It's the classic tangy tomato cocktail often hailed the perfect “hair of the dog” hangover cure.
And this year the Bloody Mary is celebrating 100 years since it was created.
The tipple has many variations but most commonly consists of vodka, tomato juice, lemon, Tabasco sauce and Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce, with a pinch of pepper and a stick of celery.
Here Daily Star reveals 10 tasty facts about the drink.
1. While there are a number of claims as to the origins of the Bloody Mary, it’s generally acknowledged to have been invented by French bartender Fernand Petiot, who was working at Harry’s New York Bar in Paris, a favourite of writer Ernest Hemingway.
2. He experimented with the tasteless vodka brought over by exiles who had escaped the Russian Revolution to try to jazz it up. He was also introduced to the American staple of canned tomato juice and had the brainwave in 1921 to put them together.
3. The use of a celery stick as a garnish came about when an impatient customer at a New York hotel in the 1960s didn’t get a stirrer for his drink. So he grabbed the first thing he could see, a piece of celery off the bar.
4. The phrase “hair of the dog” – drinking alcohol to ease a hangover – originally referred to treatment for a rabid dog bite, which involved placing hair from the same canine in the wound.
5. There is debate about how the tipple got its moniker. Some claim it’s from the ruthless Queen Mary, dubbed “Bloody Mary” due to the number of Protestants she bumped off during her reign. Another theory is it was named after the silent film actress Mary Pickford, a huge celebrity in the 1920s.
6. Scientifically, a Bloody Mary tastes better in the air. According to a German 2010 study the dry air in an aircraft cabin makes it harder to detect sweet and salty tastes but the savoury flavours of tomato and sauces, such as Lea & Perrins, cut through this.
7. The cocktail enjoyed a surge in popularity in the UK after the film version of the 1920s novel The Great Gatsby was released in 2013, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan. Gatsby author F Scott Fitzgerald was another regular at Harry’s New York Bar at the time of the drink’s invention.
8. And in Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 film Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, Brad Pitt’s stuntman character has a Bloody Mary in the opening scene.
9. Don’t want vodka in yours? No problem. With gin it’s a Red Snapper, a Bloody Fairy with absinthe, a Bloody Molly with Irish whisky and a Bloody Maria with tequila. Minus the alcohol, it’s known as a Virgin Mary.
10. The largest Bloody Mary ever created used 500 litres of tomato juice to make a cocktail totalling 588.43 litres. The world’s most expensive was made in Wisconsin, US, in 2015, costing £50 a glass. Dubbed the Bloody Beast, it was garnished with cheese, sausage, pickles, olives, onion, mushrooms, asparagus, spring onions, prawns, lemon, Brussels sprouts, tomato, celery and a whole fried chicken.
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