The Grasshopper is a sweet, mint-flavored cocktail, typically served after dinner. It emerged in the middle of the twentieth century as a species of Pousse Café made with equal parts crème de menthe, crème de cacao, and cream.
The drink’s name and its two alcoholic ingredients were already wedded together in 1908, when San Francisco bartender “Cocktail Bill” Boothby included a Grasshopper (with equal parts cacao and menthe layered in a pony or Pousse Café glass) in his World’s Drinks and How to Mix Them. He attributed it to Harry O’Brien, “late of the Palace Hotel” in that city. That version appeared occasionally in American and European bartenders’ guides through the 1930s. See Boothby, William T. “Cocktail Bill.”
It is unknown precisely when the layered two-ingredient Grasshopper Pousse Café became the shaken (or sometimes blended) three-ingredient Grasshopper cocktail. New Orleans legend has it that the drink was invented in 1928 or thereabouts by Philip Guichet, owner of Tujague’s Restaurant there, for a cocktail contest in New York City. The Grasshopper is one of Tujague’s signature cocktails today, but no documentary evidence substantiates the claim that Guichet was the creator.
The printed record, instead, points to the Midwest as the most likely place of origin and the years just after World War II as the time. The first known printed reference to the Grasshopper as a cocktail appeared in Neal O’Hara’s column for Boston Traveler in February 1950, which noted, “Currently popular in the midwest is the Grasshopper Cocktail.” The following month, Clementine Paddleford of the New York Herald-Tribune attributed the cocktail’s creation to Fazio’s Towne Room in Milwaukee, though a reader subsequently wrote to insist that it first appeared at Charlie’s Café Exceptionale in Minneapolis. In July of that year, Louis Sobol, a New York journalist, found it popular in Rapid City, South Dakota; he had not previously heard of it.
The Grasshopper enjoyed a surge of popularity in the 1950s as many Americans were abandoning whisky-heavy drinks in favor of lighter and sweeter cocktails, but the drink’s vogue was short-lived. By 1961, the New York Times was reporting that “a drink like the grasshopper … catches on for a while and then fades out.” It persisted most stubbornly in the Midwest, which embraced a blended variant in which the regular cream is replaced by ice cream—more an alcoholic milkshake than a cocktail. Cocktail enthusiasts have tended to treat the Grasshopper with disdain, lumping it in with White Russians and other heavy, sweet, cream-laden drinks. See White Russian. David Embury, in the third edition of The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, provides a short gloss of the Grasshopper and a variant with blackberry brandy added and notes, “With or without the blackberry, as a cocktail it is strictly vile.” See Embury, David A. In recent years, though, bartenders have started rediscovering this mid-twentieth-century dessert drink, and it lives on today as a standard if minor part of the American cocktail canon. It helps greatly if one follows Tujague’s lead and adds an equal part of cognac to the mix (a fix already suggested in 1951 by the mixologists at the Columbia restaurant in Tampa, Florida).
Recipe: Combine 30 ml each of crème de menthe, crème de cacao, and heavy cream in a cocktail shaker filled with shaved ice. Shake vigorously until the mixture is silky, and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Optional: add 30 ml VSOP-grade cognac to the other ingredients and proceed as above.
See also Pousse Café.
DeJesus, Erin. “It’s Not Easy Being Green: The Weird History of the Grasshopper.” Eater, October 23, 2014. http://www.eater.com/2014/10/23/7036159/a-brief-history-of-the-grasshopper (accessed February 12, 2021).
Paddleford, Clementine. “Grasshopper Cocktail.” Baltimore Sun, September 8, 1950, 14.
By: Robert F. Moss