Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Foreword
Introduction
CHAPTER 1 - “PROFESSOR” JERRY THOMAS: JUPITER OLYMPUS OF THE BAR
CHAPTER 2 - HOW TO MIX DRINKS, OR WHAT WOULD JERRY THOMAS DO?
CHAPTER 3 - PUNCHES
CHAPTER 4 - THE CHILDREN OF PUNCH: COLLINSES, FIZZES, DAISIES, SOURS, COOLERS, ...
CHAPTER 5 - A HANDFUL OF EGG DRINKS
CHAPTER 6 - TODDIES, SLINGS, JULEPS, AND SUCH
CHAPTER 7 - COCKTAILS AND CRUSTAS
CHAPTER 8 - CHANNELING THE PROFESSOR—NEW DRINKS FROM SIXTEEN OF THE TOP ...
CHAPTER 9 - BITTERS AND SYRUPS
APPENDIX I: THE BON VIVANT’S COMPANION
APPENDIX II: SOME ADDITIONAL CONSIDERATIONS ON THE ORIGIN AND NAMING OF THE COCKTAIL
APPENDIX III: THE ORIGIN OF THE MARTINI
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Acknowledgements
A FEW RECOLLECTIONS OF THE DISTANT PAST
INDEX
“Imbibe! rescues barman Jerry Thomas, an American hero, from the dustbin of history. We drinkers and readers are in the debt of his scribe, Dave Wondrich, who proves an engaging and intellectually curious guide to the barroom netherworlds where ‘bottle conjurers’ and other ne’er-do-wells ‘carved their deeds in ice.’”
—John T. Edge, author of Southern Belly: The Ultimate Food Lover’s Companion to the South
“David Wondrich has drunk his way through two centuries of American cocktails and other mixed drinks. He emerges to tell us, with clarity and wit, what he encountered, how it was made, and how to make it now. In his re-creations of the drinks of yesteryear, he stops at nothing, even growing his own snakeroot to make Jerry Thomas’s Bitters. Thomas was called ‘the Professor’ in his day. If this title belongs to any living expert on the cocktail, it belongs to Wondrich.”
—Lowell Edmunds, author of Martini, Straight Up
“David Wondrich is such an envy-producing polymath that it drives me to drink. Brilliant historian, beautiful writer, former punk rocker, absinthe-maker, mixological marvel, and perhaps, yes, even wizard. Plus he can grow an amazing beard. There are few people in the world I rely on to be so authoritative and so entertaining all at once, and to mix an amazing cocktail at the same time. And those few people are David Wondrich.”
—John Hodgman, author of The Areas of My Expertise
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Copyright © 2007 by David Wondrich
Parts of this book have previously appeared, in greatly altered form, in Drinks; in Slow Food USA’s news-letter, The Snail; and on Esquire.com.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
eISBN : 978-0-399-53287-0
1. Cocktails. 2. Drinking customs. 3. Thomas, Jerry, 1830-1885. I. Title.
TX951.W5663 2007
641.8’74—dc22 2007027096
PUBLISHER’S NOTE: The recipes contained in this book are to be followed exactly as written. The publisher is not responsible for your specific health or allergy needs that may require medical supervision. The publisher is not responsible for any adverse reactions to the recipes contained in this book.
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FOR MARINA
FOREWORD
Back in 1985, when the legendary New York restaurateur Joe Baum asked me to create a classic bar for him at the fine dining restaurant Aurora, he sent me on a search for a book that would explain what he meant by a classic bar: How to Mix Drinks, or The Bon Vivant’s Companion by Jerry Thomas. After my initial unsuccessful attempts searching bookstores and without the Internet for quick reference, I finally discovered that Joe had neglected to mention that the book was written in 1862 and had been out of print since the Herbert Asbury edition was published in 1928. Eventually I got my hands on a copy of the later edition and started down a road that changed my thinking about bars and cocktails, and brought me to the Rainbow Room—a road that led to a revival of interest in real drinks made in a culinary style with real ingredients following original recipes, which continues to this day.
The bigger-than-life characters found in Jerry Thomas’s world actually seemed familiar to me, given my deep working knowledge of numerous New York City watering holes in the late 1960s—joints where the collection of con men, politicians, sporting types, and jazz-loving foreigners was as colorful as the crowd in any Bowery music hall of the mid-nineteenth century. The bartenders at Jimmy Ryan’s Club, where I practically lived back in those days, would have been right at home in one of Thomas’s saloons; they could determine as you approached the bar whether you had two nickels to rub together and give you the bum’s rush before you could open your mouth to order.
Colorful characters aside, what the barrel-chested and bejeweled Jerry Thomas embodied that has been lacking in the post-Prohibition bars in this country is an insatiable curiosity for the strange-sounding concoctions collected during extensive travels and adapted to his personal style—concoctions, I soon discovered, that were crafted from ingredients half of which no longer existed. But that left me undeterred in my quest to make Joe Baum’s vision of a classic bar a reality.
Jerry Thomas’s book taught me how to craft drinks without the aid of commercial mixers; remember, all we knew as journey-men bartenders in those years was what we had learned from other untrained bartenders who came before us. That usually comprised a shot of spirits and a good portion of sour mix or daiquiri mix and a shake. The artificial foaming agent in the mix made the drink look great; as for flavor, those who wanted it drank straight spirits. Bloody Marys were one of the
few drinks we made from scratch, and not many knew how to prepare a decent Bloody Mary mix with the right balance between the hot pepper and the sweet tomato juice.
Thomas talked about sugar syrups and how to make and then use them with fresh citrus juices. He was not generous with descriptions on technique and how to assemble these drinks, but there were enough hints here and there to fill in the blanks. Those hints, and lots of trial and error, led to my first all-fresh-ingredient cocktail menu at a time when cocktail menus were as rare as hens’ teeth. When I moved to the Rainbow Room with my newfound skills and the benefit of Joe’s celebrity and public relations machine behind me, the idea of old-as-new-again became the cutting edge; classics revived made quite the splash in the trade and eventually in the general market.
Back then I could have used a book like David Wondrich’s as a teaching tool, to take the bartenders through the logical steps of punch to sling to cocktail, allowing them to experience firsthand how the whole culture of the cocktail evolved; even tasting them through the steps.
Wondrich has provided us with the most important and authoritative book on the American cocktail to date. He pitches and swaggers his way through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, from poems to periodicals, from songs to books, becoming more intoxicated with each new find. As the pieces accumulate like an enormous jigsaw puzzle, the picture begins to make more and more sense.
Against the backdrop of Western civilization, the cocktail, like the whole American experiment, is in its infancy. But the nature of this bibulous tradition—born, as Wondrich so deftly demonstrates, in the sporting life—is such that even though all the drinks, stories, and recipes are less than 250 years old, there is very little left in the way of documentation.
Undeterred, Wondrich has uncovered a remarkable trail left like broken twigs on a forest path that lead the reader through the gaming rooms, saloons, gentlemen’s clubs, and coffeehouses—to reveal the real story of the evolution of the American cocktail.
—Dale DeGroff, founder,
The Museum of the American Cocktail
INTRODUCTION
My introduction to Jerry Thomas wasn’t nearly as dramatic as Dale’s—characteristically, I read about him in a book, one or another of the various histories of American lowlife Herbert Asbury published in the 1920s and ’30s. It was the early 1990s, and I was in graduate school, keeping my head down and anticipating a somewhat dull but (I hoped) pleasant life in academia. Asbury’s raffish accounts of old New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and New Orleans—I read them all—and their various thugs, crooks, players, and sports were a lot more colorful than the Latin scientific poems I was studying. But work is work, so I reluctantly shelved Gallus Mag and Bill the Butcher, Bathhouse John, Belle Cora, and the bartender known as “the Professor” (who seemed to be in every book) and got back to my Manilius and Martianus Capella.
But funny things happen sometimes. Toward the end of 1999, I found myself working as an assistant professor of English at a Catholic college on Staten Island, and my place in academia fully as dull, but not nearly so pleasant, as I had pictured it. So when I got a phone call from my friend Josh Mack, then a honcho in Hearst’s New Media division, asking if I might be interested in a little side project, I was pretty receptive. And when I found out that the project involved adapting the cocktail section from one of Esquire’s old entertaining guides for the Web, I was flat-out excited. As Josh knew, I had been writing a few little pieces on music for the Village Voice as a way of blowing off steam, and I liked to mix the occasional cocktail. Since this combined writing and mixing . . . Sure.
As luck would have it, Esquire liked the historical essays I had fitted a few of the drinks out with enough to hire me to do them for all the drinks. A new one went up on the site each week. Suddenly, I was a mixographer. Being a good academic, my first response was that I was going to need a lot more books. Well, maybe that was my second response, after kissing my wife, Karen, and mixing us up a couple of celebratory Martinis (Beefeater and Noilly Prat, seven to one, olives, as I recall). In any case, the handful of vintage drink books Karen and I had accumulated over the years—Charles H. Baker, Jr., Patrick Gavin Duffy, Harry Craddock, a couple more—were going to need some serious reinforcements. The first book I bought? “Professor” Jerry Thomas’s, in the same 1928 Herbert Asbury edition Dale found (imagine my disappointment when I learned that Thomas’s title was awarded not by any academic institution but by the wags of the day, who gave it to anyone who could do anything requiring superior technical knowledge, be it tickling out syncopated melodies on the piano, dealing undetectably from the bottom of the deck, or constructing a perfect Sherry Cobbler).
Having read Straight Up or On the Rocks, William Grimes’s groundbreaking cocktail history, I knew that Thomas’s book was the first of its kind, and I was a firm believer in starting at the beginning.
Over the next three years, in the service of Esquire and soon various other publications, I mixed literally thousands of drinks of all classes and styles. But while I often used Jerry Thomas’s book as a sort of historical backstop, a place to trace a particular recipe back to, I rarely mixed any actual drinks from it. At first glance, the book’s telegraphically phrased recipes seemed either uninspiringly simple or dauntingly complex; deeply weird or old hat.
But again, things happen. At the end of 2002, now an ex-professor and happy to be so, I was introduced to a couple of people from the Slow Food movement at a friend’s birthday party. Since said party happened to be in a bar, I did what I do best in bars and began holding forth. Slow Food is all about preserving traditional foodways. Well, what’s more traditional and American than the fine art of mixing drinks? Hell, we invented it, back in Jerry Thomas’s days. In fact, somebody ought to hold a tribute to Ol’ Jerry, right here in New York where he worked; the grand memorial service he never had. And so on.
The last thing I expected was that they’d take me seriously—that’s not what bar talk is for. But since Shawn Kelley, Ana Jovancicevic, and Allen Katz, the people I was shooting my mouth off to, all happen to be organized, energetic, and competent, the next thing I knew the Professor was getting his tribute. And it wasn’t just a couple of folks meeting up at a bar somewhere. It was at the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel, no less, with seven of America’s top mixologists and me, all making the Professor’s drinks—Blue Blazers, Brandy Crustas, Tom & Jerries, a bunch more—and the great Terry Waldo playing ragtime on the piano. There was even the traditional free lunch, a spread of oysters and country ham and whatnot that wouldn’t have been at all out of place when the Oak Room was the hotel’s men’s bar, back in the sepiatone days before Prohibition. There was even a little souvenir booklet with all the recipes we made, lovingly designed by Ted “Dr. Cocktail” Haigh, who does that sort of thing for a living. For it, I decided to write a little bio of the Professor, which meant doing a little research. You hold in your hands what happens when I start to do a little research.
Originally, this book was going to be an update of Asbury’s edition—a new, more accurate biographical chapter and then all the recipes, with various historical and mixological notes attached. But the more I worked on it, and the more I learned about Thomas and the origins of his book, the more five initials kept popping up in my head. W.W.J.T.D.: What Would Jerry Thomas Do? Would he be content to trudge along like some electronic-age Bartleby, narrowly copying another’s work and keeping his thoughts on the matter mostly to himself? Or would he have gone for it, using the occasion as an excuse to tell everything he knew? The answer was obvious. I could be true to Jerry Thomas’s book, or true to Jerry Thomas. I chose the latter.
On the one hand, this means that you won’t find every recipe from Jerry Thomas’s book here. In fact, of the largest class of drinks in his book, the almost threescore recipes for bowls of Punch, you’ll find only two. A bowl of Punch is a wonderful, even sublime thing, but it was already obsolete as a bar drink by the time his book was published, and the vast maj
ority of the recipes were old English ones foisted on him by his publisher. Rather than swell the book by the hundred-odd pages it would take to explain them, I’ve reserved them for another book. I’ve also cut back drastically on egg drinks and the things that are made by carefully layering liqueurs in tiny glasses. On the other hand, I’ve used the space thus cleared to supplement the Professor’s recipes with a goodly number of others from his contemporaries and immediate successors—popular, even important drinks that, I like to think, he would have included had he lived to do another edition of his book. (In all this, anyway, I’m doing no more than what he and his original publisher did: In 1876, they reprinted his book with a supplement containing new drinks, and in 1887, two years after his death, they put out a thorough update and revision, done by some unsung but expert bartender whose name has been lost to history.)
One last thing. This book took a long time to write, but what kept me going throughout was the sheer delight I got from testing the recipes. Time after time, what seemed plain on the page turned out to be subtle; what seemed baroque or fussy, rich and rewarding. But this is only proper. The average nineteenth-century drinker was accustomed to having his drinks—based not on a thin and anodyne tipple like vodka, but rather on something robust and flavorful, like cognac, rye whiskey, Holland gin, or brown sherry—made with fresh-squeezed juices, one of several different kinds of available bitters, hand-chipped ice, and a host of other touches that are today the mark of only the very best bars. In presenting the recipes I’ve done my best to lay bare these touches; to transmit the techniques and competencies the bartender relied on in practicing his craft; in making a few cents worth of whiskey, sugar, and frozen water into a glimpse of a better world.
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