But Americans are a restless people and seldom willing to let well enough alone. In the fullness of time, even the Old-Fashioned, whose very essence was its monolithic plainness, started getting the treatment. In New York, that treatment varied from having both lemon and orange peel slathered onto it and a chunk of pineapple tossed in to boot, as in Times Square bartender Hugo Ensslin’s 1916 recipe for an Old-Fashioned Gin Cocktail, to the same plus orange curaçao, to an all-out assault combining rye, Dubonnet, curaçao, absinthe, and so forth. Ensslin called that one an “Old-Fashioned Appetizer”; others might have disagreed on both counts.
Don Marquis, for one. In a series of essays the New York Sun writer—and creator of the immortal archy and mehitabel—published in the early days of Prohibition, he has his alter ego, the “Old Soak,” utter what amounts to the Old-Fashioned drinker’s manifesto: “In the old days when there was barrooms you would go into one . . . and say Ed, mix me one of the old-fashioned whiskey cocktails and don’t put too much orange and that kind of damned garbage into it, I want the kick.” What he would’ve made of the version you get today, with muddled orange slice and maraschino cherry and an ocean of seltzer, one shudders to think.
Dissolve a small lump [½ tsp] of sugar with a little [½ tsp] water in a whiskey-glass; add two dashes Angostura bitters, a small piece ice, a piece lemon-peel, one jigger [2 oz] whiskey. Mix with a small barspoon and serve,leaving spoon in the glass.
SOURCE: GEORGE J. KAPPELER, MODERN AMERICAN DRINKS (NEW YORK, 1895)
NOTES ON INGREDIENTS: Kappeler gives recipes for versions with whiskey, brandy, Holland gin, and Old Tom gin. Indeed, anything beyond these has little legitimate claim to the title “Old-Fashioned” (e.g., Ensslin’s version, which calls for dry gin—a spirit that wasn’t introduced until the 1890s). I prefer lemon peel when using rye, and orange peel when using bourbon.
NOTES ON EXECUTION: Use a muddler to crush the sugar. I like to add the liquor before the ice and give it a quick stir; this leaves less sugar at the bottom of the glass. Some people, though, like that deposit. As for that ice. According to the Chicago Chronicle, the customary size of the pieces used was “about as big as a toy rubber ball”—the kind, I assume, you play jacks with. Also according to that same 1899 article, some mixologically ambitious saloons preferred to refrigerate their Old-Fashioned with ice cut into “perfect cubes about two inches on a side”—the idea being, the bigger the ice, the less it would melt and the stronger the Cocktail. There were even some who went so far as to have the ice “frozen to order in balls which fit nicely into the glass.” (Interestingly enough, this all-but-lost art still survives in Japan, of all places, where the best Tokyo bartenders are expert at hand-carving ice balls to fit the glass precisely, though molds are also available for he who wieldeth not the Samurai ice pick.) If all that seems like a whole lot of damned bother to you, you’ve caught the spirit of the drink. Three or four regular home ice-cubes will do just fine.
SAZERAC COCKTAIL
New Orleans’ own liquid lagniappe has a way of striking sophisticated tipplers from Basin Street to Bombay in just the exact right place they like to be struck. When William Sydney Porter, alias O. Henry—a man who knew all the cushions and angles when it came to drinks—rhapsodized in one of his stories about New Orleans and “[making] the acquaintance of drinks invented by the Creoles during the period of Louey Cans,” it was undoubtedly the Sazerac he had in mind. He often did, you see. In his last years, when he was living at the Caledonia Hotel on Twenty-sixth Street in Manhattan, according to the keeper of the “quiet little bar” down the street, “Sazerac cocktail was his favorite drink.” As if to prove it, Porter made a daily practice of dropping in for them “more or less regularly” from ten in the morning until midnight. This may help to explain his confusion regarding the chronology of Cocktails and Kings: The Sazerac, venerable as it may be, postdates the period of Louis Quinze by several generations. But the history of this drink is so intricate and entangled in myth that it requires a monograph of its own.
I know this because the untangling of it I was originally planning to include here had already reached some sixteen pages with no sign of wrapping up when my editor wisely suggested I take a different tack. So let me merely state for the record that the Sazerac was in no way the first Cocktail, as has been asserted time and again by its enthusiastic proponents. There is in fact no written record of it before the first decade of the twentieth century, which is perfectly understandable: When all is said and done, the Sazerac is merely a plain Whiskey (or Brandy—see Notes on Ingredients, page 188) Cocktail, made with Peychaud’s bitters and finished with a dash of absinthe. A generation earlier, you could have ordered the same thing in any bar in America that served mixed drinks. But once Evolved (page 202) and Vermouth Cocktails became all the rage (page 233), such simple, robust pleasures began to seem rather exotic and worthy of notice.
And so they have remained. Nowadays, just try ordering a Whiskey Cocktail with a dash of absinthe (or legal substitute). Not even in New York, the cradle of fancy drinking in America, can you count on obtaining such a thing. But walk into Tujague’s, the Napoleon House, just about any central New Orleans bar save the most egregious Lite beer and Hand-Grenade joint, and moments later you’re sipping a drink that’s remained unchanged since the 1880s. To paraphrase Norma Desmond, the Sazerac is big. It’s the other Cocktails that got small.
The recipe below is the first one in print for the modern, whiskey-based version of the drink. The famed Sazerac Bar on Royal Street was the drink’s cradle and headquarters until Prohibition shut it down. There’s a Walgreens on the site today. So it goes.
From the recipe of the late Tom Handy, ex-manager of the world-renowned Sazerac Bar.
Frappé an old-fashioned flat bar-glass; then take a mixing glass and muddle half a cube [½ tsp] of sugar with a little water; add some ice, a jigger [2 oz] of good whiskey, two dashes of Peychaud bitters, and a piece of twisted lemon peel; stir well until cold, then throw the ice out of the bar-glass, dash several drops of Absinthe into the same, and rinse well with the Absinthe. Now strain the Cocktail into the frozen glass, and serve with ice water on the side.
SOURCE: WILLIAM (COCKTAIL) BOOTHBY, “SOME NEW UP-TO-NOW SEDUCTIVE AMERICAN COCKTAILS” (UNDATED SUPPLEMENT TO THE WORLD’S DRINKS AND HOW TO MIX THEM, 1908)
NOTES ON INGREDIENTS: The sugar cube is traditional (use a whole standard cube). I’ve always found, though, that this drink responds exceptionally well to a scant teaspoon of real gum syrup (i.e., with the gum Arabic in it; see Chapter 9) instead. Others call for bourbon. Nowadays, nobody in New Orleans who’s serious about the Sazerac would make it with anything but rye whiskey. Since the days of the flatboats, New Orleans always was a rye town. The six-year-old rye the Sazerac company is selling at the time of this writing does a fine job, as does the Rittenhouse Bonded rye. In New Orleans, most people use plain old Old Overholt, which makes a perfectly acceptable drink, although not without room for improvement. Or you can go the cognac route: the drink was originally made with Sazerac de Forge et Fils cognac, a brand that perished in the phylloxera epidemic of the 1880s. The occasional bottle of true Sazerac still turns up at auction; good luck. Otherwise, whatever cognac you use, don’t skimp on the quality. Perhaps best of all is a combination of cognac and rye, as Dale DeGroff likes to deploy (go with 1½ ounces cognac and ½ ounce rye). If, however, you can get your hands on some good Hollands, be aware that it responds exceptionally well to the Sazerac treatment (the Sazerac House made many a Gin Cocktail, back in the day). Some recipes supplement the Peychaud’s with Angostura bitters. Don’t; as a side-by-side taste test of this formula made with just Peychaud’s, just Angostura, or a mixture of the two will handily prove, the bitters do make a difference. There’s just something about the way the Peychaud’s interacts with the absinthe that moves the whole shebang from the “excellent” column into the “unforgettable” one, particularly if you’re using a good-quality real absinthe. The Herbsaint t
hey use in New Orleans as a substitute isn’t bad, by any means, but it’s sweeter and less complex than the real McCoy. If used only in Sazeracs, you’ll be able to squeeze hundreds of ’em out of one $100 bottle.
NOTES ON EXECUTION: To “frappé” a glass is to fill it with shaved or finely cracked ice. The Sazerac House’s technique of stirring this drink in one small bar-glass and straining it into another has become enshrined in tradition, and it’s still generally made that way—even though the small bar-glass hasn’t been otherwise used for mixing for four or five generations and it’s easier to use a regular mixing glass. Which glass you mix it in affects the taste of the drink not a whit, so stir where you like. But whichever you use, give it a good, long stir. How long is enough? In a mixing glass with plenty of cracked ice, twenty seconds will do; in a small bar-glass with less ice, you may need more. Handy’s formula deploys the twist before mixing, but if ever there was a drink that cries out for the terminal spray of lemon oil, it’s this. As for rinsing the glass with absinthe, Paul Gustings, the best present-day New Orleans Sazerac maker, does a neat little thing where he puts some Herbsaint in the bottom of the chilled glass and then gives it a little toss in the air, with enough English on it for the liqueur to spin up the sides of the glass and coat it. If you can master that . . .
II. EVOLVED COCKTAILS
Judging by their elaborately printed list, the boys behind the bar at Mart Ackermann’s Saloon in Toronto sure knew a mess of mixed drinks. One hundred and seven of them, to be precise. All the old favorites, to be sure—the Mint Juleps, Sherry Cobblers, Tom and Jerries, etc. But the boys didn’t stop there; they went on beyond zebra with a vengeance. The list, which has the year 1856 written in by hand, is packed with things like the “Canadian Favourite,” the “American Standard,” the “Silistrian Smash,” the “Esplanade Cobbler” and the supremely enigmatic “Maelstrom Tost.” The Cobblers number to thirteen, the Smashes to fifteen, the Punches to eighteen. There are even eight Fixes—and eight Cocktails. Gin, Brandy, Whiskey, as you would expect. Champagne, which is novel, but comprehensible. But then there’s a “Dublin” Cocktail. An “Ontario” Cocktail. A Cocktail “a la Mode.” Even an “Omar Pasha” Cocktail. Now, the Dublin and the Ontario can be tentatively deciphered with the application of reason, Irish whiskey and Canadian whiskey being the likely X-factors. The Cocktail a la Mode? Probably a Fancy Cocktail, as in Jerry Thomas. But the story of the Crimean War hero Omar Pasha, who had recently attained celebrity among the peoples of the British Empire when his Turkish army defeated forty thousand Russians at the battle of Eupatoria, offers few clues as to what might be in a Cocktail bearing his name.
It’s a matter of chance that the list at hand, by far the earliest such piece of ephemera I’ve come across, is from Toronto; if a contemporary one from a drink palace in New York or Cincinnati or Boston or San Francisco or Washington, D.C., were available, it would doubtless show the same thing happening. Whatever went into it, and we have no earthly idea, the Omar Pasha Cocktail marks the beginning of the evolution of “Cocktail” from a term for the Bittered Sling and a few simple variations to a generic term for any short, iced drink. Today, a Cocktail that doesn’t telegraph its composition with its name is completely unremarkable; in 1856, it was a novelty (the Omar Pasha is in fact the first on record). It wouldn’t remain so for long. As the American bar evolved and mixing drinks became more and more demanding (and lucrative), bartenders began to treat the drinks they made as works of art. Art is no respecter of boundaries, and once the humble Cocktail became a work of art it found itself harboring all kinds of ingredients that it had once rigorously excluded (citrus, eggs), and excluding ones that had once defined it (spirits, bitters). If the Immortal Willard had whipped up a mess of cognac, port, sugar, and egg and tried to palm it off on one of his clients as a Cocktail, that client would have assumed that the master’s hand had lost its cunning and removed his business elsewhere. By the time the Civil War broke out, such things were possible.
Much of this artistic impulse was expended in citrusing Cocktails or vermouthing them; you’ll find those formulae in the next two sections. Here you’ll find the miscellaneous ones, a somewhat motley collection of Cocktails that go beyond the base category in their ingredients, their nomenclature, or both.
CHAMPAGNE COCKTAIL
The first evolved Cocktail on record. The record is silent as to who came up with the idea of replacing the spirits in a Cocktail with champagne, but whoever it was, he knew how to step high, wide, and handsome. The Champagne Cocktail would be a favorite of sporting gentlemen well into the twentieth century. Increasingly, it would also find a home with young ladies who had no fixed bedtime—indeed, it would eventually acquire the evocative nickname “chorus girl’s milk.” Its first appearance on record, however, is among the easy-come, easy-go Argonauts, whom Frank Marryatt found drinking it in San Francisco in 1850. It is pleasant to imagine the young Jerry Thomas laying
The Champagne Cocktail, Before and After the Bubbly. From Harry Johnson’s New and Improved Illustrated Bartender’s Manual, 1888. (Courtesy Ted Haigh)
out a round of these for some party of black-fingered sons of toil as they pour the gold-dust out on the bar. “More French wines [i.e., champagne] are drank in California, twice over,” wrote a visitor to the Golden State a few years later, “than by the same population in the eastern States”—much of it in Cocktail form. Not that they weren’t trying, back East: The Champagne Cocktail was to be found everywhere there was money and a desire to spend it and New York and Washington (a notorious champagne town) didn’t shirk their duty.
The Champagne Cocktail enjoyed a considerable reputation as a morning “bracer,” to the point that bleary-eyed wags wrote verses about it; one set, from 1859, runs to eleven stanzas, ending with the peroration,
And the morn shall be filled with cocktail,
And the cares of the early day,
Like disappointed collectors,
Shall silently slip away.
But the Champagne Cocktail’s usefulness didn’t end there. Many a jittery gent began his day with Cocktails of “wine,” as champagne was simply called in sporting circles (because really, is there any other kind worth bothering with?)—saw out the morning with them—lunched on “chicken and wine”—sailed through the midafternoon doldrums with more Cocktails—supped with a foaming bottle at hand—Cocktailed at cards—watered the long-stemmed chorine with frequent sprinklings—tucked the boys on Broadway in with another—took one more for the road and another to greet the dawn.
All this wine-drinking adds up, especially when a Champagne Cocktail made with the real stuff cost three or four times what a regular Whiskey Cocktail did. When Jerry Thomas’s bar was at its highest ebb, between Cocktails and just plain guzzling, the place nonetheless went through enough fizz for him and George to “sometimes buy a hundred baskets of one brand at a time.” (A basket of champagne held a dozen bottles, or two dozen splits.) They kept at least seven premium brands on hand, including such modern icons as Veuve Cliquot, Moet & Chandon, Heidsieck & Co., and Roederer. No wonder they called it the Gilded Age.
(ONE BOTTLE OF WINE TO EVERY SIX LARGE
GLASSES.)
(PER GLASS.)
½ TEASPOONFUL OF SUGAR
1 OR 2 DASHES OF BITTERS
1 PIECE OF LEMON PEEL
Fill tumbler one-third full of broken ice, and fill balance with wine. Shake well and serve.
NOTES ON INGREDIENTS: In the latter years of the century, it was discovered that a cube or lump of sugar in the bottom of the glass, saturated with the bitters, will dissolve slowly, infusing the drink as it does; the standard Domino Dot works perfectly for this, holding as it does ½ teaspoon of sugar. In 1895, George Kappeler suggested Peychaud’s bitters as an alternative to the traditional Angostura. I find them particularly effective if I’m adding brandy, which I’ll get to in a moment.
Jerry Thomas and his contemporaries preferred broken or cracked ice in their Champagne Cock
tails, doubtlessly because they disappeared them so fast there was little danger of dilution. Later in the century, when giants ceased to walk the land, the Cocktails were smaller, dryer, and used a single lump of ice, which was far less likely to water down the champagne.
As for the wine. If complete authenticity is a priority, a (sweeter) sec or even a demi-sec should be used. On the other hand, the brut champagne that came in late in the century (famed “King of the Dudes” Evander Berry Wall claims it was his exquisite taste responsible for this, and it may well have been) makes for a better Cocktail. In any case, one bottle of champagne will yield six small Cocktails, not large ones. Some—the Steward & Barkeeper’s Manual, anyway—liked to disburse the stuff with a heavier hand: “One quart bottle,” its author notes, “will make a little over four large cocktails.” To me, this is more like it, but you must of course follow the dictates of your conscience.
Imbibe! Page 21