I received a text late last night from a good friend asking me “You know how to make a Deshler?” Huh?

My response: “Is that a classic car?”

“No.”

“A cocktail?”

“Yes.”

I searched for it this morning. Here’s the modern specs from liquor.com:

Deshler

2 oz. Rye

1 oz. Dubonnet

.25 oz. Cointreau

2 Dashes Peychaud’s

Shake ingredients. Yes, you heard that right. Orange Twist Garnish.

I’m assuming this is served up as it’s a Manhattan variation.

What is Dubonnet? Funny, I have a bottle of this on the shelf at home. I bought it a while back out of curiosity and also because it was cheap. And yes, before I get started, Punch has already done an article on it. It’s a French Aperitif circa 1846 created by none other than Sir Dubonnet as a method to get some quinine into the soldiers of the French Foreign Legion during a North Africa campaign. It’s featured in Baker’s Savoy Cocktail book.

Dave Deshler was a lightweight boxer with a final record of 27 wins (9 KOs), 25 losses (5 KOs), and 24 draws. Yeah, 76 professional fights, that’s some shit you just don’t see anymore. Also, back in those early days barely any sanctioning of the fights occurred. Sometimes there were unlimited rounds, no time limits, or even longer rounds with no break in between. Why this cocktail is named after him of all people is lost in the slipstream of time. Although many sources point to the boxer, there was also a Deshler Hotel in Columbus, Ohio, and I suspect it was named after the place and not the man. Hugo R. Ennslin, the originator of the recipe, bartended at the Wallick Hotel on Broadway and the people who owned that place also owned the Deshler. Anyway, makes more sense to me.

The original printed recipe showed up in the second edition of Recipes for Mixed Drinks in 1917 by Mr. Ennslin which has some historical purpose because it was the last published pre-prohibition cocktail book. Here’s the original specs as they appeared:

Deshler Cocktail

1/2 jigger Rye Whiskey

1/2 jigger Dubonnet

2 dashes Peychaud’s

2 dashes Cointreau Triple Sec

1 piece Lemon Peel

2 pieces Orange Peel

Shake well in a mixing glass with cracked ice, strain and serve with a twist of orange peel on top.

A couple of notes. Again, it’s shaken. Yes, normally something without any citrus juice is stirred, not shaken. With this you put the peels in the tin and save one orange as a garnish. This alone makes it unique. The other thing I’d like to point out is in the orignal the Cointreau is just dashed and the Dubonnet and Rye are split and not the same as current Manhattan formulas (2:1) you normally see. This happens in many of the old cocktail recipes in my mind due to the strength of the whiskey and gin used back then as there were no set standards in place. I’m guessing the shit was a lot stronger back in the day. It’s common knowledge that during prohibition a lot of bootleggers weakened their whiskeys by adding water so they could increase their supplies. Later, when alcohol was legal again, there were better standards in place. I mean, part of the reason cocktails came about in the first place was to make booze more palatable. If prohibition was good for anything it created better product. The tale, however, is much longer and more involved as the Bottled in Bond Act came about in 1897 (8 years aged back then!) and the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906, both government policies that helped define whiskey and strove to create some categories. During prohibition you could actually get a prescription for a quality bonded whiskey and after prohibition the country had to adjust their palates accordingly and many people, it is said, fancied Canadian juice over the more heavily aged American versions. At any rate, it’s endlessly fascinating and I could go on but I’d rather not.