the first time he ever drank it, he confesses that he “felt little angels rubbing me up and down.”

The substitution turns out to not be a huge matter, seeing as absinthe actually lends a harsher element to the Sazerac than the more frequently-used Herbsaint. The latter’s aromatic, anise-rich scent is at this point almost an essential component of the drink for many, including this reporter.

Thus, two things have now become clear.

One: The original, brandy-based Sazerac is just as good, if not better, than its modern interpretation.

Two: A good Sazerac is in the eye of the beholder.

It also turns out that a good Sazerac is in the eye of the beholder who has been over-served, because the afternoon quickly degenerates into one of those French Quarter stumblings that memories are made of.

A few hours on, whether or not Patrick the bartender at Mr. B’s Bistro is adding Angostura bitters to your drink becomes a matter of less urgency. Ditto whether Michael over at the Carousel Bar in the Hotel Monteleone is being too liberal with the simple syrup. One even finds oneself a little less aghast over the fact that the kid over at the Uncommon Bar on Gravier Street is shaking — yes, shaking — the Sazerac, which must never be shaken, only stirred.

In the harsh light of later that very same afternoon, it becomes clear that with few exceptions, none of the Sazeracs served that day had approached greatness. No two were alike. Some of them were even bad. And yet, it had been a beautiful afternoon in New Orleans.

Perhaps this is the secret of the Sazerac, unlocked: Leave the debates over authenticity, history, the perfect recipe and all that other noise to people with more time on their hands.

In other words, less thinking — more drinking.

5 GREAT SAZERACS

1) Patois This wonderful neighborhood fine dining joint burrowed deep in the really quiet part of Uptown is nouveau New Orleans at its most seductive. At the bar, Becky Tarpy effortlessly concocts a classic Sazerac you won’t quickly forget. 6078 Laurel Street

2) Cure Neal Bodenheimer’s new Freret Street lounge is the talk of the town, mostly because it’s in the middle of nowhere (as far as tourists are concerned) and also because he’s 100 percent serious about cocktails. Ask for Rhiannon. 4905 Freret Street

3) French 75 Bar If Chris Hannah is tending bar, you’re good. Otherwise, you take your chances. Stop in before dinner at the classic Arnaud’s, right next door. 813 Bienville Street

4) Polo Club LoungeYou might want to ask for Roger Blais, but this is one of those bars that tends to be generally reliable. Pricey, also. 300 Gravier Street, in the Windsor Court Hotel

5) Carousel Bar This is one of those anytime places that comes in handy if you’re in the Quarter, though things are at their best when Marvin Allen is behind the bar. 214 Royal Street, in the Hotel Monteleone