Golden Star

A bright brandy cocktail balanced with dry vermouth and orange curacao for an aperitif-style sipper.

The Golden Star is a pre-Prohibition brandy cocktail that uses a dash of absinthe as an aromatic accent — a technique that was standard in American professional bartending before the spirit's ban in 1912 and that has returned to prominence since absinthe's re-legalization in the United States in 2007. Absinthe, distilled from grand wormwood (Artemisia absinthium), green anise, and fennel along with various other botanicals, was produced primarily in the Val-de-Travers region of Switzerland and in the Pontarlier region of France from the late 18th century onward. Its association with bohemian artistic culture — Van Gogh, Verlaine, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Oscar Wilde were among its famous enthusiasts in the French café culture of the 1880s and 1890s — gave it a mystique that made its prohibitions feel significant to American bartenders who lost access to it. The Golden Star's formula of cognac, pineapple juice, sweet vermouth, and absinthe reflects the pre-Prohibition American taste for complex, multi-ingredient cocktails in which the absinthe dash performed a function that no other ingredient could replicate: the anise and wormwood aromatics bridged disparate elements, adding an aromatic coherence to the cognac-pineapple-vermouth combination. Pineapple juice, which was being commercially canned by James Dole in Hawaii from 1903 onward following the consolidation of the pineapple industry on the islands, was an exotic tropical ingredient in American bars of the era.