Death in the Afternoon , an Ernest Hemingway invention, was originally published in the 1935 literary celebrity cocktail book So Red the Nose, or, Breath in the Afternoon. Hemingway claimed it “was arrived at by the author and three officers of H.M.S. Danae after having spent seven hours overboard trying to get Capt. Bra Saunders’ fishing boat off a bank where she had gone with us in a N.W. gale.” The Danae was a British cruiser that later provided naval gunfire off of Sword Beach, Normandy, during the D-Day landings (coincidentally, Hemingway covered the assault on nearby Omaha Beach as a war correspondent for Collier’s). The drink is named for Hemingway’s 1932 treatise on bullfighting.
Recipe: Pour 45 ml of absinthe into a champagne flute. Slowly add 120 ml of chilled champagne. Garnish with a lemon peel (optional).
See also absinthe and champagne cocktails.
North, Sterling, and Carl Kroch. So Red the Nose, or, Breath in the Afternoon. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1935.
By: Philip Greene