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Imbibe!

Page 20

by David Wondrich


  PLAIN BRANDY, GIN, OR WHISKEY COCKTAIL

  The default Cocktail formula from the Civil War until Prohibition, although one increasingly tainted by fanciness—in fact, Thomas himself fancied things up a bit by calling for “1 or 2 dashes of Curaçoa” in his recipes for plain Brandy Cocktail and Gin Cocktail, but not, interestingly enough, in his Whiskey

  Cocktail. There were parts of the country where dashing orange curaçao into somebody’s drink without clearing it with him first would see you staring down the barrel of a Colt Navy Revolver quicker than you could say “cooked asparagus.” Bearing that in mind, I’ve reserved curaçao for the Fancy Cocktail (page 190).

  Not the least of the many things for which Thomas’s book is noteworthy is providing the first reference to the twist, without which a basic Cocktail seems insipid and even dare I say it, slightly tiresome. The precise process whereby this little strip of lemon peel, long so crucial to the epicurean concoction of Punch, came to replace the grating of nutmeg as the capstone of the Cocktail is obscure to history, but if nothing else it can be read as evidence of antebellum America’s growing wealth and commercial development. A single nutmeg costs far more than a single lemon, true, but it will garnish dozens of Cocktails to that lemon’s eight or twelve, and it doesn’t need to be delivered fresh every few days. But no matter. Early bar guides are just as silent on technical minutiae such as the proper way to cut the things. With some digging, we learn that it should be “small” and “thin”—in fact, it’s just the “yellow part of the rind” we want. Come to think of it, what more do we need?

  (USE SMALL BAR-GLASS.)

  3 OR 4 DASHES [1 TSP] OF GUM SYRUP

  2 DASHES OF BITTERS (BOGART’S)

  1 WINE-GLASS [2 OZ] OF [SPIRITS]

  1 OR 2 DASHES [½ TSP] OF CURAÇOA

  Squeeze lemon peel; fill one-third full of ice, and stir with a spoon.

  SOURCE: JERRY THOMAS, 1862 (COMPOSITE)

  NOTES ON INGREDIENTS: Given the paucity of detailed early recipes, it’s difficult to say exactly when syrup replaced lump or powdered sugar in the Cocktail; Thomas, a working bartender who understood the need for speed, preferred syrup. “Bogart’s” is Thomas’s (or his publisher’s) mistake for “Boker’s,” the leading aromatic bitters of the day, which had largely supplanted Stoughton’s for Cocktail use. Since they’re no longer available, Fee Bros’ Aromatic Bitters make a pretty good approximation, though Angostura or Peychaud’s will work just fine, too. My slight preference is for Peychaud’s when using brandy, Fee’s when using gin, and Angostura when using whiskey.

  A decent, not-too-expensive cognac is what Jerry Thomas would’ve used (although his bar’s cellar was well-stocked with fine old cognacs), and so should you. Don’t try to go too cheap, or you won’t like the results.

  For myself, I’m exceedingly partial to Hollands in this drink and in fact consider it so made to be one of the most seductive potations known to natural science. The way the bitters mask the juniper and let the gin’s maltiness come forth is particularly enticing. On the other hand, a proper Whiskey Cocktail has its own charms, particularly if you’re making it, as Thomas would have, with a fine old rye (among the barrels of rye in his cellar were several of the highly esteemed Maryland Club and some nine-year-old Tom Moore from Kentucky, not to mention the eight-year-old stuff he and George bottled under their own name). But bourbon works just as well, and in fact many tipplers of the day preferred it. I should note that most other spirits, including some far beyond Thomas’s ken, respond well to the basic Cocktail treatment. You can even make a surprisingly pleasant plain Cocktail with vodka, and a palatable one with Chinese rose petal chiu.

  The curaçao here is a sign of creeping gentrification and can and should be omitted (but see the Fancy Cocktail, page 190).

  NOTES ON EXECUTION: Going by his book, Thomas couldn’t make up his mind whether the Cocktail is shaken or stirred. His brandy Cocktail calls for the spoon, his gin and whiskey ones the shaker. Nor are his professional colleagues much help: While, for example, the author of the 1869 Steward & Barkeeper’s Manual makes it a flat rule that, “A cocktail should never be shaken,” A. V. Bevill in his 1871 Barkeeper’s Ready Reference instructs that his cocktails be shaken well. Judging by the numerous depictions of bartenders “tossing the foaming cocktail” back and forth in a huge arc, in the 1860s and 1870s consensus favored his method—or perhaps it was just the more picturesque one and hence was noticed more often. In my experience, a stirred plain Cocktail has a transparent silkiness that a shaken one cannot achieve.

  Once the mixing is done, however it’s done, it’s straining time—unless it isn’t. Here, again, Thomas differed with himself: His gin and whiskey Cocktails are strained, his brandy Cocktail is not. As often, the Steward & Barkeeper’s Manual provides some elucidation, noting that, “It is a matter of preference with many to drink the cocktail from the glass in which it is made.” As for the twist: It comes in at the end, though some preferred to mix it in with everything else.

  FANCY BRANDY, GIN, OR WHISKEY COCKTAIL

  The difference between plain and fancy can be as small a thing as a thin cordon of hammer marks around the rim of a silver cup or as large a one as spinning chrome hubcaps, a cushion of ground-effect neon, and woofers the size of garbage cans. In his person, Jerry Thomas favored the latter aesthetic; in his drinks, the former, as one can see by his recipe for the Fancy Brandy Cocktail: “This drink is made the same as the brandy cocktail, except that it is strained in a fancy wine-glass, and a piece of lemon peel thrown on top, and the edge of the glass moistened with lemon.” In 1862, there was no such thing as a dedicated Cocktail glass, plain or fancy, so a small wineglass had to do. (By 1876, that situation had been remedied with the adoption of the small, cup-bottomed coupe for Cocktail use.) Other than the glass, there’s nothing here to separate the Fancy Cocktail from the plain one besides that genteel lemoning of the rim of the glass; not for Jerry Thomas was the decadent practice of serving a Cocktail “plentifully trimmed with orange, banana and things of that sort,” like the house special some wags at the famous Hancock’s in Washington slipped in front of Marcus Aurelius Smith, a notoriously crusty Arizona politician, in 1890. “I don’t drink slops or eat garbage,” Smith announced. “Gimme some of the best whisky.” His reply was widely reported enough to enter the language: For at least two generations afterward, a fruit garnish on a Cocktail was known as “the garbage.” (For the record, that garbagey Cocktail was the creation of the great black bartender Richard Francis, who served it with a slice of lemon muddled up with some pulverized sugar, dashes of maraschino, Angostura, and raspberry cordial, and a shot of spirits, shaken well, strained and garnished with slices of banana and orange. Hardly disgusting.)

  (USE SMALL BAR-GLASS.)

  3 OR 4 DASHES [1 TSP] OF GUM SYRUP

  2 DASHES OF BITTERS

  1 WINE-GLASS [2 OZ] OF [SPIRITS]

  1 OR 2 DASHES [½ TSP] OF CURAÇOA

  Squeeze lemon peel; fill one-third full of ice, and stir with a spoon. Strain into a fancy wine glass, twist a piece of lemon peel over the top, moisten the rim of the glass with it and throw it in.

  SOURCE: JERRY THOMAS, 1862 (COMPOSITE)

  NOTES ON INGREDIENTS : As for the Cocktail (Plain), except for the dashes of curaçao. Few things in mixology are as variable as the precise measure of a dash, but in this case a quarter-teaspoon of good-quality imported orange curaçao (such as Marie Brizard) or Grand Marnier will do nicely.

  NOTES ON EXECUTION: As for the Cocktail (Plain), Thomas eschewed the bit of decadence described in the Continental Monthly in 1864, whereby a Whiskey Cocktail is served in a glass “with the edge . . . previously lemoned and dipped in powdered sugar.” But then again, Thomas was conservative, and particularly (and rightly) when it came to Whiskey Cocktails.

  If you’ve got a Fancy Brandy Cocktail all made up and just can’t resist the temptation to top it off with a splash of chilled brut champagne, go ahead; at the old Waldorf-Astori
a, they called that a Chicago Cocktail; elsewhere, it was a Saratoga Cocktail. Whatever it was called, it dates to the gaudy years immediately before Prohibition, when Chicago was run by those paragons of the Aldermanly virtues Bath-House John Coughlin and Hinky-Dink McKenna, and Saratoga by the great gambler Richard Canfield.

  IMPROVED BRANDY, GIN, OR WHISKEY COCKTAIL

  In 1876, when Dick & Fitzgerald got wise and reissued Thomas’s book in a format handier for the working bartender, among the drinks tacked on in the Appendix were “Improved” versions of the three standard Cocktails, all sharing the same basic formula. In brief, curaçao was out, maraschino was in, “Bogart’s” was corrected to “Boker’s,” and the option of Angostura was given.

  More important, there was a new ingredient: absinthe. As faddish in the 1870s and 1880s as pomegranate and mint are in the 2000s, absinthe was everywhere—when the New York Tribune asked “a man with a waxed moustache, a diamond pin and a white linen jacket, who was dispensing fluids behind the bar of a well-known up-town hotel” about it in 1883, while “deftly squeezing a bit of lemon peel into a cocktail as a finishing touch” the bartender—almost certainly Jerry Thomas himself, at the Central Park Hotel—answered, “Much absynthy drunk? Well I should smile. Pretty near every drink I mix has a dash of the green stuff in it.” For one thing, the dash of absinthe—first attested to in the 1869 Steward & Barkeeper’s Manual—helped to polish up the Cocktail’s medicinal luster, although with a hot-rails-to-hell edge that bitters alone could never quite achieve. “Bad for the nerves? I guess not,” continued the man uptown, almost defensively. “You jest get up of a mornin’ feeling as if yer couldn’t part yer hair straight an’ see if a cocktail or John Collins dashed with absynthy don’t make a new man of yer. Bad for the nerves! Why, you ain’t been around much, I guess, young man. . . .”

  It didn’t hurt, of course, that not only did absinthe carry an aura of danger, but used sparingly it gave the drink an offbeat fragrance that many found mighty pleasing to the palate. In the last decades of the century, bartenders were dashing it into everything in sight, to the point that master mixologist George J. Kappeler felt compelled to warn, “Never serve it in any kind of drink unless called for by the customer.”

  (USE ORDINARY BAR-GLASS.)

  2 DASHES BOKER’S (OR ANGOSTURA) BITTERS

  3 DASHES [1 TSP] GUM SYRUP

  2 DASHES [½ TSP] MARASCHINO

  1 DASH [⅛ TSP] ABSINTHE

  1 SMALL PIECE OF THE YELLOW RIND OF A LEMON, TWISTED TO

  EXPRESS THE OIL

  1 SMALL WINE-GLASS [2 OZ] OF [SPIRITS]

  Fill glass one-third full of shaved ice, shake well, and strain into a fancy cocktail glass. The flavor is improved by moistening the edge of the cocktail glass with a piece of lemon.

  SOURCE: JERRY THOMAS, 1876 (COMPOSITE)

  NOTES ON INGREDIENTS: In general, as for the Cocktail (Plain). This drink is particularly good with Holland gin—and, for that matter, cognac and rye. In fact, there’s really nothing wrong with it at all. For those who have ever had one, to contemplate it is to desire it. (If ever in New York, it’s worth remembering that this formula is known to the sleeve-gartered wizards at the Pegu Club.)

  NOTES ON EXECUTION : As for the Cocktail (Fancy). If you’d rather be right and stir, be right and stir. Then smile.

  PRINCE OF WALES’S COCKTAIL

  The prince was a pup. A gay dog. A letch. A lush. A charming—if stout—son of a bitch, said bitch being Queen Victoria, he watched decade after decade roll by with her grasping the reins of power for dear life and nothing for him to do in the official line but wave to the nice folks. So he did what anybody else would have: He got grumpy and he got loose. Mistresses and mischief ensued. He spent a lot of time at the table, the theater, and the club. Somewhere along there, he learned how to make a pretty fair variation on the Improved Whiskey Cocktail—in fact, one of the sportiest on record. If his circumstances had been different, Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, would’ve made a hell of a bartender.

  The particular sportiness of the prince’s brainchild lies in the addition of champagne. This Gilded Age refinement appears to date from the 1880s, when any saloon with pretensions to quality was splashing the bubbly about pretty liberally into anything from a Brandy Punch to a Manhattan Cocktail. It helped that they had special equipment, like the “solid silver champagne case pendant from the ceiling over the bar” installed at the new Palace Exchange in Decatur, Illinois, in 1882. “This novel contrivance is an innovation in Decatur,” the local paper explains, “and will be used to ‘dash’ punches, sours, cocktails, and other fancy drinks.” Most bartenders made do with a “champagne tap,” a hollow-stemmed gimlet with a tap at the end that you screwed through the cork. The prince, he probably sabered the top off a magnum of Mumm and hosed it about with gayish abandon.

  Champagne taps, circa 1898; handy things and well worth reviving. (Author’s collection)

  [The Prince of Wales] is also credited with having composed an excellent “cocktail.” It consists of a little [1½] oz] rye whisky, crushed ice, a small square of pineapple, a dash of Angostura bitters, a piece of lemon peel, a few drops [¼ tsp] of Maraschino, a little [1 oz] champagne and powdered sugar to taste [1 tsp]. This“short drink”is often asked for at the clubs which he frequents.

  SOURCE: PRIVATE LIFE OF KING EDWARD VII, BY A MEMBER OF THE ROYAL HOUSEHOLD (LONDON, 1901)

  NOTES ON INGREDIENTS: Obviously, for the quantities we must rely on our judgment. The champagne should be brut, of course, and no doubt expensive. The pineapple should, preferably, be fresh, but the drink doesn’t suffer unduly if you use an eighth or so of a canned pineapple ring; just make sure it’s not dripping with syrup.

  NOTES ON EXECUTION: Put the sugar in the mixing glass with the bitters and ½ teaspoon of water. Stir briefly until it has dissolved. Add the rye, the maraschino, and the pineapple chunk, fill two-thirds full of cracked ice and shake brutally to crush the pineapple. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass, add the cold champagne, and deploy the twist. Then smile.

  OLD-FASHIONED WHISKEY, BRANDY, OR HOLLAND

  GIN COCKTAIL

  Everything new always turfs up a few people who liked the old way better. So no one should be surprised that when the plain Cocktail began gathering unto its bosom troubling dashes of curaçoa and absinthe and truly alarming splashes of vermouth, fruit juice, and orgeat syrup, there were those who cried bloody murder. (And to a degree I can see their point: In these days of Apple Pucker Martinis, my sympathies tend to lie with the purists.) For the drinker who resisted change, the 1870s must’ve been trying times. At some point, this resistance coalesced into a catchphrase. Just as the modern-day fogey has learned that the phrase “gin Martini, straight up” when uttered to a bartender will secure an approximation of a real Martini, his or her Gilded Age counterpart learned that saying “old-fashioned Whiskey [or Gin, or Brandy] Cocktail” would bring forth a drink made with a slug of good (hopefully) booze, lump sugar instead of syrup, ice in the glass, and none of that vulgar shaking and straining and garnishing.

  It should come as no surprise that Chicago, that most broad-shouldered of cities, seems to have been one of the main centers of resistance. In fact, discounting an ambiguous newspaper squib from 1869, the earliest clear references to the “Old-Fashioned” way of making cocktails come from the pages of the Chicago Tribune . The first is from 1880, when Samuel Tilden, the Al Gore of his age, decided not to run for president again, prompting goal-oriented Democrats to toast his withdrawal with “Hot-whiskies . . . sour mashes and old-fashioned cocktails.” (Note that this busts the myth that the drink was invented at the Pendennis Club in Louisville; the club wasn’t founded until 1881.) Two years later, when the Trib quizzes a prominent local bartender about what the gents are drinking, he replies, “The old-fashioned cocktails [are] still in vogue; cocktails made of loaf-sugar and whisky . . . Rye whiskey [is] called for more than Bourbon.”

  It wasn’t just a Chicago thing, though; the
Old-Fashioned also appears in Lafcadio Hearn’s seminal 1885 New Orleans cookbook, La Cuisine Creole, albeit under the name “spoon cocktail” (the drink was generally served with a smaller version of the barspoon in it, for the customer to stir in any undissolved sugar). By 1895, the old-fashioned way was sufficiently popular for both Chris Lawlor, of the Burnet House hotel in Cincinnati, and George Kappeler, of New York’s Holland House, to include it in their books. Both recipes are nearly identical, describing an agriculturally simple drink, just spirits stirred up with sugar, bitters, and a little ice, with a bit of lemon peel for accent—in other words, a Cocktail straight out of the 1850s. In 1895, you can see why that might appeal; why people in the age of the automobile and the electric light might like a liquid look back to the days when the railroad was the latest thing; when Indians still paddled the Mississippi; when the best restaurants served roast bear and the passenger pigeon was a popular game bird; when barrooms were alive with “the merry raps of the toddy stick.” The Old-Fashioned was a drinker’s plea for a saner, quieter, slower life, one in which a gent could take a drink or two without fear that it would impair his ability to dodge a speeding streetcar or operate a rotary press.

 

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