Burnt Fuselage

An equal-parts stirred cognac cocktail with Grand Marnier and dry vermouth, created for a 1920s daredevil aviator at Harry's New York Bar in Paris.

The Burnt Fuselage first appeared in print in Harry MacElhone's 1927 Barflies and Cocktails, compiled at his Harry's New York Bar in Paris, within a "Cocktails Round Town" section that gathered drinks favored by the bar's regulars. This one was the signature of Colonel C.W. "Chuck" Kerwood, an American aviator from Philadelphia and a veteran of the Lafayette Escadrille who was known in the press as a daredevil "wild man of aviation." Kerwood's macabre name for the drink - evoking the charred wreckage of a crashed aircraft - was a piece of gallows humor entirely at odds with the smooth, warming cocktail it describes. The formula is an equal-parts build in the spirit of the Negroni: one part cognac, one part Grand Marnier, and one part dry French vermouth, stirred over ice and strained. The cognac supplies stone-fruit warmth and oak, Grand Marnier layers in its cognac-based orange-peel sweetness, and the dry vermouth ties the two together with herbal astringency that keeps the drink from turning cloying. Aviation-themed cocktails proliferated in the 1920s and 1930s as flight gripped the public imagination, from the earlier gin Aviation to the later Test Pilot and Jet Pilot tiki drinks; the Burnt Fuselage stands apart from those as a spirit-forward, after-dinner sipper rather than a citrusy long drink.