Which came first, brunch or the Bloody Mary? And where to find some of the best in Greeley

The question of whether brunch created the iconic Bloody Mary cocktail, or was it the other way around, is a conundrum that’s an easy contender for the circular reasoning prize. Shown, a bevy of Bloody's at Doug’s Diner in downtown Greeley. Photo by Emily Kemme.

By Emily Kemme

In a world of tough questions — where cause and effect is argued to the nth degree so we can get to the meat of things, which is bacon, of course — the question of whether brunch created the iconic Bloody Mary cocktail, or was it the other way around, remains a conundrum. 

Because, much as it remains unclear whether it was the egg that hatched the chicken or the chicken who laid that first egg, the popular cocktail many swear by as a hangover cure and the meal during which we often down that cocktail have a tangled relationship.

Looking at a timeline helps, although history points to a few reasons why the meal called brunch needed developing.

Brunch is a portmanteau, a word made when breakfast and lunch are squashed together. The word “brunch” is said to have been invented in an 1895 Hunter’s Weekly article by British writer Guy Beringer titled, “Brunch: A Plea”:

By eliminating the need to get up early on Sunday, brunch would make life brighter for Saturday-night carousers. It would promote human happiness in other ways as well. Brunch is cheerful, sociable and inciting. It is talk-compelling. It puts you in a good temper, it makes you satisfied with yourself and your fellow beings, it sweeps away the worries and cobwebs of the week.

If you look up “brunch” in The Oxford Companion to Food, you are told to “See Lunch”; that definition informs us that British lunches range from quick sandwiches to large dinners.

Lunch dates to the early 19th century, a period marked by social change. With industrialization, more people were working out of the home, and they needed nourishment to sustain them until dinner. Large lunches (called dinner) when men returned from working in the fields or in businesses were less frequent, and when women joined the workforce, the large weekday lunch declined even more. 

Urbanization created an extended work day and Sundays were a day off to spend with friends and family. How that time was spent was as varied as the individual who spent it.

Beringer doesn’t specifically mention alcohol, but it’s been suspected for nearly 130 years that he advocated for this new meal because of a hangover.

By the end of 19th century England, midday refreshments already included liquor. There was “nuncheon” (a noon drink), and “bever” (beer with lunch, from the Latin “bibere,” meaning “to drink”). Adding brunch, along with the hair of the dog that bit you, wasn’t much of a stretch.

This leads us to the Bloody Mary — is it the egg, or the chicken? 

Brunch didn’t sink its claws into American dining psyches until the 1930s, after it was popularized on hotel menus. Early on, the practice was limited to the upper classes who had more leisure time. But with industrialization came weekend idleness.

Hangovers from the night before necessitated hangover cures. Healthy diet fads in the early 1920s included rumors that tomatoes contained vitamins.

People discovered how tomato juice helped with a morning headache and concocted their own remedies, opening canned tomatoes and straining the juice to drink. Canning tomatoes at home is labor intensive, but fortunately, commercially canned tomatoes were invented by the mid-1860s, offering an easy tomato juice-sipping option. 

When Chef Louis Perrin ran out of juicing oranges for a group of businessmen lunching at the French Lick Resort in southern Indiana in 1917, he mashed and strained tomatoes, added sugar and salt, and voilà, tomato juice was invented.  

Seasonings like lemon juice, Tabasco and Worcestershire sauce followed, the word “cocktail” was added, and the drink became celebrated for its reviving tendencies.

By 1927, Fernand “The Frog” Petiot, a French bartender at Harry’s New York Bar in Paris, added vodka and spices. The celery stick was a marketing ploy: it attracted attention because everyone wanted to know what that leafy green thing sticking out of the tomato juice glasses was as the drink was paraded around restaurant dining rooms. 

These days we doubt the benefits of drinking “the hair of the dog” — a reference to the medieval remedy for treating a rabid dog bite that called for laying a strand of the dog’s hair in the wound. Putting liquor in tomato juice doesn’t give it healing properties, although electrolytes such as sodium and potassium naturally found in tomatoes might lessen a headache.

But in the 1920s, the perceived health benefits of tomato juice, paired with the myth that drinking more alcohol after a night out was a hangover cure, gave us today’s Bloody.   

This brings us to the modern obsession with stuffing a skewer full of cheese cubes, olives, shrimp, mini-burgers and bacon into a Bloody. Much like the celery stick, it’s just good marketing. It gives the restaurant an opportunity to showcase its menu all on one stick.

The reality is, after eating all that food on a stick and downing a Bloody Mary, it’s time for a nap. 

That was probably why Beringer advocated for brunch all along.

Some of Greeley’s best Bloody Marys: 

Doug’s Diner | 801 9th Street, Greeley; 401 Pointe Plaza Dr., Unit A, Windsor

Out of the Blue | 4111 Center Place Drive, Unit D, Greeley

Meeker’s, A Colorado Kitchen & Bar | 919 7th Street, Greeley