Remember the Maine

Rye, sweet vermouth, Cherry Heering, and an absinthe rinse — Charles Baker's 1939 Gentleman's Companion creation named for the Spanish-American War rallying cry.

Remember the Maine was created by American travel and food writer Charles Henry Baker Jr. and published in his celebrated 1939 book The Gentleman's Companion, Volume II: Being an Exotic Drinking Book, Or Around the World with Jigger, Beaker and Flask. Baker was an adventurous journalist who documented the cocktail traditions of dozens of countries through extended travel in the 1920s and 1930s, and his two-volume Gentleman's Companion remains one of the most vivid and entertaining primary sources for mid-century international cocktail culture. The cocktail — rye whiskey, sweet vermouth, Cherry Heering, and a rinse of absinthe — takes its name from the rallying cry of the Spanish-American War of 1898. The USS Maine, an American battleship, exploded in Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898, killing 268 American sailors; American newspapers attributed the explosion to Spain, and the slogan Remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain became the war's mobilizing cry. Baker described the drink as a grand, strapping thing that one should approach with respect. Cherry Heering, the Danish cherry liqueur produced by Peter Heering in Copenhagen since 1818, provides the drink's stone-fruit sweetness, and the absinthe rinse adds the characteristic anise bridge that connects New Orleans-style cocktail architecture to this specifically Manhattan-adjacent preparation.