Post #630647 by TikiTomD on Fri, Mar 30, 2012 9:00 AM

Sven, see my edit on the prior post regarding the Sans Souci bar photo. I’ve added an RLS quote about it from his 1896 book, In the South Seas, as well as correcting the photo origin as his 1889 voyage on the Equator, not the later one on the Janet Nicol.

To be honest, I haven’t yet given much thought or research into the Fu Manchu mug association with the Dr. Funk cocktail. Perhaps some of our other TC members can, in the meantime, track down the origins of the Fu Manchu mug and its earliest appearance in association with that cocktail on a menu.

I have been exploring a bit on the drink’s ingredient mutation between the early recipe appearing in Frederick O’Brien books and that in the Trader Vic’s book about a quarter century later. To that end, I ran across this 1941 newspaper article published before the Pearl Harbor attack about a guy finding a dark rum and absinthe based Dr. Funk cocktail in Honolulu and sending back the recipe, along with several others, to his yachting buddies in Vancouver...

The Vancouver Sun August 9, 1941 (page 28)

So, given that some of the accompanying drinks are of Don the Beachcomber or Trader Vic origin, does this mean that the Dr. Funk recipe mutated in California and then migrated to Honolulu before the War in the Pacific got underway in earnest, or is that a coincidence? Or alternately, could it have mutated into a rum and absinthe drink by the preference of sailors and traders in remote ports of the South Seas and then migrated to Honolulu and onto the mainland? Insufficient data... but the presence of those other drinks on the list makes me lean to a mainland origin.

-Tom