A Brief Study of the Negroni, or rather, the Camparinette Cocktail

A Brief Study of the Negroni, or rather, the Camparinette Cocktail

by Andrew “the Alchemist”

In 1950, Horace Sutton published his book, “Footloose in Italy.”  In that book he suggests a couple of drinks he found to be native to Italy – the Negroni and the Cardinale.  A drink called the Negroni is known in literature from as early as 1919, but it was probably not the same drink thought of today.  It seems it was a cooler/highball if it was filled with a greater amount of  soda water than liquor – or a cup if the soda water was added in a more moderate amount.  Sutton’s Negroni is composed of “vermouth, campari [sic], seltzer and gin.”  And Sutton is not alone in presenting the Negroni as a cooler/highball or a cup.

Sutton describes the Cardinale as “a Martini with campari [sic] which turns it red.”  That sounds a lot more like the Negroni people think of today, but was the Cardinale truly native to Italy?

In the American book published in 1934 by Boothby’s World Drinks Company and attributed to William Boothby (even though he had died in 1930), there is a drink called the Camparinette.  The Camparinette Cocktail is composed of gin, sweet vermouth and Campari.  It is diluted with method ice and strained into a glass cocktail goblet.  The garniture is a twist of lemon.  That should seem familiar to all drink enthusiasts, even if the name does not.

I think it is fair to assume that in 1934, the Negroni in Italy was still a cooler/highball or a cup, rather than a cocktail.

So, not only is the drink that is now commonly called the Negroni the same drink that the Italians and Sutton called the Cardinale in 1950 – it already existed in an American book with its own name in 1934.  Since Campari is a grand bitters, the Camparinette is elementally that most American type of drink – a bittered sling, otherwise known as a cocktail.

What does this all mean for the bar-lore of an Italian count?  If any one of the men proposed as the count Negroni in question was involved with creating any drink, it surely was not the more popular and better drink that people now errantly call after his name.  That creature is of an elementally American species and breeding – and its home range is where its recipe was first documented – as the Camparinette Cocktail.