Imbibe! (25 page)

Something about the drink must’ve struck New Yorkers as amusing, because its next appearance was in a bit of philosophico-medical doubletalk printed in the
New-York Courier
in 1816, in which the author claims to prove the “duality of souls” by his not being able to remember what he does at night, after a daily routine that began with “a cocktail or two every morning before breakfast” and ended with, “just before going to bed, two or three brandy tods.” There were plenty of other potables in between, not neglecting “a cocktail or two . . . before dinner.” But the drink was popular in Massachusetts, too, judging by its appearance (as “bitter sling”) in an 1818 ad for a Natick merchant (the ad, in verse, was considered amusing enough to be widely reprinted) and in an 1820 issue of the Worcester
National
Aegis
. Whatever the precise circumstances of its birth, it’s clear that the Cocktail enjoyed its first fame in the rough triangle between Boston, Albany, and New York, and in the absence of any evidence to the contrary we must consider that its homeland. As for that name—the simplest explanation is that it is taken from the common slang term for a mixed-breed horse, it being a mixed-breed sort of drink; but you’ll find my argument for this in Appendix I.

 

 

The Cocktail made the jump from journalism to literature in 1821, when James Fenimore Cooper wrote it into his Revolutionary War novel,
The Spy
, as “that beverage which is so well known, at the present hour, to all the patriots who make a winter’s march between the commercial and political capitals of this great state [i.e., New York and Albany] and which is distinguished by the name of ‘cocktail.’” At the very end of the same year, Dr. Samuel Mitchill (another polymath physician who, like Benjamin Rush, deserves a chapter of his own) included it in a widely reported satirical lecture he gave in New York against “Anti-fogmatics,” or morning drinks. Ironically, as diarist Philip Hone noted upon Mitchill’s death in 1831, “for several years past he was a confirmed drunkard.”

Once the Cocktail found its way to the metropolis, it made itself right at home. Thus in 1824 we find a porter eulogizing a dead friend as “the kindest soul that ever poted a gin cock-tail.” In 1827, it’s one Captain Morgan, or someone the
New-York Chronicle
thought looked a lot like him, following up an evening at the theater by eating a “mince treat” and “toss[ing] off four brandy cocktails”—quite a performance for somebody whose body half the country was looking for (the supposed murder of William Morgan by Masons was the O. J. Simpson case of the late 1820s). The next year, the
Chronicle
was making knowing references to the “cocktail snooze.” The year after that, the
Manhattan Courier
fixed the Cocktail in its social milieu when it lamented how the city’s old ale houses, where the “venerable burgher” could while away his thoughts with “the smooth pipe and the bright pewter mug,” had fallen to the hotel bar, where it was all

 

The Cocktail might have gotten a foot out of the morning-drink ghetto, but it was still unfit for polite company. As Robert Montgomery Bird had one of his characters say in his 1837 novel,
Shepperd Lee
, “None but vulgarians drink strong liquors; slings, cock-tails, and even julaps are fit only for bullies. Gentlemen never drink any thing but wine.”

But by then, it seems, America was a nation of bullies and vulgarians. Outside of a few square blocks in New York, Boston, and a couple of other cities where society attempted to maintain a European
bon ton
, and the occasional knot of Temperance men here and there, Juleps and Slings were in universal use—and so, it appears, was the Cocktail. If travelers are to be trusted, in the 1820s, while history was looking elsewhere, the Cocktail stole out of New York and followed the rivers, canals, wagon-tracks, and foot-trails that were binding the new nation together and pitched its tent wherever it found its people, ending up in places as far-flung as Niagara Falls and Balize, Louisiana, a godforsaken patch of mud and reeds and wooden shacks at the spot where the Mississippi meets the Gulf. That’s where Captain J. E. Alexander of the Royal Army, traveling from Havana to New York via the Mississippi, was greeted with these friendly words: “Halloo, man! are you here? Which are you for, cocktail or gin-sling? Here is the Bar, you must liquorise”—said bar being a shack equally as unprepossessing as the rest. That was in 1831, by which point the Cocktail was everywhere, even Canada (it first turns up there in the mid-1820s).

 

 

In the thirty years between Captain Alexander’s book and Jerry Thomas’s, some things about the Cocktail remained constant.

By way of introduction to the Cocktail section of his book, Thomas notes,

 

However threadbare, that old cloak of medicinal respectability still hung from its shoulders, and when it wasn’t ministering to suffering humanity it still traveled with the same sporty crowd. (Those “other sporting parties” no doubt included the notorious ones—with which Thomas must have been intimately acquainted—formed by the “fancy” to travel to illegal boxing matches. The Cocktails would have been bottled; the merriment, not.)

During those decades, though, the actual drink itself changed in several small ways and one very big one—that one being, of course, the permanent and indissoluble incorporation of ice into its fabric. It’s difficult to pinpoint precisely when this happened. The conventional wisdom is that it was in the 1830s, when everything else got iced. However, a close examination of recipes and descriptions of Cocktails from the Antebellum era suggests that it was actually a generation later—in fact, out of the dozens of references to Cocktails and their consumption I’ve been able to find from the 1830s and 1840s, only two suggest that the drink was ever served iced: one from New York in 1843 (which has it served with “a few nobs [sic] of ice as pure as crystal”) and one from the frontier a couple of years later.

In fact, not only were Cocktails generally served un-iced, they were occasionally even served—perish the thought—
hot
. With boiling water. Since a Cocktail is nothing more than a spiced Sling, and I consider a hot Sling or Toddy to be a sanctified thing, I don’t know why this makes me shudder. It must be years of Pavlovian conditioning; of associating the word
cocktail
with the thrilling rattle of ice. But when I read Charles Fenno Hoffman’s description in his 1835
A Winter in the West
of the “smoking ‘cocktail’” he was handed in a country tavern near Kalamazoo, I quail inside. In any case, this perversion was not a common one and had disappeared by 1857. At least that’s when a New York bartender was recorded replying to an order for a Hot Brandy Cocktail with, “Hot what, sir?” and, “No, sir, they are never made hot.”

Even as late as 1855, when the Julep and the Cobbler had made American iced drinks famous throughout the world, the stuff’s presence in the Cocktail is still not a given. Consider, for instance, the handful of dog-Latin prescriptions for mixed drinks the
Spirit of the Times
, the popular sporting paper, published as a joke in 1855 (you got your doctor to sign them, you see, and took them to the nearest drugstore and handed it . . . well, it seemed amusing at the time). There’s the Mint Julep, which calls for ice (you’ll find the recipe on page 156). But the Brandy Cocktail and Gin Cocktail merely call for “
aqua frigida
”—cold water. Add John Bartlett’s
Dictionary of Americanisms
, from 1860, which defines the drink as “A stimulating beverage, made with brandy or gin, mixed with sugar and a very little water,” a few similar references from the time, and you have legitimate grounds for doubt.

But the 1850s were a go-ahead decade, and that drive to the future extended to perpendicular drinking. In 1852, the
Southern Literary Messenger
already saw the writing on the wall when it noted, not without regret, that

 

This is perhaps true more in the metaphorical sense than the literal one—it’s hard to make a case for the Cobbler as a Western drink, and the “snake and tiger” is otherwise unknown—but it’s true nonetheless. The Gold Rush may not have changed every aspect of American life, but it sure galvanized the Sporting Fraternity. As Bayard Taylor observed when he toured the diggings in 1849, in the easy-come-easy-go atmosphere of California, “[w]eather-beaten tars, wiry, delving Irishmen, and stalwart foresters from the wilds of Missouri became a race of sybarites and epicureans.” This was manifested most characteristically in their sudden and surprising “fondness for champagne and all kinds of cordials and choice liquors.” One of the places this expressed itself was in the Cocktail, a luxury that at a bit or two a pop even a busted-flush gambler or empty-pan prospector could afford.

That taste for the finest extended to ice: John Borthwick, a Scot who spent much of the early 1850s in California, later recalled of the mining town of Sonora that “Snow was packed in on mules thirty or forty miles from the Sierra Nevada, and no one took even a cocktail without its being iced.” In any case, by the end of the decade an iced Cocktail was no longer an item of wonder, not just in California but in the rest of the country as well (though there were exceptions). The advent of ice brought in a few other changes: Since granulated sugar doesn’t dissolve well in cold liquor, “mixologists,” as they could now be called (the word, you’ll recall, was coined in 1856), learned to replace it with syrup—and why stop with plain sugar syrup? Why not throw in a little raspberry or almond syrup, if you’ve got it, or even a few dashes of some fancy imported cordial? And once you’ve predissolved the sugar, you won’t need that toddy-stick to break up the lumps anymore; you can stir the drink with a simple teaspoon or, more theatrically, pour it back and forth between two glasses, or a glass and one of those new tin “shakers.” And since the cocktail is a short drink, meant to go down the hatch before it has time to warm up, you won’t need to leave the ice in it and can spare its
devotés
the shock of it bumping up against their teeth by straining it into another glass.

This is where Jerry Thomas steps in.
How to Mix Drinks
is the first book to contain a section of recipes devoted to the Cocktail. There are a grand total of thirteen of ’em, all but one iced, and that one’s bottled for traveling. Nowadays, of course, you can get more Cocktails out of an airport bartender, and there are books floating around with titles like
1,001 New Vodka Cocktails.
But thirteen is actually a lot: If Thomas had set pen to paper ten or fifteen years earlier, he would’ve been hard-pressed to offer four or five—a Brandy Cocktail, a Gin Cocktail, perhaps a Champagne Cocktail, and maybe even a Whiskey Cocktail, although that one was still not quite ready for polite society. But writing when he did, he could offer that bottled Cocktail, three plain old Cocktails, a couple of “fancy” Cocktails, a “Japanese” Cocktail (made without sake or anything else from the land of the rising sun), some Cocktails that extend the basic formula to include bases other than straight booze, and a few Crustas, which Thomas defines for us as “an improvement on the ‘Cocktail’ ”—the improvement lying chiefly in the addition of “a little lemon juice” and some fiddling around with lemon peel and sugar. In the 1876 edition, Thomas adds three so-called Improved Cocktails (this improvement, too, is a subtle one). Finally, the 1887 revision reflects the Cocktail’s displacement of Punch as the Monarch of Mixed Drinks by moving Punches to the back of the book and putting Cocktails in their rightful place at the front. What’s more, the later edition featured twenty-three Cocktail recipes, including five with the new wonder ingredient: vermouth, which would bring the Cocktail into the twentieth century, transforming it utterly in the process. In 1914, on the eve of Prohibition, Jacques Straub’s up-to-date
Drinks
would offer more than twelve times that many.

Rather than attempt to untangle all these chronologically, I’ve divided Thomas’s recipes into four loose families, from the plain old Cocktail and its variations, to the Evolved Cocktail, to the Crusta and other citric cocktails to the Manhattan, the Martini, and the whole frisky tribe of vermouth Cocktails. As elsewhere, I’ve fleshed out each category with a few other important recipes that the Professor didn’t include, either because he wouldn’t or he couldn’t. Had he lived out his threescore-and-ten (and maybe a little extra), I know he would’ve gotten around to them, so this is really just covering the rest of his shift.