Almost lost to history, the Roffignac has long been one of New Orleans’s most mysterious cocktails. While drinks such as the Sazerac and the Ramos gin fizz enjoyed a resurgence in popularity during the 21st century craft cocktail revival , resurrecting the Roffignac has proved a more difficult task.

In this volume, Robert F. Moss separates truth from fiction and offers the definitive story of this classic pre-Prohibition creation. The Roffignac explains for the first time how this once-famous elixir was born and how it fell out of favor in the 20th century. Along the way, it paints a portrait of dining and drinking in 19th-century New Orleans and explores how 20th- and 21st-century conceptions of the city have shaped our views of the drink and its history. As Moss shares this remarkable and rather twisted tale, he highlights the central role that narrative, myth, and legend have played in American cocktail culture, and how unreliable those stories can sometimes be.