What is Grand Marnier?

Grand Marnier is a French orange-based liqueur that is one of the world's most famous after-dinner drinks and the signature ingredient in Escoffier's Grand Marnier soufflé and Grand Marnier-flamed crêpes suzette, landmark clichés of French cuisine.
Grand Marnier was born in 1827 when a cognac connoisseur named Lapostolle got the idea to mix it with orange, a rare and prized ingredient at the time. His friend the hotelier César Ritz named the liqueur and helped make it famous. Now, its signature bottle, tied with a red ribbon with its name spelled out in Gothic lettering, is a familiar site on bar shelves the world over (the company claims that a bottle of Grand Marnier is sold every two seconds somewhere on the planet).
The company is still run by the sixth generation of the Marnier-Lapostolle family.
(Image courtesy of Wikipedia, under the Creative Commons Share-Alike license.)
























