The Last Word

HALLOWEEN
Halloween is celebrated every year on October 31. The tradition started as an ancient Celtic festival called Samhain when bonfires were lit and people wore costumes to scare off ghosts. In the eighth century, Pope Gregory III decided that November 1 should be a day to honor all saints. The two celebrations soon merged and the evening before All Saints Day came to be known as All Hallows Eve, later Halloween. In the United States Halloween parties didn’t really take off until the late 19th century when a great amount of Irish immigrants came, fleeing the Irish Potato Famine. So shake up a Bloody Mary, Blood and Sand, Zombie, Death in the Afternoon, El Diablo a Last Word or any other Halloween-like cocktails to celebrate this All Hallows Eve.

THE LAST WORD
The cocktail was invented at the Detroit Athletics Club around 1915, a club originally founded in 1887 but remade in the early 1900s to cater to Car Company executives and other prominent Detroiters. Not only was the club exclusive, the Last Word was the most expensive cocktail at the club selling for 35 cents, twice as much as a Manhattan.

The Last Word might have been made in honor of the New York vaudeville performer Frank Fogarty. He was performing at Detroit’s Temple Theater at the time of the drinks creation, and the name of the cocktail might be an allusion to the monologue with which he closed his act. The recipe for the Last Word didn’t appear in print until Ted Saucier, an authority on food and drink, added it to his 1951 cocktail book Bottoms Up. In the book Saucier, a boulevardier according to New York Times, calls Fogarty “a very fine monologue artist”. After Bottoms Up the drink never really took off, until the early 2000s.

THE DESIGNER
The cocktail glass was designed by Polish-Ukrainian designer Wszewłod Sarnecki in 1964.