A different version of this entry appeared in Eaten magazine 2019 issue No. 5: “Surf & Turf“
In the early 1970s, a popular new drink began to make appearances in advertisements and nightlife coverage.
Charles McHarry of the New York Daily News reported in his “On The Town” column:
“La Seine now has a drink called the Harvey Wallbanger, an import from Malibu, and here is how it was born: Seems a surfer known as Harvey bounced into a Malibu pub one night after a heavy day of hanging ten. He asked for a screwdriver and then as an afterthought asked the bartender to float an once and a half of Galliano on it. He finished the portion and promptly walked into the nearest wall. Hence Harvey Wallbanger, and it is not recommended at a lunch of less than two hours.”
Similarly, Mickey Porter of the Ohio Akron Journal announced that the Brown Derby bar would be “the first in the area to feature the Harvey Wallbanger, a drink imported from Malibu, and here’s how it was born…” You can guess the rest.
1960s tiki-bar culture was fading from favor, but a few elements survived. Among them were surfers and juice-based cocktails. Enter an intriguing imported liquor in a cool bottle, plus a bit of advertising ingenuity, and you have a mixture as potent as the Harvey Wallbanger itself: Galliano became the most-imported liquor of the 1970s.
Depending on how you look at it, the legend of the origin of the Harvey Wallbanger cocktail has been uncovered over the years – or just sured up to incorporate the available facts. Donato “Duke” Antone is said to have originated the drink around 1952 at a Los Angeles Bar called the Blackwatch. Some critics point out that Antone has been credited with a suspicious number of famed cocktails, including the Harvey Wallbanger, Rusty Nail, and the White Russian. To be fair, the enterprising WWII vet and former shoe-shine boy had won his share of awards in mixology. In the 1960s he operated a bartending school in Hartford Connecticut. (He was also working as a consultant for Galliano at this time…) His fame made Hartford “the mixology capital of the world,” according Antone’s 1992 obituary in the the Hartford Courant.
There was a bar named the Black Watch on Sunset Boulevard – it closed in 1950. A subsequent Black Watch restaurant was opened by a Bob Feagon around that time on Las Tunas in Temple City. Advertisements and articles suggest dancing, cocktails – and a very upscale location. What was a surfer doing banging his head on a wall of a fancy restaurant miles inland? And who asks for “an once and a half of Galliano” as an “afterthought?” Even the stories that connect Duke Antone to a ‘Blackwatch’ restaurant in Los Angeles tend to arrive at the one loose end: the surfer, ‘Tom Harvey’, may never have existed.
The character of Tom Harvey is now generally attributed to ad-man Bill Young, hired by marketing director George Bednar of McKesson Imports company to promote one of their imports – Galliano. Young created a cartoon mascot and a slogan to promote the trendy cocktail: “Harvey Wallbanger is the name. And I can be made!”
If the Harvey Wallbanger cocktail was popularized by surfer mystique, that was certainly not capitalized on by Young’s cartoons. Throughout the successful ad campaign, Harvey was portrayed as unsmiling and baggy-eyed, with a few strands of frazzled hair pointing from his round head. Whether surfing, skydiving, or running for president, his eyes conveyed uncomfortable alarm. At perhaps his most desperate, he is shown wearing a sandwich board with his namesake drink’s recipe. “Harvey Wallbanger Is the Name…,” he says to the reader. “Want to make something out of it?” His expression implies that he hopes you do not.
Although the Harvey Wallbanger cocktail had mostly faded from memory by the 1980s, it lived on in the form of a cake. The leap from the cocktail glass to cake-pan is not well documented. It may well have been another play from the liquor marketing camp. Recipes began to make the rounds not long after the cocktail itself in the early 1970s.
All of the earliest printed recipes for Harvey Wallbanger cake involve cake mix rather than a scratch-made cake. The popularity of the recipe was certainly a boon for Galliano, Dunkan Hines, and the Florida Citrus Commission.
On the other hand, there has never been a lack of inventive home cooks ready to incorporate trends into their baking. It’s not such an unusual leap – alcohol has been used to flavor cakes for centuries. A very similar “Pennsylvania Dutch Orange Cake” predates the Harvey Wallbanger cake, although the ingredients vary – including the liqueur. Cake historian Laura Shapiro speculates “It’s always been open season on cake mixes, and the manufacturers like it that way… People figured out ways to make the cakes themselves better or at least more interesting. My guess is that the Harvey Wallbanger version came from a liquor company, but you never know – people get very imaginative when they’re using cake mixes.”
Throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s, Harvey Wallbanger Cake recipes continued to be shared in newspaper columns and community cookbooks, even winning the occasional baking contest. A recipe for the cake was included in “Potato Chip Cookies and Tomato Soup Cake: Recipes of Americana” by Carole Everly in 1992.
In 1990, a reader of the News Journal in Wilmington Delaware requested the cake recipe in Nancy Coale Zippe’s “What’s Cooking” column. Zippe was wowed when she received a “record breaking” 59 replies. In her next column, she printed the names of each person who submitted a Harvey Wallbanger Cake recipe. People from all over Delaware had replied, plus a few surprise submissions from as far away as Arizona. The recipe that Zippe ultimately printed was credited to Chicago bartender Danny Lee McGuire, who “shared his idea” for a Harvey Wallbanger cake with Better Homes and Gardens in 1973. It may have been his idea, but he wasn’t the first: newspapers had already been printing recipes for the cake based on the cocktail for at least a year… with the exact same ingredients.
Recipe columnists often referred to the cake recipe as “lost” or nostalgic, despite its consistent recurrence. Throughout all this, the recipe itself changed very little. When Dunkan Hines Orange Supreme cake mix became hard to find in the late 80s, bakers substituted lemon cake mix. Eventually, yellow cake became the standard.
In 1989, Remy Cointreau purchased Galliano and altered the 93 year old recipe. When Lucas Bols later acquired Galliano and reverted to the original recipe in 2010, memories of the Harvey Wallbanger cocktail resurfaced. Liquor.com declared the cocktail “a modern classic.” Saveur writer Robert Simonson absolved the Harvey Wallbanger of the bad reputation the cocktail had earned as “one of the preeminent drinks of the 1970s… a time of sloppy, foolish drinks.”
The cake, of course, has had a few “from scratch” revisions, but the cake mix version continues to reappear wherever there’s a recipe-finder column. And with the ability to order the elusive “Orange Supreme” cake mix online, purists are in luck. The real surfer named Harvey may never surface… but he can be made.
Recipe:
- 1 package orange cake mix
- 1 (3 3/4 oz) package pudding mix
- 4 eggs
- .5 Cups cooking oil
- .5 Cup orange juice
- .5 Cup Galliano
- 2 Tablespoons vodka
Glaze:
- 1 Cup sifted powdered sugar
- 1 Tablespoon orange juice
- 1 Tablespoon Galliano
- 1 Teaspoon vodka
In large bowl, combine cake mix and pudding. Add eggs, oil, 1/2 c. orange juice, 1/2 c. Galliano and 2 T. vodka. Beat on low speed for 1/2 min. beat on med. speed 5 min. Pout into greased and floured 10 in. fluted tube pan. Bake at 350° for 45 min. Cool for 10 min. in pan, remove to rack and pour on glaze while cake is warm. Glaze- combine last 4 ingredients listed above.
Recipe from “Loyola Recipes”, Loyola Mothers’ Club, 1974
