I had one where they subbed in real wasabi instead of horseradish and used kuzu instead of lime, not as good. They might have also used V8, but with the other changes I really couldn’t tell.
I wish people would stop screwing with perfectly good recipes just to be unique. Call it a bloody samurai or something like that, but it is definitely not a bloody mary.
Right, I’m knocking into you for Hallowe’en ok?
Aside: Note that “Bloody Mary” ain’t the same as “Typhoid Mary”: Who was Typhoid Mary? - The Straight Dope
I’ve been working on a book about this topic off and on (mostly off lately) for ages. For a while I had a website that was the #1 result on Google for the phrase “Bloody Mary”. That went down when I sold the site’s domain name and I never got around to having the page restored.
This was quite popular in early 20th century America, as depicted on countless Halloween cards.
I think it’s extremely likely that it was just some kids misunderstanding what was being said when they were told when you look in the mirror at midnight you will see who you will “marry”.
The earliest versions of the story I’ve collected were less gory than later ones, with a Mary who would show up in a mirror and smile or just fade away. As the story was retold people attached famous Marys to it, like Mary Worth (the comic strip) and Bloody Mary (the queen). Once the “bloody” part of the name was widespread the tale took a more violent turn to explain the blood. The legend also appears to have been strongly influenced by quite a number of stories in horror comics of the early '50s featuring witches in mirrors. There also was an old belief that anyone who looked into a mirror for too long would attract a demon (because of the sin of vanity). All of these things got rolled into a story that scared other kids silly, which became the whole point of doing it.
Various folklorists have written about the legend also, but they were basing their theories on a very small collection of the story, and some of them seem to have come into it with pet theories (especially psychoanalytic ones) that colored their views.
Is there a Typhoid Mary mixed drink?