by Hanne Tidnam
The mint julep is one of the most literary and storied cocktails. In fact, directions on how to make the “glittering,” “twinkling” cocktail are themselves poetry.
Literary giants Charles Dickens and Washington Irving shared a blissful evening over the drink in 1842, a moment which became one of Dickens’s favorite memories of his friend:
“Some unknown admirer of his books and mine sent to the hotel a most enormous mint julep, wreathed with flowers. We sat, one on either side of it, with great solemnity (it filled a respectably-sized round table), but the solemnity was of very short duration. It was quite an enchanted julep, and carried us among innumerable people and places that we both knew. The julep held out far into the night, and my memory never saw him afterwards otherwise than as bending over it, with his straw, with an attempted air of gravity (after some anecdote involving some wonderfully droll and delicate observation of character), and then as his eye caught mine, melting into that captivating laugh of his, which was the brightest and best I have ever heard. — J. W. T. Ley, The Dickens Circle: A Narrative of the Novelist’s Friendships,
E. P. Dutton, New York, 1918. Henry Clay, also known as “The Great Compromiser,” wrote a lyrical recipe for the mint julep in his diaries in 1865:
“The mint leaves, fresh and tender, should be pressed against a coin-silver goblet with the back of a silver spoon. Only bruise the leaves gently and then remove them from the goblet. Half fill with cracked ice. Mellow bourbon, aged in oaken barrels, is poured from the jigger and allowed to slide slowly through the cracked ice.
In another receptacle, granulated sugar is slowly mixed into chilled limestone water to make a silvery mixture as smooth as some rare Egyptian oil, then poured on top of the ice. While beads of moisture gather on the burnished exterior of the silver goblet, garnish the brim of the goblet with the choicest sprigs of mint.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne, writing of the famous Willard Hotel in Washington, DC in July of 1862, described the mint julep at the heart of the hopping political scene in the bar:
“Occasionally you talk with a man whom you have never before heard of, and are struck by the brightness of a thought, and fancy that there is more wisdom hidden among the obscure than is anywhere revealed among the famous. You adopt the universal habit of the place, and call for a mint-julep, a whisky-skin, a gin-cocktail, a brandy-smash, or a glass of pure Old Rye; for the conviviality of Washington sets in at an early hour, and, so far as I had an opportunity of observing, never terminates at any hour, and all these drinks are continually in request by almost all these people.”
The drink was ripe fodder for Civil War poets in the south, standing in as a symbol for all that was patrician and southern. In 1863, poet Clarence Ousley wrote: “When the mint is in the liquor and its fragrance on the glass, it breathes a recollection that can never, never pass.” And poet Charles Fenno Hoffman wrote a length ode to the drink in 1873, called, unsurprisingly, “The Mint Julep”:
“…The draught was delicious, and loud the acclaim,
Though something seemed wanting for all to bewail,
But JULEPS the drink of immortals became,
When Jove himself added a handful of hail.”
Joshua Soule Smith, a Kentucky Colonel writing in the 1890s wrote an entire volume waxing poetic about the drink:
“Then comes the zenith of man’s pleasure. Then comes the julep — the mint julep. Who has not tasted one has lived in vain. The honey of Hymettus brought no such solace to the soul; the nectar of the Gods is tame beside it. It is the very dream of drinks, the vision of sweet quaffings.
The Bourbon and the mint are lovers. In the same land they live, on the same food they are fostered. The mint dips infant leaf into the same stream that makes The Bourbon what it is. The corn grows in the level lands through which small streams meander. By the brook-side the mint grows. As the little wavelets pass, they glide up to kiss the feet of the growing mint, and the mint bends to salute them. Gracious and kind it is, living only for the sake of others. Like a woman’s heart it gives its sweetest aroma when bruised. Among the first to greet the spring, it comes. Beside gurgling brooks that make music in the fields, it lives and thrives. When the bluegrass begins to shoot its gentle sprays towards the sun, mint comes, and its sweetest soul drinks at the crystal brook. It is virgin then. But soon it must be married to old Bourbon. His great heart, his warmth of temperament, and that affinity which no one understands, demands the wedding.
How shall it be? Take from the cold spring some water, pure as angels are; mix it with sugar till it seems like oil. Then take a glass and crush your mint within it with a spoon — crush it around the borders of the glass and leave no place untouched. Then throw the mint away — it is the sacrifice. Fill with cracked ice the glass; pour in the quantity of Bourbon which you want. It trickles slowly through the ice. Let it have time to cool, then pour your sugared water over it. No spoon is needed; no stirring allowed- just let it stand a moment. Then around the brim place sprigs of mint, so that the one who drinks may find the taste and odor at one draft.
Then when it is made, sip it slowly. August suns are shining, the breath of the south wind is upon you. It is fragrant cold and sweet — it is seductive. No maidens kiss is tenderer or more refreshing, no maidens touch could be more passionate. Sip it and dream-it is a dream itself. No other land can give you so much sweet solace for your cares; no other liquor soothes you in melancholy days. Sip it and say there is no solace for the soul, no tonic for the body like old Bourbon whiskey.”
O’Henry immortalized the drink — and the ritual of making it — in the short story The Duplicity of Hargraves, in 1902:
“‘It occurred to me,’ the major would begin — he was always ceremonious — ‘that perhaps you might have found your duties at the — at your place of occupation — sufficiently arduous to enable you, Mr. Hargraves, to appreciate what the poet might well have had in mind when he wrote, “tired Nature’s sweet restorer” — one of our Southern juleps.’ It was a fascination to Hargraves to watch him make it. He took rank among artists when he began, and he never varied the process. With what delicacy he bruised the mint; with what exquisite nicety he estimated the ingredients; with what solicitous care he capped the compound with the scarlet fruit glowing against the dark green fringe! And then the hospitality and grace with which he offered it, after the selected oat straws had been plunged into its twinkling depths!”
Theodore Roosevelt, famously accused of “habitual drunkenness,” finally copped to making Mint Juleps with the mint growing in the White House gardens: “There was a fine bed of mint at the White House…I may have drunk half a dozen Mint Juleps in a year,” Roosevelt said to the courtroom for his trial filing suit against a newspaper for libel in 1912. His lawyer quipped in response, “Did you drink them all at one time?”
F. Scott Fitzgerald used the drink as the epitome of decadence in The Great Gatsby in 1925: “The notion originated with Daisy’s suggestion that we hire five bathrooms and take cold baths, and then assumed more tangible form as ‘a place to have a mint julep’.”
One of two favorite cocktails of the notoriously hard drinking William Faulkner, Faulkner would supposedly make one by mixing whiskey with a teaspoon of sugar, a sprig of crushed mint, and ice in a frosty metal cup. Lillian Ross once visited the author when he was ailing, and quoted him as saying, “Isn’t anythin’ Ah got whiskey won’t cure.”
And of course, could the great southern epic Gone with the Wind possibly not include the most southern of southern cocktails? Margaret Mitchell’s novel of 1936 included numerous references to the julep, including this sultry reference:
“…Scarlett teasingly clicked her tongue against her teeth as she reached out to pull his cravat into place. His breath in her face was strong with Bourbon whisky mingled with the faint fragrance of mint. Accompanying him also were the smells of chewing tobacco, well-oiled leather and horses — a combination of odors that she always associated with her father and instinctively liked in other men.”
Also in 1936, Kentucky humorist Irving S. Cobb purportedly blamed the Civil War on the debate over how to make a mint julep properly:
“Well, down our way we’ve always had a theory that the Civil War was not brought on by Secession or Slavery or the State’s Right issue. These matters contributed to the quarrel, but there is a deeper reason. It was brought on by some Yankee coming down south and putting nutmeg in a julep. So our folks just up and left the Union flat.”
It could even be argued that Hunter S. Thompson’s greatest career break was owed in small part to the mint julep. His famous article, “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved,” appeared in 1970:
“Hell, this clubhouse scene right below us will be almost as bad as the infield. Thousands of raving, stumbling drunks, getting angrier and angrier as they lose more and more money. By mid-afternoon they’ll be guzzling mint juleps with both hands and vomiting on each other between races. The whole place will be jammed with bodies, shoulder to shoulder. It’s hard to move around. The aisles will be slick with vomit; people falling down and grabbing at your legs to keep from being stomped. Drunks pissing on themselves in the betting lines. Dropping handfuls of money and fighting to stoop over and pick it up.”
Perhaps it’s something about the drink itself that inspires so many. What is possibly most elaborate recipe for a Mint Julep ever written is so delicately descriptive, so lovingly detailed that it is a kind of literature in its own right. Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr., USA wrote a his mint julep recipe to Major General William D. Connor on March 30, 1937:
“A mint julep is not a product of a formula. It is a ceremony and must be performed by a gentleman possessing a true sense of the artistic, a deep reverence for the ingredients and a proper appreciation of the occasion. It is a rite that must not be entrusted to a novice, a statistician nor a Yankee. It is a heritage of the Old South, and emblem of hospitality, and a vehicle in which noble minds can travel together upon the flower-strewn paths of a happy and congenial thought.
So far as the mere mechanics of the operation are concerned, the procedure, stripped of its ceremonial embellishments, can be described as follows:
Go to a spring where cool, crystal-clear water bubbles from under a bank of dew-washed ferns. In a consecrated vessel, dip up a little water at the source. Follow the stream thru its banks of green moss and wild flowers until it broadens and trickles thru beds of mint growing in aromatic profusion and waving softly in the summer breeze. Gather the sweetest and tenderest shoots and gently carry them home. Go to the sideboard and select a decanter of Kentucky Bourbon distilled by a master hand, mellowed with age, yet still vigorous and inspiring. An ancestral sugar bowl, a row of silver goblets, some spoons and some ice and you are ready to start.”
