The cocktail has the distinction of being an original American drink.

Its origins are murky, but the most common accounts name one Antoine Amedee Peychaud, a young Creole from a distinguished French family, as the originator of the drink.

Peychaud, along with wealthy plantation owners, fled his home in the French controlled portion of the island of Hispaniola during the slave uprisings of 1793.

Peychaud, trained as an apothecary, settled in New Orleans and set up shop in the French Quarter. Along with his education, he had salvaged an old secret family recipe for the compounding of a liquid tonic called bitters.

The bitters were good for whatever ailed you. And they added zest to the cognac brandy he served friends and others who wandered into his pharmacy.

Fame of the concoction spread. Soon the ubiquitous New Orleans coffee houses, as liquor dispensing establishments were then called, were offering their French brandy spiked with a dash of the marvelous bitters compounded by M. Peychaud.

He had a unique way of serving his brandy libation. He poured portions into a double egg cup. The French speaking population called such a device a coquetier (pronounced kah-kuh-tyay). The speculation is that the pronunciation of the French word eventually corrupted into the present day cocktail.

New Orleans based Museum of the American Cocktail displays the first known written reference to the drink on its website, www.museumoftheamericancocktail.org. On the front page of May 6, 1806 issue of The Balance and Columbian Repository, a Hudson, N.Y., newspaper. In response to a reader's request, an editor defined a cocktail as "a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water and bitters."

The editor then goes on to say that it is