Washington, D.C., had a cocktail all its own, once upon a time: the Rickey. It was as tart a drink as one was likely to find anywhere other than Lubbock, Texas. There, one will find a drink every bit as tart as the original Rickey: the Chilton. And whereas the Rickey became famous and forgot what it was all about, the Chilton has escaped the ruin that so regularly comes with fame. The Chilton, if you will allow a watery metaphor in describing the desiccated expanse of West Texas, is happy to be a big fish in a small pond. It is known to every bartender in Lubbock, and to very few practitioners outside the Lone Star State.
Let’s begin with the Rickey. It got its name from the man who liked to drink it, a political fixer named Joe Rickey. He would go every morning to the favorite saloon of Washington’s most connected scoundrels, a dive bar called Shoomaker’s. And there he would order a highball of Kentucky whiskey and fizzy water on ice. Nothing extraordinary, except that one day in the 1880s, Missouri Rep. William Henry Hatch called for “one of those Rickey drinks with half a lime in it.”
Thus began a fad for a drink that was difficult to choke down: the Rickey. Soda water and lime juice on ice is certainly refreshing, but with bourbon? It is no wonder that the drink quickly evolved away from its austere origins. The Rickey would come into its own decades later, by which time the whiskey was replaced with gin, and the tart lime was balanced with the sweetness of sugar. Lose the gin, and you had a popular soda pop.
In the 1930s, you could walk into most any bar in the United States and order up a gin Rickey. Over the decades to come, it would fade away. Then, in best Washington fashion, advocates of the Rickey launched a campaign to rescue the Rickey from obscurity by having it proclaimed the District of Columbia’s official cocktail. The City Council, clearly with nothing better to do, voted in favor.
The endorsement of the people’s representatives notwithstanding, good luck finding a bar in Washington where one can find a Rickey on the menu or, outside the artisanal cocktail cognoscenti, a bartender who knows how to make one.
Lubbock’s Chilton highball bears a remarkable resemblance to the original Rickey. Like the Rickey, it is made of a spirit (in this case, vodka), citrus (lemon), and soda water over ice in a tall glass. Unlike the Rickey, it has salt on the rim. Also unlike the Rickey, it has needed no endorsement by politicos to thrive.
The origin story of the Chilton is almost certainly apocryphal. Legend has it that a Dr. Chilton frequented the Lubbock Country Club and would ask for a drink of his own devising. Fellow members of the club took up the quaff and named it after the good doctor. But there is no doctor named Chilton in the club records.
I doubt the drink was created by swells, in part because the first reference I have been able to find for the Chilton places the drink in a rather more democratic milieu than any country club.
Back in 1975, the local daily newspaper, the delightfully named Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, ran an article on what was considered to be a remarkable cultural development: women bartenders. “The force of change has spared nothing,” observed the Avalanche-Journal. “It has now entered the comfortable, smoke-filled world of the old corner bar.”
Behind the stick at one such haunt was Rosemary Paxton. “I like to use a shaker,” she told the reporter. “It really shows style.” But when asked to make her specialty, Paxton didn’t reach for the shaker. Instead, she declared she was going to make “a favorite Lubbock original,” the Chilton.
The recipe she offers is unfussy, free from sweeteners and unadorned with the lemon wheel garnish with which the drink now often comes. “Salt the rim of a tall glass,” Paxton instructed. Squeeze half a lemon in the glass and drop the shell of the lemon into the glass. “Fill with ice. Add a jigger and a half of vodka.” Top with soda water.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
