Alaska Cocktail
A French monk goes clamming
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By Karen Almond-Schnase
KUKAK BAY, Alaska • 1925 — On a late spring day, Guillaume the Carthusian stepped off the steamship Redondo. Brother Bill, as he’d learned to introduce himself to Americans, had sailed from Aberdeen, Washington to visit the Kukak Bay Cannery, one of the more successful razor clam canning operations in southern Alaska.
Frida Nielsen, a clam clipper at the cannery, had never seen a monk before, but she knew that the stranger in the white, loose robe and hiking boots was not an executive visiting from Seashore Packing Company HQ.
The man flipped his hood back onto his shoulders as he stepped off the pier. He approached Frida and her cannery colleagues who were having a swimming party in the bay.
Alaska Cocktail
2 ½ oz gin
¾ oz Yellow Chartreuse
2 dashes orange bitters
Stir ingredients in a mixing glass with ice • Serve in a coupe or Nick & Nora glass • Garnish with a lemon peel
“Hello, my name is Brother Bill,” he said, extending his hand. Frida couldn’t place his accent but guessed that maybe he was from eastern Oregon. Maybe Idaho.
“Nice to meet you,” said Frida. She shook his hand and offered him a drink. “I call it Frida’s Golden Razor Fizz.”
The women on the beach watched Brother Bill’s first sip of the Golden Razor Fizz expectantly. They’d seen this comedy before. But instead of spitting the drink into the sand, as most first-timers did, Brother Bill took a considered sip, looked up at the sky for a moment, and then took another. “This is terrible,” he said, smiling. “You must give me the recipe. But first, will you tell me about your operation?”
As Frida walked Brother Bill among the cannery’s boilers and retorts she told him about how the clams were harvested 25 miles north at Swikshak Beach, then shipped down to the bay. She explained her job clipping the foot-long clams into smaller sections and feeding them into the mincer.
Brother Bill then told Frida about peregrinatio pro Christo, a medieval practice in which Christians voluntarily exiled themselves from their homeland, placing themselves in God’s hands as they wandered for Christ. He explained that more than 20 years earlier, during a time of anticlericalism in France…
“France!?” said Frida. “Not Idaho?”
France, said Brother Bill. The French government had expelled his community of Carthusians from their monastery where they’d survived by making and selling a liqueur called Chartreuse.
“Some of us went together in exile to Italy to continue making the liqueur,” he said. “And some of us chose to pursue a more solitary calling, wandering for Christ and for our brothers, studying organizations we come upon in our travels, and sending back ideas to make our product better.”
Frida looked at Brother Bill. She felt she was in the presence of someone important. Someone proximate to the divine. A warm, soothing feeling.
“I make the drink from gin and razor clam juice,” she confessed. “A trapper who was eaten by a bear left two crates of gin at the cannery and we can’t get vermouth up here. I tried other ingredients with the gin: mud, human sweat, malamute spit. The razor clam juice was the least bad.”
“Do you have some gin here? In the cannery?” Brother Bill asked.
Frida ran to a crate behind a massive seamer and brought back a bottle of Seagram’s and two glasses. Brother Bill took a knapsack from his shoulder and produced a small bottle of yellow liqueur. “From us to you,” he said, handing the bottle to Frida. She filled one glass with gin, topped it with the Chartreuse, scooped some ice out of the clam bed, and stirred.
They each tried a sip of the strained result. “Brother Bill!” Frida cried. “Your stuff is better than razor clam juice! We have to change the name. Would you do the honors?”
Brother Bill thought for a moment. “There is an Aleut word that means ‘the place where the sea waves crash upon themselves,’ he said. I will name this cocktail for that word.”
“What’s the word?” Frida asked.
“Alaska. This will be the Alaska Cocktail.”
“Wow,” said Frida. “That’s fucking boring, but OK.”
Editor’s Note: Fact-based cocktail historians claim the Alaska Cocktail was first mentioned in “Straub’s Manual of Mixed Drinks” in 1913.
SOURCES:
Macho L. Riggins, “Bivalve Collection and Canning in the Western United States 1896 to 1939,” in Water Farming the World, ed. Samantha Brookes-Meyer-Brookes (Iowa City: Crinklebrooke, 2014), 46-53
Juliette Moreau, Sons of Bruno: 900 Years of Hard Partying in the Order of Carthusians, trans. R.P. Scadfsen (Grenoble: Èditions Fadaises,1984)
Kyle Frostte, “Gin’s Where It’s At” (Ph.D. diss, University of Alaska Fairbanks), 493-516
Contributors Notes:
Karen Almond-Schnase’s poetry has appeared in The Cuttlefish Review, Into the Frying Pan, Chillout, Almond-Schnase Quarterly, and Seven Lovely Frogs. She is the author of “Sheep of the Westernmost Edge of Western Warwick, Rhode Island, 1928–1944” (Savage Books, 2001). Her articles have been published by magazines and in anthologies in Germany, Chile, and Azerbaijan, where she lives with her husband, Floyd, and Floyd’s aunt.
Actual For Real Credits: Kukak Bay Cannery details from Katherine Johnson’s “Buried Dreams: The Rise and Fall of a Clam Cannery on the Katmai Coast”
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FYI, it's pretty common to confuse the Idahoan and French accents. No shame there Frida.