Imbibe!

by David Wondrich

  To be fair, both of those events took place in 1902, by which point Johnson was long off the scene, but the Bowery hadn’t changed all that much in the meanwhile and they do give an impression of the tone that prevailed on the street. It’s unclear where he went after his stint at the Little Jumbo, but wherever it was nobody paid him much attention. The self-published 1900 edition of his Bartender’s Manual gives his address as 1 and 2 Hanover Square, in the Financial District, but that may have just been a mail drop. In any case, in 1902 or 1903 he gave up on New York entirely and retired to Europe, ending up in Berlin (his book had already been published in German). The New York Herald caught up with him when he came back for a visit.

  Blowhard he might have been, but at least he knew how to mix drinks, if his version of the Bijou is any indication (another version, published by Cincinnati bartender Chris Lawlor in 1895, uses Grand Marnier rather than Chartreuse; nice, but not nearly so interesting).

  (USE LARGE BAR-GLASS.)

  ½ GLASS FILLED WITH FINE SHAVED ICE

  1/3 WINE GLASS [1 OZ] CHARTREUSE (GREEN)

  1/3 WINE GLASS [1 OZ] VERMOUTH (ITALIAN)

  1/3 WINE GLASS [1 OZ] OF PLYMOUTH GIN

  1 DASH OF ORANGE BITTERS

  Mix well with a spoon, strain into a cocktail glass; add a cherry or medium-size olive, squeeze a piece of lemon peel on top and serve.

  SOURCE: HARRY JOHNSON, BARTENDER’S MANUAL, 1900

  NOTES ON INGREDIENTS: I strongly suggest you use the cherry and not the olive.

  WEEPER’S JOY

  William Schmidt. The Only William. In later years, Julian Street—then one of America’s leading culinary authorities, but once a cub reporter in New York—would recall his encounter with greatness:

  The newspapers were published downtown, so of course there were many downtown restaurants and bars that catered to newspapermen. A favorite bar was that of “The Only William,” off lower Broadway, and it was a great moment in the life of the young reporter when a bearded elder of the craft escorted him to William’s pleasant place, bought him a Weeper’s Joy . . . and over it introduced him to the celebrity behind the bar, a short round-headed man with an amiable eye and an immense mustache.

  Street’s turn came in 1899, and I envy him for it. William Schmidt was an unlikely candidate to succeed Jerry Thomas as America’s official Number One Mixer of Drinks, but succeed him he did. He was everything that Thomas was not—fussy, precise, vain, pedantic, even faintly ridiculous—but he was also a wildly creative and talented mixologist (he used to boast that he invented an entirely new drink every day). As proof, I offer that selfsame Weeper’s Joy, a drink that looks like a train wreck on the page but tastes like an angel’s tears. For at least a decade before his death in 1905 (of senile dementia, according to the papers, although he had been mixing drinks almost to the last), he was the newspapers’ go-to guy for mixology, and this drink proves that it wasn’t just because he was right around the corner.

  A GOBLET 2/3 FULL OF FINE ICE

  3 DASHES [½ TSP] OF GUM

  ½ PONY [1 OZ] OF ABSINTHE

  ½ PONY [1 OZ] OF VINO VERMOUTH

  ½ PONY [1 OZ] OF KÜMMEL

  1 DASH [2 DASHE S] OF CURAÇAO

  Stir very well, and strain into a cocktail glass.

  SOURCE: WILLIAM SCHMIDT, THE FLOWING BOWL, 1892

  NOTES ON INGREDIENTS: This one’s pretty straightforward. If you want to eliminate the gum, go ahead; the drink’s sufficiently sweet without it. But I’d think twice: The extra sweetness gives the drink a thick mouthfeel and helps round that final edge off of the absinthe.

  BAMBOO COCKTAIL

  In 1890, a group of American naval officers stationed in Yokohama assumed part interest in the newly expanded Grand Hotel, which offered the best accommodations in town. Soon after, the hotel reached across the Pacific and hired a West Coast saloonman by the name of Louis Eppinger. A German-born contemporary of Jerry Thomas’s, Eppinger had run bars in San Francisco and perhaps New Orleans, hotels in Portland, and God knows what else. “Fussy little Louis” was a wise choice. Under his stewardship, the massive five-acre pile of a hotel became “a far-famed rendezvous for round-the-world travelers,” one of those cardinal outposts of Western culture around which the amorphous, cosmopolitan mass of steamship-borne moneyed vagabonds bent their endless paths. For almost two decades, Eppinger greeted guests, “haunt[ed] the markets for delicacies,” planned menus (the Grand was known for its cuisine, and even served a couple of Japanese dishes every day), arranged entertainments, and bustled around the premises until, “grown grey and almost blind in the service of catering to the public” and so rheumatic that he needed a couple of boys to carry him up and down the stairs, he finally retired. That was in 1907; before the year was out, he’d be dead and buried. His remains still lie in the Jewish section of the Yokohama Foreigner’s Cemetery.

  Although Eppinger, in his old age, was particularly concerned with the Grand Hotel’s kitchen, he didn’t neglect the bar; it was widely known as a congenial place to “play billiards and drink Japanese Martini cocktails,” as one visitor noted and through its doors passed many a celebrity, including Rudyard Kipling and humorist George Ade. Not only that, at some point during his first decade there, he took up the glass and spoon and mixed up a new Cocktail. The “Bamboo,” as he christened it, was a simple, light, and thoroughly delightful aperitif that rapidly spread across the Pacific. By 1901, anyway, it was being advertised by West Coast saloons, and soon after it was sold widely in bottle form.

  None of this explains how the drink—recipe and all—turned up in the “uptown Broadway hotels and cafes” in 1893 with the moniker “Boston Bamboo,” unless that “Boston” was merely a misheard “Yokohama.” (I seem to recall hearing somewhere that, taken in large quantities, vermouth does strange things to the eustachian tubes; it’s the quinine.)

  Originated and named by Mr. Louis Eppinger,Yokohama, Japan. Into a mixing-glass of cracked ice place half a jiggerful [1½ oz] of French vermouth, half a jiggerful [1½ oz] of sherry, two dashes of Orange bitters and two drops of Angostura bitters; stir thoroughly and strain into a stem cocktail glass; squeeze and twist a piece of lemon peel over the top and serve with a pimola or an olive.

  SOURCE: WILLIAM T. “COCKTAIL” BOOTHBY’S WORLD DRINKS AND HOW TO MIX THEM (1908)

  NOTES ON INGREDIENTS: For the sherry, use a fino or an amontillado, but not a particularly expensive one. The two drops of Angostura can be generated by lightly tipping the bottle over the glass without actually dashing it. A pimola is simply a pimiento-stuffed olive, which makes a nice touch. On the other hand, if there’s a Japanese specialty foods store in your area, it might be worthwhile to pop in and see if anything suggests itself as an alternate garnish.

  If you make this with Italian vermouth instead of French, omitting the drops of Angostura, not only will you have a plusher, if less elegant, drink, you’ll have an Adonis, named after what has been called the first Broadway musical. Adonis, starring Henry E. Dixey, opened in 1884 at the Bijou—in Jerry Thomas’s old space at 1239 Broadway—and ran for more than six hundred performances.

  PRINCETON COCKTAIL

  As mixing spirits with fortified, aromatized wines went from novelty to orthodoxy, mixologists began experimenting with things beyond vermouth, leading to drinks like the Zaza, which combined equal parts of dry gin and Dubonnet (see under the Bronx Cocktail, page 222), and the Calisaya Cocktail, which mixed a Spanish aromatized wine with whiskey. The deep thinkers behind the bar soon realized that the fortified wine didn’t have to be aromatized to make a fine Cocktail. Case in point, the Tuxedo, which combined gin, dry sherry, and orange bitters to excellent effect (proportions: two to one with a dash). Or the Princeton. This is another of George Kappeler’s; his book also offered the Harvard and the Yale, which gives you some indication of the sort of folks who propped up the bar at the old Holland House. All three are fine drinks, but for some reason this one’s the most artistic. Interestingly enough, a simplifi
ed version of this—as “Top and Bottom”—became a staple of Harlem rent-parties during the 1920s. Go figure.

  A mixing-glass half-full fine ice, three dashes orange bitters, one and a half pony [2 oz] Tom gin. Mix, strain into cocktail-glass; add half a pony [¾ oz] port wine carefully and let it settle in the bottom of the cocktail before serving.

  SOURCE: GEORGE J. KAPPELER, MODERN AMERICAN DRINKS, 1895

  NOTES ON INGREDIENTS: For the Tom gin, use Plymouth and add ½ teaspoon of gum, to round the edge off and add texture. You don’t want to add too much sugar, though, or the layering effect will get messed up (it depends on the relative densities of the port and the gin). Charlie Mahoney of the Hoffman House suggests a lemon twist on this one; I prefer orange, but whichever you use, don’t drop it in the drink or you’ll mess up the visuals.

  NOTES ON EXECUTION: To get the top-and-bottom effect, the port has to be slowly slid down the side of the glass. The drink will taste better if the port has been chilled in advance.

  VI. THE STINGER

  Properly considered, the Stinger shouldn’t be here. Not only is it made without vermouth or any other kind of fortified wine, but according to many of its devotees it isn’t even a real Cocktail. Joyce Kilmer (the author of the oft-quoted poem “Trees”), for one: “white mint and brandy shaken up together with cracked ice,” he wrote his mother in 1914, “make a good substitute for a cocktail.” And indeed, the bartender’s guides of the time always list this combination among the after-dinner drinks; the sticky, multilayered Pousse-Cafés; the Champerelles (a simpler Pousse-Café); the Sam Wards (this last is a surprisingly tasty device named after the great lobbyist and gourmet; simply invert the skin of half a lemon and fill the resulting cup with shaved ice and yellow Chartreuse). But unlike the others, the Stinger was produced like a Cocktail and served like a Cocktail, and eventually it was drunk like a Cocktail, which is to say before dinner, or in the morning, or in the afternoon, or any time at all, even including after dinner.

  As for its origins. Despite its name, which in the vernacular meant a quick shot to the head, whether liquid or fistical, the Stinger has always been considered a Society drink. As Hermione—the ultradumb young socialite that Don Marquis created for a series of columns in the New York Sun lampooning the dim-bulb civic and spiritual pretensions of the rich—notes while supporting Prohibition for the working classes, “Of course, a cocktail or two and an occasional stinger is something no one can well avoid taking, if one is dining out or having supper after the theater with one’s own particular crowd.” And in point of fact, New York folklore has always associated the drink with Reginald Vanderbilt (Gloria’s father). This, it turns out, is no coincidence: according to a gossipy 1923 syndicated piece on this worthy, back in the Roosevelt years “Reggie” was highly devoted to the ritual of Cocktail hour, which “was observed in all its pomp and glory in the bar of [his] home, and he himself was the high priest, the host, the mixer.”

  From four to seven every day, Reggie would stand behind the bar—which was modeled on the one in the William the Conqueror tavern in Normandy—and shake up Stingers, “his favorite cocktail.” In fact, “the ‘Stinger’ was his own invention, a short drink with a long reach, a subtle blending of ardent nectars, a boon to friendship, a dispeller of care.” Well, okay; properly concocted, the Stinger is all of those things.

  a la J.C.O’Connor proprietor of the handsomest café for gentlemen in the world, corner Eddy and Market Sts. S.F. Calif. ¼ [¾ oz] white crème de menthe and ¾ [2¼ oz] cognac. Shake well and serve cold in sherry glass.

  SOURCE: UNDATED TYPED SUPPLEMENT TO WILLIAM T. “COCKTAIL” BOOTHBY’S AMERICAN BAR-TENDER (1900); THE SUPPLEMENT MOST LIKELY DATES TO AROUND 1905

  NOTES ON INGREDIENTS: Other recipes call for two parts or even one part cognac (and don’t skimp on the quality!) to one part liqueur. This way’s better. In any case, the only crème de menthe to use for a top-flight Stinger is the French “Get” brand; well worth tracking down. And whatever you use, it must always be white, not green. Report has it that Reggie liked a dash of absinthe in his. He would, wouldn’t he?

  NOTES ON EXECUTION: Even though it has only spirits in it, this drink is always shaken. That bolsters the Vanderbilt story: If you were a millionaire making drinks for show behind your replica Norman bar in your Fifth Avenue mansion, wouldn’t you want to shake them? As for the glass: Use a Cocktail glass, on the small side.

  CHAPTER 8

  CHANNELING THE PROFESSOR—NEW DRINKS FROM SIXTEEN OF THE TOP MIXOLOGISTS OF OUR TIME

  For someone who has been dead for 120 years, Jerry Thomas is doing pretty well. His book is in print, his name flits through the mouths of men, his drinks are mixed and dissected and even enjoyed. In contemporary cocktail culture, he is frequently evoked as an arbiter and a benchmark, one of the (pathetically few) authorities every serious drink-mixer has to know.

  But the Professor’s work is more than a point of academic reference; it also serves as a source of inspiration, a jumping-off point in the creation of new drinks. And rather than merely asserting this, I can prove it. When assembling this book, I asked a bar full of the world’s best mixologists if they would be kind enough to contribute any original recipes they might have that were inspired in some way by Jerry Thomas and his drinks. Their responses, which you will find below, should put to rest any thoughts that the Professor’s work is a mere historical curiosity.

  Not that they all agree exactly how his legacy should be used; like all artists, mixologists are a diverse-thinking bunch. Between them, they manage to box the compass of inspiration, so to speak, from taking one of his recipes, brushing off its shoulders, straightening its seams, and sending it on out there, to filling in the blanks in one of his categories (even some blanks he would never have thought existed, like the one in the Sour category that calls out for horseradish), to bringing different classes together, to . . . well, to the Regans. The incorrigible Regans. The thing about Gary and Mardee, they just won’t—can’t—follow the rules, color between the lines, stay on the reservation. You ask them for a drink inspired by Jerry Thomas and they send you something sweet and dangerous that (almost) swipes the name of a highly toxic Australian gold-miner’s drink employing controlled substances (it’s not the rum, not the cayenne, but the opium you’ve got to watch out for) and claim that somehow it fits with Thomas’s life and character. And, come to think of it, somehow it does. So they get off the hook—this time.

  The only way I can justify insinuating a drink of my own in this august company is because it uses one final way of honoring the master, which is robbing him blind. The alert—or even not-so-alert—reader will immediately recognize my so-called Tombstone Cocktail as nothing more than a plain old Whiskey Cocktail, fitted out with new identity papers. But I will plead in my own defense that it nonetheless deserves a name of its own. Not because of any slight originality in conception or execution (the only way it differs from the Professor’s drink is in its use of Demerara sugar syrup instead of white), but because of the occasion its name commemorates: It was first served on October 3, 2004, when a group of New York writers and bartenders—including Audrey Saunders, Julie Reiner, Toby Cecchini, Del Pedro, and John Hodgman—accompanied me to Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx to help me look for Thomas’s grave. Upon finding it we broke out the enormous shaker we had brought with us, unpacked the freezer bag full of ice and the Cocktail glasses (no plastic for the Professor), assembled this Cocktail, passed the shaker around so we all had a jiggle, and had a drink with the Professor.

  I’ll close this discussion with some of the words Eben Klemm and Francesco Lafraconi sent in along with their recipes. Mr. Klemm, I believe, correctly assesses the continued relevance of Jerry Thomas and his great contemporaries to the modern art of mixing drinks mixographer when he notes that

  Even with all the flim-flam shaken up these days (some of which I myself indeed produce), most mixology past the 1890s I believe is but a footnote. For the most part, the sense of w
hat we want and what works has been determined long before we were born. The contrapuntality of sour, savory, bitter and sweet found in the best of cocktails is now a centuries-old motif, and one not found in only the most suspect of current drinks.

  But the Professor’s legacy extends beyond the nuts and bolts of combining liquors, sugars, and acids. As Mr. Lafranconi notes, “although he was an incredibly committed and creative individual behind the bar, full of ingenuity and know-how, his personality wasn’t only related to mixing drinks; he also had that savoir-faire; that elegance and class behind the bar. Above all, he was a man of trust. God bless JT!” I heartily concur.

  (ALMOST) BLOW MY SKULL OFF

  BY GARY REGAN AND MARDEE HAIDIN REGAN

  www.ardentspirits.com