Vieux Carré
A New Orleans classic, born in fascist Rome
By Wharton Baarl
ROME • 1933 — When Romano Mussolini dreamed, he dreamed of the piano. He grew up playing classical compositions with his father, who was a great piano teacher and also a fascist dictator. But Romano didn’t dream about classical piano music. He was then 14, and his dreams flitted through his snoozing subconscious to Ellington swing.
When your father is directing his Blackshirts to crush local pockets of resistance, he’s not paying a lot of attention to where you spend your evenings. For similar reasons, it’s easy to get a job bartending at Cabaret Veleno—the best club in Rome—so you can soak in as much jazz as your teen soul can handle.
For the preceding three weeks, Romano had been keenly aware that he was watching history unfurl before him. Not because he’d passed Adolf Hitler a plate of his mother’s tagliatelle al papavero at the family dinner table one recent evening. But because Delphine Cazeau, a real, live jazz singer from New Orleans, America was in the middle of a six-week residency at Cabaret Veleno. She was ten years his senior. She was beautiful.
Vieux Carrè
1 oz rye
1 oz cognac
1 oz sweet vermouth
1 bar spoon Benedictine
2 dashes Angostura bitters
2 dashes Peychaud’s bitters
Stir ingredients with ice • Strain into a rocks glass over a large ice cube • Garnish with lemon peel and cherry
As everyone who knew anything about jazz knew, when Cazeau was a child she sang for pennies outside the St. Denis Hotel on Burgundy St in the French Quarter. At 17, she was performing seven nights a week at the Cadillac Club where she learned how to be a professional singer and met some of the masters of the early jazz age. In 1928, Joe Helbock, the owner of a new speakeasy in New York City, caught Cazeau’s act at the Cadillac Club and offered to make her a star.
But even as a star the way the business treated her, a Creole woman, ate at her. Cazeau brought people in the door at the Cadillac Club, but she’d never been allowed to use that same door to come into work. Helbock paid her a quarter of what the male musicians made. She’d heard Europe was different, and when an offer came, in 1931, to do a few shows a week at Bricktop’s in Paris, she packed her bags.
And now Delphine Cazeau was here, in Rome—the last stop on a European farewell tour before she went home to America. Since Cazeau’s first night at Cabaret Veleno, Romano had barely been able to make his customers’ drinks while she performed. He studied how she held the microphone, how she anticipated her band’s moves, feeding on unexpected turns that forced her to improvise.
As he set up the bar for the evening, Romano thought about how his piano dreams might change from studying Cazeau these weeks. How he might dream himself into her band, throwing musical curves her way to see what she would do with them.
He looked up from the bar sink, and there she was. Just sitting there. Looking at him.
“Hiya,” she said.
“Buonasera signorina,” he said. The bar spoon he’d just cleaned shook in his hand. He threw it back in the sink, and it landed with a clang.
“Ok!” she said. “Who needs that spoon anyway? You ready to fix me a drink?”
“Certo, Signorina Cazeau.”
She pulled two cube-shaped glass vials from a black purse she’d set on the bar. They were about a half-inch tall with a spout. One was filled with a reddish-brown liquid, and the other was brighter red.
“I haven’t been home – my real home – in a long time,” she said. “I miss it, and I want you to make me a drink that takes me there. I’ve been watching you from the stage, and I can see how much you care about the music. I’ve also heard you practicing. You’re good. I want you to put the same amount of care and focus into this drink.” She paused. “It’s important.”
Romano nodded, but he was sure that he was about to throw up on the greatest jazz singer alive.
“I’ve been building this drink in my mind since I came to Europe,” she said. “It has many parts, but we’re going to work together to make it real. If you do this for me, I will always be grateful.”
Romano nodded again. “I will do anything for you, Signorina Cazeau.”
“I know. Please bring the rye.”
Each part of the drink, she explained, represented a piece of her home. The whiskey for America. The cognac for her French Louisiana roots. And the Benedictine for the Catholic parish she grew up in. She pointed to the two glass cubes of liquid on the bar.
“These are bitters,” she said. “A couple dashes of each for my Creole ancestors.”
Romano poured the ingredients. He added ice and stirred. He dropped ice cubes into a glass and strained the cocktail over them. He placed it gently in front of Cazeau. He swallowed very hard.
“Thank you,” she said. She smiled at him. “What’s your name?”
“Mi chiamo Romano Mussolini, Signorina Cazeau. May I ask the drink’s name?”
“I think we’ll call it the Vieux Carré,” she said. “The neighborhood where I first heard music.”
She lifted the drink and took a long sip. Her eyelids closed into a deep squint. She opened her purse, spit the booze into it and nodded at the glass vials on the bar.
“Keep those, Romano,” she said. “And stick to the piano.”
Editor’s Note: Fact-based cocktail historians claim the Vieux Carré was created by Walter Bergeron at the Hotel Monteleone in New Orleans in the 1930s.
SOURCES:
Romano Mussolini, I Was a Dictator’s Teenager (Rome: Farfalla Editore, 1972)
Delphine Cazeau, The Europe Years (New York: Jazzmatazz Press, 1953)
Paulo Chirico, Bring Me Some Baked Ziti Or You Hang: Cooking for Il Duce, trans Chris Frankelnewt (New York: O’Press, 1961)
Contributors Notes:
Wharton Baarl has translated nine volumes of poetry and monographs from the original Bengali into Urdu and then into Maltese. Then he translated two of them back into Bengali from the Maltese. In 1991, Baarl’s translation of “Liber Memorialis,” the nineteenth-century tract against Louvain traditionalism by Bishop Jean-Baptiste Malou of Bruges, won Best Translation of Something No One Knew About, awarded by the National Order of Translators. A volume of essays, “Babies: Why So Tiny?” appeared in 1998.
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