Champs-Élysées

Champs-Élysées Cocktail

It has been nearly two months since I posted here, a hiatus that was about 80% poor time management and 20% a lack of inspiration. My usually-lengthy list of cocktails to try had somehow dwindled, and the aforementioned time management issues meant that I didn’t have a lot of time for experimentation. So I decided I would keep it simple and make a classic.

I picked up a reliable cocktail recipe book (Death & Co: Modern Classic Cocktails), opened it to the section of classic cocktail recipes, and went through it alphabetically until I hit one that I had never made before: the Champs-Élysées. Ok, that’s a lie. I skipped over the Blood and Sand (doesn’t sound very good), the Bobby Burns (better suited for a January Burns Night), the Brown Derby (skeptical about bourbon + grapefruit juice), and the Caipirinha (I don’t have any cachaça). But the fifth classic cocktail I had never made was the Champs-Élysées, and it turned out to be a perfect choice. A recent trip to Provence has me deeply enamored with anything remotely French, my husband is going through a Green Chartreuse phase that is heavily overlapping with an ongoing Cognac phase, and – most importantly – I was so pleasantly surprised by how much I liked this drink. It’s a combination of ingredients that I never would have put together myself, but they all meld together into a rich, herbaceous, citrusy combination that tastes like it was meant to be. I liked it so much that I might even try the Blood and Sand next. You never know.

History of the Champs-Élysées Cocktail

The recipe for the Champs-Élysées first appears in 1925, in a book called Drinks – Long & Short by Nina Toye and A.H. Adair. I’ve mentioned this book once before, as it also contains the first appearance of the Dunhill cocktail. I didn’t do much digging into it then, but this time I got curious, particularly about Nina Toye. Bartending was still very much a man’s world in 1925, so any woman writing cocktail books – particularly with billing over her male co-author – is worth knowing more about.

As it turns out, Nina Toye (born Ann Huston Miller) was a writer of supernatural thriller novels. By 1925 she had published at least two: The Death Rider, a romantic thriller taking place during the Italian Renaissance, and The Shadow of Fear, a “supernatural romance involving black magic” (sign me UP). She also published drink recipes in magazines such as Vogue. Her husband Francis was an author and music critic who managed a restaurant belonging to French chef Marcel Boulestin, the life partner of Nina’s future co-author A.H. Adair. Adair was, among other things, a cookbook writer, and it was likely through Francis and Marcel that he and Nina formed their partnership. Marcel wrote the book’s preface.

That, however, is all I can really find. I don’t know who originally created the Champs-Élysées. As always, please get in touch if you have more information!