Bloody Mary and Virgin Mary

The Bloody Mary is a cocktail made with vodka, tomato juice, lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, cayenne pepper, and salt. Folklore attributes the origin of the Bloody Mary to Ferdinand “Pete” Petiot, a bartender at Harry’s Bar in Paris. Petiot purportedly first mixed vodka with tomato juice in 1921. After Prohibition ended in 1933, Petiot moved to the United States and became a bartender at the King Cole Bar at New York’s St. Regis Hotel, where he added Worcestershire sauce and pepper to the recipe. Petiot named the drink either after a girlfriend called Mary or after Mary Tudor, the mid-sixteenth-century Catholic queen of England, who killed many Protestants during her reign. In any case, the Bloody Mary was born—or so the story goes.