In 1879, a group of midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis formed a football team. In these early days, the team was forced to practice in secret, as the Academy’s superintendent had officially banned the sport. Fortunately, the school ultimately reversed itself and the team officially became sanctioned.
In 1890, Navy invited the cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point (Army) to play a “friendly” game. Army accepted this challenge and hastily formed a team of its own. As the game was held at West Point, each of the 271 cadets contributed 52 cents to help cover Navy’s travel costs. While no doubt grateful for Army’s largess, Navy had no problem dispatching Army 24-0, before a crowd of more than 1,000 spectators. After all, Navy had 11 years of experience on the gridiron behind them.
The 126th installment of the historic Army Navy football game will be held in Baltimore this weekend on December 13. Navy holds a 63-55 record in the series (with seven games ending in a tie), and is favored to win this year. Navy is currently ranked third in the American Conference with a 9-2 record. Army, meanwhile, is 6-5 and sixth in the American Conference. That said, Army has won six of the last nine times these two teams have faced off.
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If you’re planning on watching this epic contest, I suggest you fix the under-the-radar Army & Navy Cocktail. It’s a classic sour style drink, which dates back to just after the end of Prohibition.
And there is no better year to enjoy this drink than 2025, which marks the 250th anniversary of the creation of the Continental Army (June 10, 1775), the Continental Navy (October 13th), and last but not least, the Continental Marines (OOHRAH!), established by the 2nd Continental Congress on November 10th, 1775. The first recruiting station for the Marines was, in fact, a tavern in Philadelphia.
The History of the Army & Navy Cocktail
The first time I ever encountered the Army & Navy Cocktail was around 20 years ago while reading David Embury’s 1948 classic cocktail book, The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks. While Embury waxed poetic about many of the recipes he included, uncharacteristically he didn’t say much about this drink. But Embury piqued my curiosity and I wanted to know more about the origins of the Army & Navy Cocktail, including where it was created.
As a native Washingtonian and an inveterate cocktail geek, I immediately thought of the historic Army and Navy Club in downtown DC. It was, after all, where the immortal Daiquiri cocktail made its stateside debut, brought here from Cuba by a young US Navy medical officer, Lucius Johnson. To this day, the Club’s bar is known as The Daiquiri Room. Sadly, I couldn’t find any connection between the Club and the Army & Navy Cocktail.
So I dug a little deeper. After all, the US Navy is in my blood. My father, father-in-law, and four of my uncles all served. Further, my son-in-law, a TOPGUN E-2D Hawkeye Naval Flight Officer, only recently returned home from an extended deployment on the USS Nimitz. And lastly, just this year I retired from the Department of the Navy’s Office of the General Counsel, closing out a rewarding 16-year tenure. I had to learn more about this drink!
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Digging into the archives further, I found an article by Embury, titled “Potation Mutations,” in The Daily Times, which was published in the suburbs of New York on May 26, 1949. In this piece Embury was a bit more expansive: “At present, there is a strong movement on for unification of our armed forces – a movement which, despite ancient rivalries and petty jealousies, must ultimately succeed. Few people realize that this trend toward unification originated in the field of cocktails. In my book, I have the recipes both for the Army and for the Navy cocktails. There is another cocktail called the ‘Army and Navy,’ which several years ago was praised both by Clementine Paddleford in the Herald Tribune and by G. Selmer Fougner in The Sun. Quite prophetically, it is a better drink than the one named after either of the two separate branches of the service.”
I then searched the newspaper archives for Paddleford’s and Fougner’s articles, but could not find either. So, I did what I always do when I hit a dead end, I turned to my old pal David Wondrich, who is the author of the recently published Comic Book History of the Cocktail and the editor in chief of The Oxford Companion to Spirits & Cocktails. Dave, naturally, had more to tell me. He had previously found a recipe from 1930 for the Army & Navy in the pages of Jere Sullivan’s book, The Drinks of Yesteryear: A Mixology. It was made with the juice of a whole lime, grenadine, and Bacardi rum. While interesting this seemed to be a different cocktail with the same name.
Dave also had evidence that at some point between October of 1933 and December of 1934, Fougner featured his friend Carroll Van Ark’s recipe for the Army & Navy in his syndicated “Along the Wine Trail” column, which was published in The New York Sun and ran in other papers across the country. Van Ark was a Madison Avenue ad man and sometimes contributor for New Yorker. If his last name rings a bell, his daughter Joan Van Ark played Valerie Ewing on Dallas and Knot’s Landing.
Fougner then reprinted the Army & Navy in his column on January 1, 1937, and again on May 16, 1938. Quite succinctly, he wrote that: “The Army and Navy is made with one part lemon juice, one part orgeat, two parts dry gin, well shaken with ice. If it is a little too sweet for taste, add a little more lemon juice and gin. A lot of people have tried it, and I have yet to meet one who doesn’t like it. An inexpensive drink, but it tastes like a million. Just the thing for a cocktail party.” Or, you know, a football game. Go Navy!
How to Make The Army & Navy Cocktail
The earliest recipe for Army & Navy Cocktail is a bit too sweet for me, so I’m offering you my own version of the drink. Feel free to adjust it to your own palate.
Ingredients
- 2 oz London dry gin
- ¾ oz fresh lemon juice
- ½ oz Orgeat syrup (I prefer Small Hand Foods)
- 2 dashes Angostura Bitters
DIRECTIONS
Add all of the ingredients to a shaker and fill with ice. Shake, and strain into a chilled coupe glass.
