Milano-Torino cocktail

Florence 1919 or 1920. At the time, Count Camillo Negroni was a regular at the aristocratic Caffè Casoni. One day he wanted something a little bit stronger than his usual Americano so he asked Fosco Scarselli, the barman, to add a dash of gin rather than soda to the drink, in honour of his recent trips to London. The new cocktail became ‘the usual’ for the Count and soon the ‘Count Negroni-style Americano aperitif’ for everybody else. In the 1950s, the cocktail became very popular in Italy and then worldwide with even Ian Fleming citing the Negroni Cocktail in one of the episodes of his famous James Bond saga.

The origins of this cocktail go so far back that it's tough to trust anyone who says they created it. The original name was Whiskey Cocktail as it reflected the characteristics of the classic cocktail formula laid down in 1806; spirit, sugar, water and bitters The proliferation of new liqueurs available to bartenders from the 1870s resulted in a treadmill of new 'improved' Whiskey Cocktails... but which also led to a revolt amongst those who yearned for the original drink. Hence the Old Fashioned Whiskey Cocktail.

Manhattan cocktail has been famous since the beginning. They said that it was created around the 1870 at Manhattan Club in New York by Ian Marshall during the reception organized by Jennie Jerome (aka Lady Randolph Churchill, mother of Winston Churchill) in honor of the presidential candidate Samuel J. Tilden.The drink had a great success and became vary trendy so people begun to order it referring to the club where it was born, The Manhattan. the cocktail soon became very popular also in Europe, probably helped by its name which represents a perfect synthesis of the Big Apple enclosed in a glass.

La storia del Boulevardier inizia all’Harry’s Bar di Parigi dove lo storico barman Harry McElhone creò questo cocktail per Erskine Gwynne: sarebbe stato poi quest’ultimo a decretarne l’ingresso nei libri di storia grazie alla citazione all’interno di “Barflies and Cocktails” pubblicato nel 1927.

La fama di Erskine derivava dal fatto di essere il nipote del magnate Alfred Vanderbilt e dall’aver fondato un mensile chiamato proprio “Boulevardier”: il nome, che deriva da boulevard (strada, in francese) fu coniato all’epoca per definire una persona “di strada” nel senso positivo del termine.