February/March 2011

What a blast to crack open the Washington Post’s Metro section and run into breathless posturing (even lecturing!) about how the Sidecar should properly be served.

The cocktail has as many inventors as baseball, ice cream, or Facebook, but here’s one with a delicious Maine twist:

Former Kennebunkport summer resident and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Booth Tarkington “supposedly invented” the Sidecar with his frequent theatrical collaborator Harry Leon Wilson (among their triumphs, The Man From Home) “during a creative moment in Paris” around 1907, according to Suzannah Mayberry in My Amiable Uncle, a loving tribute which covers Tarkington’s devil-may-care days in Europe (FFI, see his cosmopolitan novel The Guest of Quesnay). That’s over ten years before Wikipedia’s claim of a loopy World War I American Army captain being driven in a motorcycle sidecar in Paris to his favorite bistro.

Tarkington’s ingredients of choice at the dawn of the last century were what they are today: cognac, Cointreau, lemon juice, and maybe a maraschino cherry. Glass selection and the possibility of a sugar rim are far more controversial. Consider the urban-chic self-consciousness of this “live chat” with “mixology fans” in the Post:

Q: I have ordered a Sidecar at two restaurants recently. Both times, they were served in a Martini glass with the rim dipped in sugar. Is this part of the “martinification” of cocktails…?

A: It is part of the “martinification” of cocktails, though I know places that have been serving them that way since the early 2000s. (I think my first Sidecar was served up with a sugar rim, and that was years ago.) The main difference is whether the drink is being served on the rocks, in which case it would go in the Old Fashioned glass, or up, which would call for the usual cocktail/Martini glass…

Au contraire, mon ami. Our crack investigative team has determined that at Tarkington watering holes like Maxim’s and the Ritz in Paris, it’s more likely a Sidecar would have been served in a champagne coupe, a shallow, wide-rimmed vessel that enjoys notoriety of having been molded on the breasts of Marie Antoinette. It’s very likely a sugar rim did exist on the original version, as the drink is a variation on the Brandy Crusta, which enjoys that sweet periphery.

At the blur of parties and receptions at his mansion “Seawood” on South Main Street in Kennebunkport, Tarkington’s friends were instructed to rhyme his first name with “Soothe,” easier to swallow if you’ve had a few Sidecars to let people know you’ve really arrived.

Just a dash of history to impress the mixologist at the Mandarin Oriental next time you touch down. If people around you are amazed by your story/drink and ask if Booth Tarkington invented anything else, just wink and say, “F. Scott Fitzgerald.”