Your intrepid liquor reporter has one of those booze-a-day calendar apps on his smartphone, which helps me keep track of all the different booze-related holidays.
Imagine my surprise on May 14th when a notification for the first annual National Caesar Day popped up in my calendar!
Yes, gentle reader, another one of those crafty liquor marketing reps has thought up a new special day in order to move more of their product, and this time it is Newfoundland-based Iceberg Vodka, who makes fine Canadian vodka from actual glacier water.
The mad-scientist distillers behind Iceberg Vodka actually use large fishing vessels and giant nets to harvest enormous chunks of ice that split off from glaciers, then melt it down for pure glacier water in their vodka.
While our Newfie brethren certainly know a thing or two about boozin’, I was secretly hoping for an Alberta-based distillery to be behind the inaugural National Caesar Day, as our fair province was the birthplace of the Caesar cocktail.
Unbeknownst to many, the Caesar was invented in Calgary’s very own Westin Hotel (then called the Calgary Inn) way back in 1969. Behind the bar was a master mixologist called Walter Chell. After an illustrious career throughout the finest restaurants in Europe, he landed a job with the Westin Hotel chain in Canada.
Hotel management had tasked him with creating a new drink to celebrate the opening of a fancy new Italian restaurant in the hotel. After experimenting for three long months, he settled upon a mixture of tomato juice, hand-mashed clams, Vodka, Worcestershire sauce, salt & pepper, and a stick of celery as garnish.
You may question how any sane person could arrive at the idea of mashing up clams and mixing them into a cocktail, but there’s a very fine line between genius and madness. For the record, Chell was trying to develop a drink that would complement the restaurant’s Spaghetti Vongele, which was made with tomatoes, spices, and clams.
Luckily for the boozing public, the Caesar has been a roaring success in Canada! In fact, with over 350 million guzzled a year, the Caesar is Canada’s most popular cocktail, beating the Screwdriver and Rum & Coke by a handy margin.
Back in 1969, you couldn’t walk down to the corner store and pick up a bottle of Clamato juice, so you had to squeeze the clams by hand if you wanted a Caesar. Soon after Calgarians had begun quaffing Caesars in the fancy new hotel restaurant, a small New York company called Mott’s came out with their now-famous Mott’s Clamato.
This helped make the Caesar much more accessible, and it rapidly gained a wide following.
Despite a little friction between Mott’s and Walter Chell as to who exactly invented Clamato first, they eventually kissed and made up, with Mott’s hiring Chell as a spokesman to promote their product.
The Caesar is sometimes referred to as the Bloody Caesar, due to its similarity to the Bloody Mary cocktail so popular in the USA. The Bloody Mary is like a bland and uninteresting Caesar, made with Vodka and tomato juice, and a few of the same spices as a Caesar.
Interestingly, Clamato juice has never enjoyed the same popularity in its home country of the USA has it has in Canada. Many Canucks have been greeted with blank stares when requesting a Caesar at a bar south of the border.
With the celery stalk providing a good source of fibre, and the tomato juice providing much-needed minerals to the hangover sufferer, the Clamato is also a very popular “hair of the dog” drink. Your intrepid liquor reporter has been known to knock one or two back with a greasy breakfast after a long night of imbibing.
Purely in the interests of research, your intrepid liquor reporter popped into three different drinking establishments on National Caesar Day, and each of them had a slightly different variation on the classic recipe. I saw the celery stalk replaced by pickled beans and asparagus stalks, and all three pubs entirely skipped the salt & pepper addition, opting instead for the premixed celery salt on the rim.
For those who prefer their Caesar in the traditional manner, pour one ounce of vodka over ice, add four ounces of Clamato juice, a dash of Worcester sauce, salt and pepper, drop in a celery stalk, then enjoy.
