Chrysanthemum

Dry vermouth, Bénédictine, and absinthe — Hugo Ensslin's 1916 New York creation, revised by Craddock in 1930, revived by the US re-legalization of absinthe in 2007.

The Chrysanthemum's documented history begins in 1916 in New York City, when Hugo R. Ensslin published it in Recipes for Mixed Drinks — one of the last major American cocktail books printed before Prohibition shut down the country's bar culture. Ensslin was the head bartender at the Hotel Wallick on 43rd Street and Broadway, and his formula combined equal parts dry vermouth and Bénédictine with three dashes of absinthe and an orange peel twist. The drink may take its name from Scott Joplin's 1904 ragtime composition The Chrysanthemum, which was released on a recorded cylinder in 1916 — the same year as Ensslin's book. Harry Craddock included a revised version in his 1930 Savoy Cocktail Book, shifting the ratio to two parts vermouth to one part Bénédictine for a drier result, and added a note that the drink was well-known and very popular in the American Bar of the S.S. Europa. The SS Europa was a German Norddeutscher Lloyd ocean liner that departed on its maiden voyage from Bremerhaven to New York in March 1930, crossing the Atlantic in approximately five days and arriving precisely as Craddock's book was published. The Europa's American Bar gave Prohibition-era travelers from the United States a legal venue to drink as soon as they boarded in American waters — a cultural function that made transatlantic liner bars a significant part of the cocktail world's geography. Absinthe had been banned in the United States since 1912, which lent the original Chrysanthemum a pre-Prohibition mystique that its craft cocktail revival — following absinthe's re-legalization in the US in 2007 — has fully embraced.