The Obituary Cocktail: The 'deadly' drink that symbolises New Orleans

Combining a martini's wallop with one of the world's most notorious spirits, this recently revived cocktail embodies the city's distinctive approach to life and death.

Like a rake's progress, it starts with gin. Then vermouth. Then absinthe, delivered by atomiser, eye-dropper or spoon. A lemon twist, with its burst of essential oils, anoints it.

My first Obituary Cocktail was in New Orleans, the city that invented it, forgot it and then revived it. In the eight years I lived there, it never appeared on a menu, but savvy local bartenders could make one on request. That evening's details are as hazy as the Wednesday after Fat Tuesday. I could not tell you the year, nor the season. I only remember it was good and that it was sometime after absinthe became legal again in the United States in 2007.

I drank it at Cure. Neal Bodenheimer's legendary bar is graced by an enormous scientific print of a palmetto bug, the flying cockroach residents know as the city's native bird. Uplighting shines through the liquor bottles, turning them into bejewelled reliquaries.

In a city that uses "costume" as a verb and shimmies into one at the drop of a hat, visuals are important. Poured into a vintage Nick and Nora coupe glass, the Obituary Cocktail is a head-turning drink. It also captures something of New Orleans' carefree approach to life and nonchalance in the face of death, where a clinking glass and party is often a response to worldly travails.

"[The Obituary Cocktail] sums up the allure and the appeal of the city," says Clayton Rosenthal, manager and head of the drinks programme at Fives, a cocktail and oyster bar located in a historic 19th-Century building on Jackson Square.

Rosenthal uses Old Tom gin, Drapo Dry vermouth and Mata Hari absinthe in his Obituary, warning first-time drinkers: "The first sip can be a bit of a punch in the mouth."

It's an appropriate warning for a cocktail that combines a martini's wallop with one of the world's most notorious spirits and then names the result after a death notice.

The Obituary's mysterious birth

The Obituary Cocktail is a remnant of the louche and bohemian world of the French Quarter in the years following the end of Prohibition in 1933, when artists, writers and creatives like Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote gathered in cafes and bars.

According to Sue Strachan, a New Orleans historian and author of The Obituary Cocktail, the drink was likely invented in Café Lafitte on Bourbon Street. She notes that the first known reference to the cocktail was in a 1942 guide to the city called "The Bachelor in New Orleans", which promised to introduce "unattached gentlemen and ladies of spirit" to "the Paris of North America".

But while the drink subsequently surfaced in newspaper columns, nobody seems to have recorded who invented it or who gave it its morbid moniker.

"There's no definitive documentation on how the cocktail got its name," says Strachan. "No doubt its powerful punch led to some rough mornings, much........

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