Absinthe Frappé

There is something magnificently perverse about a drink that was once thought to cause madness, delirium, and death, and which nonetheless became the signature beverage of some of history's most celebrated minds. Oscar Wilde claimed that after drinking absinthe, he could feel the tulips brushing against his legs. Mark Twain sampled it at the Old Absinthe House in New Orleans. General Robert E. Lee apparently knocked back a few there as well, which perhaps explains certain strategic decisions. The Absinthe Frappé was born in 1874, when Cayetano Ferrer, bartender at that very establishment on Bourbon Street, decided that the best way to tame the green fairy's notorious intensity was to chill her into submission. The result is a drink that manages to be both bracingly cold and warmly aromatic, the licorice notes of the absinthe softened by ice until they become almost medicinal in the best possible way—the kind of medicine you'd happily take twice daily. When absinthe was banned in 1912 (the wormwood, it turned out, was more hallucinogenic than helpful), bartenders substituted Herbsaint and Pernod. Now that proper absinthe has returned to American shores since 2007, we can make the frappé as Ferrer intended. The madness, presumably, is optional.