Signature Cocktails with Amanda Schuster

Featured Cocktail: The Commodore Cocktail

This episode’s featured cocktail is the Commodore Cocktail. To make it, you’ll need:

• 1.5 oz (45ml) Bourbon
• ½ oz (15ml) Lime Juice
• ½ oz (15ml) gum syrup or simple syrup
• 1 oz (30ml) of blackstrap rum

Combine all ingredients except the rum in a cocktail shaker with ice, give em a good, hard shake until everything is well chilled and properly diluted, then strain into a stemmed cocktail glass, top up with that generous, 1 oz float of rum, and enjoy.

Conceived around the year 1899 by a bartender named Philip O. Gross at the Honing Hotel in Cincinnati, Ohio, this signature cocktail is named in honor of Commodore George Dewey, then commander of the US navy and hero of the Spanish American War in the Philippines (although I’m not sure that’s how Filipinos would put it). And, according to the entry for this drink in Amanda’s book, this cocktail beat out 9,000 other applicants in a nationwide contest.

Originally, the formulation contained orange curacao (a very popular 19th century ingredient) and involved an olive garnish, but subsequent recapitulations of the drink varied widely. Essentially, you needed some whiskey, some lime, and some sweetener. Generally there was a nod to orange, although that could come in the form of orange bitters. And generally there was some sort of rum dashed in at the end.

What strikes me most about the Commodore cocktail is that it’s a deliberate play at fusion during a time in American history when our imperialism was at or approaching its height. Sure, Bourbon is as domestic as it gets…but all the other ingredients in the drink come to us courtesy of a complex web of trade and diplomatic relations that span the globe. Fitting, then, that it should bear the name of a naval hero who, for better or worse, bent those imperial forces to his will.