Imbibe!
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CHAPTER 1
“PROFESSOR” JERRY THOMAS: JUPITER OLYMPUS OF THE BAR
WHO READS AN AMERICAN BOOK?
In the January 1820 issue of the Edinburgh Review, the noted English wit Sydney Smith closed his review of Adam Seybert’s 804-page Statistical Annals of the United States of America with a flurry of questions calculated to let the air out of anyone whom Seybert’s monument to American enterprise might inspire with admiration for the new republic’s achievements. “Confining ourselves to our own country,” he asks, “and to the period that has elapsed since they had an independent existence . . . Where are their Foxes, their Burkes, their Sheridans . . . their Wilberforces?”—and a good twenty-one other celebrated names to boot, covering the full spectrum of human endeavor. It’s not just that the country lacks famous names, though; it’s everything:
In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue? What does the world yet owe to American physicians or surgeons? What new substances have their chemists discovered? Or what old ones have they analyzed? What new constellations have been discovered by the telescopes of Americans? What have they done in mathematics? Who drinks out of American glasses? or eats from American plates? Or wears American coats or gowns? or sleeps in American blankets?
Here’s the thing: Smith wasn’t entirely wrong. From our perspective, two very busy—and largely American—centuries down the road, it’s not easy to appreciate just how rudimentary American civilization was in its early years. Once you got more than a day’s ride in from the coast, where things were maintained to a thickly provincial, mail-order version of European standard, everything was salt pork and hominy, dirt and ignorance and inebriation, all punctuated by the splat of expectorated tobacco juice. Or so it seemed, anyway, to the European travelers who flooded the country.
Even an impartial observer (which Smith and most of the travelers were assuredly not) would have to concede literature—although Washington Irving’s 1809 Knickerbocker’s History of New York had earned at least some amount of international notice—and drama, painting, and the plastic arts. And medicine, astronomy, and math. And manufacturing, heavy industry, light industry. Pretty much everything, in short, but raw materials, empty space and the sheer drive and feistiness needed to fill it.
But little did Sydney Smith realize that, even as he wrote, an American name was thrusting itself forward, and in an art in which Great Britain had long been preeminent. As often, this genius at first was not recognized: The earliest squint we have at him creating comes from Lieutenant the Honourable Frederick Fitzgerald De Roos, of the Royal Navy, who encountered him in 1826 and was not impressed. This was at the City Hotel, the best in New York at the time. “The entrance to the house,” the fussy lieutenant writes, “is constantly obstructed by crowds of people passing to and from the bar-room, where a person presides at a buffet formed upon the plan of a cage. This individual is engaged, ‘from morn to dewy eve,’ in preparing and issuing forth punch and spirits to strange-looking men, who come to the house to read the newspapers and talk politics.”
About that man in the cage (American hotels kept their bars right in the lobby, so they needed to be lockable when the desk clerk/barkeeper—the jobs were one and the same—was off duty, lest the guests help themselves): His name was Willard. Mr. Willard, if you were being formal. If he had a first name, nobody ever used it. If the lieutenant had been a little less stuck-up, he might have noticed that the “issuing forth” Willard was doing was something more than ladling Punch from a bowl and pouring drams. In fact, he was America’s first celebrity bartender; our “Napoleon of BarKeepers,” as he was called. As one patron recalled, “Willard was one of the first in the city to concoct fancy drinks, and he introduced the mint-julep as a bar drink,” frequently mixing them up three or four at a time while simultaneously using his photographic memory to greet long-absent guests by name, supply the whereabouts of others, and answer all and sundry questions clerks and bartenders are subject to.
Indeed, as the English traveler Charles Augustus Murray observed in 1839, “by common consent” Willard, whose name was familiar to every American, and to every foreigner who has visited the States during the last thirty years,” was “allowed to be the first master of [his] art in the known world.” There was probably no other American in any field about whom an Englishman would admit this, but then again, Murray had tried Willard’s Mint Juleps. As an Englishman, Murray knew whereof he spoke: For two hundred years, the English upper classes had maintained a reputation as the world’s most discriminating consumers of alcoholic beverages. Without their educated—and insatiable—demand, Bordeaux wines, champagne, cognac, vintage port, old sherry, Scotch whisky, and liqueur rum would never have developed beyond an embryonic stage; it was the English market that nourished and shaped them. Nor was the Milords’ expertise confined to straight goods alone: Punch, the nectareous and lethal concoction that for two hundred years represented the acme of the mixologist’s art, was for all intents and purposes an English creation, and those men who excelled in making it were rewarded with money and celebrity. But as Murray and indeed every other traveler who visited America and was cooled by a Mint Julep on a hot day or warmed by an Apple Toddy on a cold one was forced to admit, in this one art anyway, the old order was passing and a novus ordo potationum was coming into being.
Now, admittedly, mixed drinks are not paintings, sculptures, novels, or poems. They are disposable and, frankly, not a little bit disreputable, standing roughly in the same relation to the culinary arts that American motor sports do to automotive engineering or hot jazz to musical composition: they smack of improvisation and cheap effects and even the most august of them lack the cachet accorded to fine wines, old whiskies, and cognac brandies. They are easily abused; they can degrade lives and even destroy them. Even if appreciated in moderation, they are appreciated in surroundings that rarely lead to detached meditation on truth and beauty (if those are not the same thing) or constructive engagement with the great moral and social questions of the age. And yet neither are they contemptible. A proper drink at the right time—one mixed with care and skill and served in a true spirit of hospitality—is better than any other made thing at giving us the illusion, at least, that we’re getting what we want from life. A cat can gaze upon a king, as the proverb goes, and after a Dry Martini or a Sazerac Cocktail or two, we’re all cats.
But let’s leave such philosophical matters for when we meet over a drink and note that even the notorious Mrs. Trollope, who spent three and a half years in Tennessee, Virginia, and, mostly, the American “Porkopolis,” Cincinnati, and recorded her frank and decidedly unvarnished impressions of the country in her 1832 Domestic Manners of the Americans, finally came around to admitting that here was something that Americans excelled in, and that it had merit. Indeed, she conceded in 1849, when it came to those Mint Juleps she had disingenuously held up in her book as an example of American boorishness, “it would, I truly believe, be utterly impossible for the art of man to administer anything so likely to restore them from the overwhelming effects of heat and fatigue.” And these were Whiskey Juleps, mind you—if someone had managed to slip one of the more epicurean Brandy ones under her nose, who can say? She might even have given Porkopolis another chance.
Many excellent books have been written on the social history of drinking in early America. I will therefore dispense with the traditional lengthy description of the general bibulousness that prevailed; on the Slings and Juleps that, raised in honor of rosy-fingered dawn, eased men onto the proscenium of day; on the eleven-o’clock spark-quenchers of gin and the noontime whiskey drams; on the Celt and his ball of malt and the Good Old ’Nongohela of the Pennsylvanian; on Kentucky corn and Medford rum and the true purpose of the Georgia peach (like Johnny Appleseed’s stock-in-trade, it was destined for the stillhouse, not the table).
Whether or not Americans ingested more absolute alcohol than their Eu
ropean forbears is open to debate. There’s no question, though, that a much greater percentage of that alcohol was in the form of distilled spirits, and that these spirits were consumed in an unprecedented variety of mixtures. Nor can it be disputed that this facility with mixing drinks was the first legitimate American culinary art, and—along with the minstrel show, but that’s another book—the first uniquely American cultural product to catch the world’s imagination. In the century and a half between the American Revolution and Prohibition, this art was born, reached maturity, and spread to every corner of the globe, in the process establishing the principles, techniques, and even a surprising number of the tools and formulae that still characterize the art today.
Arts don’t invent themselves. Someone had to mix the first Rum Punch, stir the first Cocktail, shake the first Sherry Cobbler, and invent the shaker to do it with. But when it comes to these early Titans of the bar, we run into the condition lamented by the Roman poet Horace, two thousand years ago:
There lived heroes before Agamemnon,
Yet all unwept in shadow lie, for want
Of poets to save their mighty deeds in song.
Unfortunately, there was no Homer to record the names and deeds of bartenders. Other disciplines of similarly louche character found their poets—e.g., the Anglo-Irish journalist Pierce Egan’s remarkable 1819 Boxiana, a four-volume anecdotal history of British pugilism and the culture that supported it, or its companion piece, Patrick Timony’s American Fistiana from 1849—and there was no shortage of what was known as “convivial” or “jovial” literature, books about social drinkers and their conversation. But the nineteenth century brought forth no American Bariana, no chronicle of the men behind the bar, their sayings and their doings. For the most part, as far as history is concerned the great bartenders of the Heroic Age—men like Cato Alexander, a freed slave who kept a coaching inn in upper Manhattan and who, in the Federal Era, was second only to Willard in his reputation as a mixologist; or Sherwood “Shed” Sterling (alias “Napoleon II”), who presided over the grand circular bar at the Astor House; or William Pitcher, the Greek-spouting deity of the Tremont House bar in Boston—carved their deeds in ice. We might catch occasional glimpses of them in the murk, tossing drinks from cup to cup before a bewhiskered and thoroughly appreciative crowd, but beyond that they are enigmas. And they were the famous ones. Even the mighty Willard left behind no book of recipes or biographical sketch. We don’t know when or where he was born or when or where he died. We don’t even know his first name.
But if the vast majority of the bartenders of the period have been condemned to obscurity, there is one, anyway, who has not; one about whom a good deal has long been known and a great deal more will be revealed herein. In large part, this is because, not content to wait for a poet, he was his own Homer, telling his story to anyone who would listen and getting his deeds, his recipes between the covers of a book before anyone else. In this book, he will stand in for the countless ranks of his colleagues whom history overlooked; his character and actions for those of all bartenders. Fortunately, if there was one old-time bartender whose shoulders could support such a burden, it was Jerry Thomas.
AN AMERICAN, AND A SAILOR, TOO
Oh, to have seen him as Edward Hingston saw him in 1863, presiding over the luxurious marble-and-gilt barroom of the Occidental, the newest and best hotel in San Francisco:
He is a gentleman who is all ablaze with diamonds. There is a very large pin, formed of a cluster of diamonds, in the front of his magnificent shirt, he has diamond studs at his wrists, and gorgeous diamond rings on his fingers—diamonds being “properties” essential to the calling of a bar-tender in the United States. . . . It must be remembered, however, that he is in California, and that he is engaged as a “star.”
When Hingston encountered him, Thomas was, as he noted, “one of the most distinguished, if not the chief, of American ‘bartenders, ’” his name “as familiar in the Eastern States as it now is out here in California. . . . In the manufacture of a ‘cocktail,’ a ‘julep,’ a ‘smash’ or an ‘eye-opener,’ none can beat him, though he may have successful rivals.” This “Jupiter Olympus of the bar,” as the preface to his book had dubbed him the year before, was thirty-three years old and he was pulling down a cool hundred dollars a week, more than the vice president of the United States.
Jerry P. Thomas—alas, we may never know what the “P.” stands for—was “an American . . . and a sailor too,” as he told a reporter from the New York Sun in 1882. He was a gold miner, a Broadway dandy, a (minor) theatrical impresario, an art collector, an artist himself (of sorts, anyway), an inventor, an author, and a gambler. A footloose type, at one time or another he tended bar in just about every place where conviviality was at high ebb, from London, England, to Virginia City, Nevada. And wherever he was, he was a man as good as any who stood before his bar, and a damned sight better than most.
Jerry Thomas was born on or around November 1, 1830. Or maybe it was 1829—things like strict chronological accuracy don’t seem to have been a primary concern of his (the 1830 date comes from his death certificate and seems like the best bet). In any case, the place was Sackets Harbor, New York, a garrison town on the chilly waters of Lake Ontario not far from the Canadian border. About his parents, Jeremiah and Mary Morris Thomas, we know nothing. We know he had a younger brother, George M., because they ran saloons together, but of other siblings we also know nothing. His early childhood is a blank. We can deduce that his social class wasn’t the highest, but only from his career choices. On the other hand, Richard Henry Dana and Herman Melville came from “respectable” families, and they shipped out as sailors, too, and George M. Thomas ended up as a bank director. At some point in the mid-1840s, Jerry ended up in New Haven; whether he moved there with his family or by himself is another open question.
Here’s the problem: Jerry Thomas was a bartender, not a poet or a politician. Bartenders were important men in their milieu, but that milieu—discussed below—compiled its historical record by anecdote and barroom reminiscence, not systematic investigation backed by documents. That doesn’t mean that we’re without resources to reconstruct his life, but they tend to be catch-as-catch-can, giving us intermittent, if often vivid, glimpses of the man as he moved through his world. These don’t extend to the part of his life before he learned how to mix drinks. According to the unusually accurate obituary published in his hometown paper, this occurred “at sixteen years of age, [when] he began life as a New Haven barkeeper.” New Haven, which was both a seaport and a college town, would have been an excellent place to pick up the rudiments of the craft. In 1846, though, it was a craft still transmitted by long apprenticeship, and his duties in the bar would far more likely have involved sweeping, polishing, and carrying than mixing fancy drinks for customers.
In any case he didn’t stick with it long: At seventeen or eighteen, as that same obituary states, “he went to Cuba as a sailor.” We don’t know what ship that was on, but soon enough he joined the Ann Smith of New Haven (William Henry Bowns, Captain) and, as he told the Sun in 1882, “sailed all around the world before the mast,” or if not all around the world, at least to California (as he told the New York Dramatic Mirror writer Alan Dale around the same time). Whatever his previous sailing experience, his berth there wouldn’t have been a soft one. Life before the mast was a deadly serious business, even for a lakeman like Thomas—“though an inlander . . . wild-ocean born,” as Melville put it in Moby Dick. Not that Thomas could complain, since “whatever your feelings may be, you must make a joke of everything at sea” (so Dana). And there would have been plenty for him to joke about. Even for a boy from Sackets Harbor, who presumably knew something of knife-sharp winds, ice-glassed decks, and waves that topped the masts, rounding the Horn in Antarctic winter, as he did in 1849, must’ve been an ordeal: When he wasn’t climbing aloft to the skyscraping top-gallants, a hundred feet and more above a pitching deck, or edging out to the ends of the yards to furl can
vas stiff with ice while standing over nothing but the roiling South Atlantic, there was the constant scrubbing, scraping, and swabbing; the picking and the pounding; the stitching and the mending. And all for twelve dollars a month and rations that made prison food look wholesome.
The drinks must’ve helped. Now, while the Royal Navy might have had its daily rum ration, this was by no means a universal practice in the American merchant marine. Whether out of moral concern or just plain Yankee thriftiness, most ships were dry (or, more properly, like Dana’s Alert, where “the temperance was all in the forecastle”—in other words, the officers could drink their Brandy-and-Water or Punch, while “Jack . . . can have nothing to wet his lips”). The Ann Smith, however, was no temperance ship. We know this because James Minor, one of the passengers on that trip around the Horn, kept a journal. A strict temperance man himself, Minor was dismayed to see his fellow passengers divide themselves into a “Temperance Party” and a “Rum Party.” The latter boozed and caroused the days and nights away with Bowns not only doing nothing to rein them in, but actually joining them. If only it stopped with the captain—“many of the Rum party,” Minor wrote, “have made themselves to [sic] free with the sailors by treating them, a poor policy to gain friends.” Things soon reached the point that the (dry) First Mate was duking it out with drunken sailors, and the cabin boy and the captain’s son were getting tanked with one of the passengers and pitching the poor ship’s dog overboard. Finally, Minor concluded that “Our Captain is devoid of Order + Sobriety.” (To be fair to Captain Bowns, there are other sources that recall him as a man of honor and talent.)