How to Make the Classic Rye Whiskey Cocktail

The La Louisiane cocktail is a middle child. It is the other other rye-based classic from New Orleans, the overlooked one, and in a lot of ways the halfway point between its more famous brothers. The recipe reads like someone trying to remember what’s in a Vieux Carre but keeps mixing it up with a Sazerac. So why not just make either a Vieux Carre or a Sazerac? Well, despite La Louisiane’s drift from its original incarnation, the flavors at work in this cocktail are so good, the drink remains delicious and vital to this day. Some of that owes to its history.

New Orleans is a special place. The restaurant industry is, to put it mildly, not famous for its longevity, but that’s not the case in the Big Easy. The city enjoys an unusual abundance of historic restaurants and bars—places that have been doing that particular thing in that particular spot for 100+ years, replete with history and tradition, and where unique recipes are refined over time. The La Louisiane cocktail comes from one of spots as the house drink of the restaurant La Louisiane, which stood on Iberville St. in the city’s French Quarter for some 125 years, from 1881 until 2005.

From its inception, the restaurant La Louisiane was one of the city’s nicest and most expensive French restaurants, “long the rendezvous,” wrote Stanley Clisby in 1937, “of those who appreciate the best of Creole cuisine.” Clisby’s book is called Famous New Orleans Drinks and How to Make ‘Em, and is, as you’d imagine, an invaluable resource for such things. It is here that we first meet the Vieux Carré and we help codify the Sazerac, and also where we get our first printed introduction the La Louisiane, of which Clisby writes is “as out-of-the-ordinary as the many distinctive dishes that grace [the restaurant’s] menu.” The La Louisiane of which he writes is three to four dashes each of absinthe and Peychaud’s Bitters, alongside equal parts of rye whiskey, sweet vermouth, and the herbal French liqueur Bénédictine.

Equal parts! If you don’t have an intuitive sense of such things, let me just tell you this is extremely sweet. It would be sweet if it were just equal parts vermouth and rye, but to add a third measure of a liqueur is essentially dessert. The flavors are great. Bénédictine brings a lovely honeyed spice, which folds beautifully into rye (see: the Monte Carlo) and is well-accented by absinthe (see: the Chrysanthemum), but taken in such quantities would be out of the ordinary indeed. This, combined with the fact that the original called for a scant “⅓ jigger” (0.5 oz.) each of the liquids but a full four dashes of absinthe, makes the original La Louisiane cocktail an ambrosial and nectarous little drink, with enough sweetness and licorice spice to invite a comparison to pastis or even sambuca.

Over the years, as palates dried out and the cocktail renaissance got a hold of it, the drink transformed. It might have been perfect beside the elegant Creole cuisine at the restaurant La Louisiane, but for our purposes it’s too sweet and too small, so the community has made tweaks. Most modern recipes double or triple the measure of rye and cut back proportionally on the bitters and absinthe, which gives us a very different product, the La Louisiane of the 21st century: A wonderful Manhattan variation with more than a little Creole swagger. It is, again, a middle child. It’s more charming than a Sazerac but less of a dandy than a Vieux Carre, a rye whiskey cocktail that’s ready to be deployed any time you’re in the mood for the historic delights of the French Quarter, of which Clisby notes, “where the antique shops and the iron lace balconies give sightseers a glimpse into the romance of another day.”

La Louisiane

Add all ingredients to a mixing glass, add ice, and stir for 15 to 30 seconds (longer for bigger ice, shorter for smaller). Strain into a rocks glass over a fresh piece of big ice and garnish with lemon peel.

NOTES ON INGREDIENTS

Proportions: These ratios still lean a small touch sweet, and many smart people raise the measure of rye to 2oz and reduce the Bénédictine to 0.5 oz, both of which help further dry it all out. Feel free to do this if you want, though a problem you run into is that when the sweetness is 80 proof (Bénédictine), more rye can trade charm for alcohol heat. Absinthe helps a lot with this—spice, whether from cinnamon or habanero or ginger or absinthe, tends to excuse sweetness.

Your specific bottles will matter—I liked a 100-proof rye, which obviously is hotter than a 80 proof one—so feel free to slide along that scale as you wish, but for me, the above retains the charm of the fabled La Louisiane while bringing sweetness down to acceptable levels.

Rye Whiskey: As with the Vieux Carre, a strong favorite for me was a 100+ proof Kentucky rye like Rittenhouse Rye or Wild Turkey 101 rye, which provides muscle and spice where the drink needs it most.

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Sweet Vermouth: There are two conflicting urges you might confront with this drink. There’s some sweetness at work here, so perhaps you’d want to grab a lithe and lean sweet vermouth, like Cinzano or Dolin, to not add to the problem. This would make sense, but for the size of the flavors here—for a big rye and a big liqueur and absinthe used in this quantity, you want a big flavor, like Carpano Antica or Carpano Classico (also in line our recommendation for the Vieux Carre).

Absinthe: The short answer is to use whatever absinthe you have around, all of them taste pretty good here. But if you were, say, at the absinthe store buying a bottle just for this, I’d get a robust green absinthe (“verte”) which has a secondary herb infusion post-distillation and so a deeper and more robust herbal accent. My favorite go-to brands for cocktails are the Butterfly Classic, La Fée Absinthe Parisienne, and Pernod.