What came first: the Cocktail sauce or the Cocktail?

It's very hot in the Northwest right now which irritates me greatly. I left sunny California for a reason. My skin (and Baby Balsamic's as well) is a delicate shade of triple cream (now there's a condiment that I'll blog about after I finish the Danskin Triathlon in August, because I'll be shoveling it into my mouth). Anyway, with my northern European build and coloring, I was meant to be dropping babies as I dig potatoes out of green fields under gray skies.

So tonight, Mr. Mustard prepared a cold dinner: cold shrimp and a Mediterranean salad. And where there's shrimp, there must be cocktail sauce. Cocktail sauce is what I like to term a "complex condiment," meaning it consists of other condiments mixed together to create the final product. It's basically ketchup with horseradish sauce mixed in, perhaps some lemon juice and worchestshire sauce tossed in for good measure. I consider it the condiment form of the Bloody Mary without the vodka.

Which leads me to my question: How did it get to be called cocktail sauce? Wikipedia had no answer. Is it because it's used in the dish shrimp cocktail which arranges the shrimp around the edges of a glass filled with the red, tart sauce?

Nothing conjures up the 50s and early 60s for me like the idea of shrimp cocktail. If I lived back then, I could see myself greeting Mr. Mustard at the front door wearing a shiny green dress with a collar not unlike the tailfins of a 1960 Thunderbird. I would have a martini in one hand and a shrimp cocktail in the other. Baby Balsamic would be toddling around in a haze of second-hand smoke. If I were really ambitious, I would have thickened a Bloody Mary and placed it in the center of the circle of shrimp to truly combine the two experiences at once. Perhaps I will do that at my next cocktail party.

Now, if I could only find a metallic green dress.

Condiment Grrl