Negroni Cocktail Recipe & History To Celebrate Negroni Week
 [1] A Negroni, elegantly presented in a stemmed glass at The Heathman Restaurant & Bar in Portland, Oregon.
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It’s Negroni Week, an opportunity to try a classic cocktail that has always been at the top of lists of the world’s favorite cocktails. Negroni Week is a worldwide holiday, launched in 2013 by Imbibe Magazine and Campari, an Italian apéritif wine. It was begun not only to celebrate one of the world’s great cocktails, but as an effort to raise money for charitable causes around the world. Visit NegroniWeek.com to see how you can participate. As the story goes, the cocktail was created in 1919 at the Bar Cassoni (now the Caffè Cavalli) in Florence, Italy by bartender Fosco Scarselli. He created it for a regular patron, Count Camillo Negroni, who had asked for an Americano* cocktail strengthened with a dash of gin instead of the usual soda water. He had recently returned from London, so had gin on his mind. Scarselli mixed the drink, using more gin, an orange slice garnish instead of the lemon garnish of the Americano, and presented his client with the first “Negroni.” The Negroni is an intensely aromatic cocktail, thanks to the botanicals present in all three spirit ingredients, which today in a 1:1:1 proportion: gin, Campari and sweet vermouth. The sweetness of the vermouth, the assertive bitterness of Campari, the complex botanicals of gin—not to mention, as with the Americano, a bright red color from the Campari. The cocktail took off, and the Negroni family quickly founded Negroni Antica Distilleria in Treviso, producing Antico Negroni, a ready-made version of the drink. But the Negroni was unknown in the U.S. until 1947 when Orson Welles, working in Rome, wrote about it. This sent Americans to bars demanding Negronis. The Negroni is made in 1:1:1 proportions of gin, Campari and sweet vermouth. There are many variations of the cocktail today. Check out these in L.A. Magazine. Ingredients Per Drink 1. COMBINE ingredients in a shaker with ice. 2. STRAIN into a chilled coupe or serve over ice in a chilled rocks glass. 3. GARNISH and serve. Use the Gourmet Foods pull-down menu at the right, and also check out the Cocktails section on the main site of TheNibble.com. |
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_____________________ *An even older cocktail, dating to the 1860s, the Americano was created in Novara, Italy by Gaspare Campari at his Caffè Campari. The ingredients: Campari (an apéritif wine, invented by Gaspare in 1860), sweet vermouth and club soda, with a lemon garnish. The cocktail was originally known as the Milano-Torino because of its ingredients: Campari, the bitter liqueur, was made outside of Milano (Milan) and Punt e Mes, the vermouth, was made in Torino (Turin). Campari was originally colored red with carmine dye, derived from crushed cochineal, a plant-sucking insect. In 2006, Gruppo Campari ceased using carmine in favor of artificial red coloring [source]. |
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