Warning: Contains spoilers for Peacemaker episode 5.
In Peacemaker episode 5, Chris Smith makes cocktails for himself and Leota Adebayo, and here's how to make the real Peace Train cocktail? James Gunn’s DCEU TV series has had plenty of deep-cut references to strange DC characters like Bat-Mite and Matter-Eater Lad, that might just seem strange but are real characters from the comics. However, he also had Peacemaker claim that Wookiees canonically have teeth on their buttholes, which is less grounded in fact, so the Peace Train cocktail could easily be fictional or real.
After the team’s mission at the Glan Tai bottling facility, Leota (Danielle Brooks) drops Peacemaker (John Cena) off at his trailer and Peacemaker invites her inside for a drink, providing her with the opportunity to hide the forged diary. He proceeds to make them a drink in a cocktail shaker that he tells Leota is called a Peace Train. According to him, it's a mixture of gin, vermouth, vinegar, peppercorn, a bit of maple syrup, and some yak butter. Peacemaker even goes as far as to lament that yak butter is hard to find in Evergreen and therefore he had to substitute normal butter in its place. Despite Peacemaker’s confidence, Leota is disgusted by the Peace Train cocktail, calling it a “feces drink,” and he seems a little surprised by how bad it is himself.
Surprisingly, Peacemaker’s Peace Train is technically a real cocktail but not exactly how it's depicted in the TV show. While Peacemaker gets the method and the first two ingredients right, he gets the rest of the ingredients very, very wrong. Here's how to make a traditional Peace Train cocktail:
1 1/2 oz. gin,
1 oz of sweet vermouth (dry vermouth would make a very different drink),
1 oz. of Calvados (a type of apple brandy),
1 tablespoon of yellow chartreuse (a herbal liqueur).
It should all be added together, shaken, and then serve in a chilled glass.
It is unclear exactly why Peacemaker gets the recipe so wrong; however, it is extremely on-brand for him. It is possible that someone once told him that this was how the drink was made, or he might have just been trying to mix together a bunch of things he thought sounded good and playing it off as best he could. The inclusion of the disappointment at not having yak butter would play into his attempt to make it sound fancy, and he has clearly not tried it before given his own reaction to it in which he struggles to swallow it before providing an unconvincing “yum.” Ultimately, this all serves as a callback to Peacemaker episode 1: Peacemaker pronounces Leota’s last name incorrectly and she admires the confidence with which he said something so wrong, and he in return brags that it’s his “thing.”
The origin of the Peace Train cocktail (the original, not the one that appears in Peacemaker) is unclear. It is possible that it was created with the intention to reference the extremely famous song by Cat Stevens, a.k.a. Yusuf Islam. The song is a strong call for peace, but Yusuf has been criticized for the song being hypocritical given his response to the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. A reference in the Peacemaker TV series to a song about someone whose mission for peace is at times misguided is probably an appropriate choice by James Gunn, even if that is not the source of the original cocktail’s name.
Peacemaker releases new episodes Thursdays on HBO.
