Scottish Foods-Drinks. Bloody Mary.

The name “Bloody Mary” is associated with a number of historical figures—particularly Queen Mary I of Scotland, who was nicknamed “Bloody Mary” in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs for attempting to re-establish the Catholic Church in England—and fictional women from folklore.

Some drink aficionados believe the inspiration for the name was Hollywood star Mary Pickford. Others trace the name to a waitress named Mary who worked at a Chicago bar called the Bucket of Blood. The tradition at Harry’s New York Bar in Paris, according to manager Alain Da Silva in a 2011 interview, is that one of the patrons for whom the cocktail was first mixed in 1920 or 1921 declared, “It looks like my girlfriend who I met in a cabaret”; the cabaret’s name was the Bucket of Blood and the girlfriend’s name was Mary, so the patrons and bartender Petiot agreed to call it a “Bloody Mary”.

Alternatively, the name may have arisen from “a failure to pronounce the Slav syllables of a drink called Vladimir” in English. This gains some credibility from the anecdotal observation that the customer at the New York Bar for whom Petiot prepared the drink in 1920/21 was Vladimir Smirnov, of the Smirnoff vodka family.