How to Make a Japanese Cocktail, the Cognac and Orgeat Classic With a Forgotten History
The Japanese Cocktail is not Japanese. It’s best to clear that up right away. It’s not even a little Japanese. It was invented by an American bartender, made with largely French ingredients and served in New York. So why is it called the Japanese Cocktail? As best we can tell, it took its name from that one time in 1860 that the guy who invented it met, or perhaps merely saw, a Japanese person.
Don’t get me wrong, the Japanese are great, but these days we don’t tend to throw a parade if a few dozen of them come to New York. But apparently, they felt differently in the mid-19th century, because when three samurai ambassadors accompanied by a 74-person entourage arrived in America to ratify the Treaty of Amity and Commerce in June of 1860, New York City literally threw them a parade.
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It’s difficult to overstate America’s excitement for this visit. Japan had been isolated as a matter of policy for 250 years at that point. As such, this delegation was almost certainly the first time someone from Japan had ever set foot in New York, and the city made sure to show them a good time. The parade took them on a four-mile tour of lower Manhattan, with two different artillery salutes and an escort of more than 5,000 members of the First Division New York State Militia. Both Japanese and American flags were hung from “almost every window,” it was reported. Organizers instructed all the city’s shops to close by 2 pm that day so everyone could come watch, and some accounts tally the spectators at 500,000. “They will be welcomed as becomes the representatives of that great and mysterious Empire,” wrote the New York Times that morning, declaring that, “the panorama of their escort… will probably form one of the most novel and imposing spectacles ever witnessed in this city.”
The Samurai’s two-week stay in New York City was commemorated well beyond the newspapers. Walt Whitman wrote a poem for the occasion. Charles Grobe composed a song. And, back to the matter at hand, a bartender named Jerry Thomas whipped up a cocktail made of Cognac, almond syrup and bitters. Though most of the delegation spoke no English, they were said to have enjoyed those parts of New York that did not require translation, which is to say, the drinking scene—Thomas was famous, his bar was less than a block from the delegation’s hotel, and it’s not a stretch to imagine they drank there. In the absence of specifics, imagination is all we have, but what we do know is that not long after, Thomas publishes the first ever drink recipe book The Bartender’s Guide: How To Mix Drinks, or the Bon-Vivant’s Companion, and he includes there, named in homage, the Japanese Cocktail.
So the Japanese Cocktail remains, a little liquid artifact of the time. You don’t see it around much; considering the name itself requires some four paragraphs of explanation (see above), I think most people just don’t bother. But stir one up and you’ll find it a fantastic drink, essentially an Old Fashioned with extra nutty richness, punchy with strength but seductive with the twin charms of Cognac and orgeat. When spiced up with bitters it resembles a high-proof pastry, and is among the better cocktails one can call upon as the last drink before bed.
We’d like to think Thomas named it for the Japanese emissaries because they were so fond of the drink, but we can’t know. We’ll never know whether the envoys themselves ever even had it, but it’s nice to imagine this delegation, swords and all, enjoying a Japanese Cocktail or two before retiring for the night, and perhaps even thinking to themselves that while there’s nothing the least bit Japanese about this mixture, it is, nonetheless, pretty great.
Japanese Cocktail
2.25 oz. Cognac
0.5 oz. orgeat
2 dashes Angostura Bitters
Add all ingredients to a mixing glass with ice and stir for 20 to 30 seconds. Strain off the ice into a cocktail glass or coupe and garnish with a lemon peel.
NOTES ON INGREDIENTS
Cognac: Cognac is a spirit of many faces, and different bottlings can present across a wide range of fruitiness, florals, richness and oak. VS (less aged) cognac is good, but light and a little too shallow. XO (much more aged) was heavy and a bit persnickety and needed the exact right type of orgeat and a lemon peel to shine. The Goldilocks zone here is VSOP, between them in richness and age. I tried this with five different bottlings of VSOP and liked all of them, but my favorites were H by Hine and the Pierre Ferrand Ambré.
The one other thing I’ll say is that there are so many production decisions with Cognac, so many subtle choices affecting its ultimate taste, that superficially similar bottlings present in totally different ways. The Remy Martin XO really didn’t work, for example, but then I added a lemon peel, and suddenly it clicked in and was amazing. Both Hennessy VSOP and Remy Martin 1738 were just okay at 2 ounces of Cognac but began to absolutely sing at 2.25 ounces. The point of all of which is that if your particular bottle of Cognac isn’t making a great Japanese Cocktail, try adding a little more, or a little less. It might come into its own.
Orgeat: Orgeat has two main types—the lighter, marzipan, floral type, and the deep, rich, nutty type (this is an oversimplification, obviously, but workable for our purposes). For this cocktail, you absolutely need the latter. The brands I’ve tried that work for this are Small Hands Foods, Liber & Co., and Liquid Alchemist. I’m sure there are more.
You can also make it yourself, if you have a mind to, but beware any recipes that call for large amounts of bitter almonds in particular, which Amy Stewart in the Drunken Botanist reminds us “contain enough cyanide to be deadly at a dose of fifty to seventy nuts.” You obviously won’t be drinking enough of this orgeat to kill you, but how much cyanide are you looking for today?
Bitters: Thomas himself called for “Boker’s Bitters” in all his bitters recipes, but today we usually do Angostura. A few enterprising people have tried to recreate this lost style of bitters from the mid-1800s, and those can indeed good here, but one of the things that separates Angostura from its competitors—and what my tests found that these Boker’s reproductions lacked in this cocktail in particular—is that Angostura is always good, whereas Boker’s was good with some cognacs, but not good with others.
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