Imbibe! (35 page)

If you take Harry Johnson’s word for it, he was the greatest bartender of his time. His book, the
Modern Bartender’s Manual
, does nothing to contradict that impression, and not just because it went to a respectable three editions between 1882 and 1900 (Johnson claimed there was also an 1860 San Francisco edition). The last two editions are also full of detailed and thoroughly professional information on restaurant and bar management and toothsome, if wretchedly organized, recipes—and they’re illustrated! Unfortunately for Herr Johnson (he was yet another of the Germans who so distinguished themselves behind the bar), unlike our modern mixologists, to whom he is a cult figure (copies of his books bring up to four figures), his contemporaries didn’t seem to think he was such hot stuff, if they thought about him at all. True, he had made the papers in 1885 as one who was “noted among New York . . . drinkers as a mixer of complicated beverages” to the point that various millionaires were hiring him to train their valets in the art.

But beyond that, if the bar he opened in Chicago in 1868 was indeed “recognized as the largest and finest establishment of the kind in this country,” as he claimed, he must’ve used another name. And if in 1869 he was “challenged by five of the most popular and scientific bartenders of the day to engage in a tourney of skill, at New Orleans,” thereby winning the “championship in the United States,” the event seems to have gone unremarked by the national press. And that San Francisco book from 1860, the one that should be the first bartender’s guide on record? No earthly trace of its publication or of any of the “ten thousand (10,000) copies” he said were printed and sold “within the brief period of six weeks” has either turned up or is likely to. In other words, there are grounds for taking the things that came out of his mouth with a grain of salt. Yet another example: In 1910, he told a reporter from the
New York Herald
that when he was at the Little Jumbo, the bar at 119 Bowery, which he ran from the late 1870s until 1887, “mixed drinks were unknown in New York then” and while there he “first made the gin sour, the mint julep and the cocktails.” Indeed. (He also claimed that he served Horace Greeley his first Cocktail; if so, it was probably his last—Greeley was a notorious teetotaler.)

Although fondly remembered for its Cocktails and other Epicurean beverages, the Little Jumbo was hardly one of New York’s showplaces. It’s difficult to imagine one of the Hoffman House’s patrons pulling out a roll of bills to pay for a disputed check and having three men jump him and run off with the boodle. (When young William Randolph Hearst met his father, the senator, at the Hoffman House bar and asked him for some money, Hearst Senior sent someone to get his coat from the check room and, according to Berry Wall, who was there, “drew thirty thousand dollars from the pocket, his winnings that day at the races, peeled off two thousand, and gave them to his son, saying ‘Is that enough, Willie? ’” Willie hoped it was.) Nor does one hear of one of Jerry Thomas’s waiters shooting his bouncer five times in an after-hours joint, thus expediting his demise.

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).

 

 

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

 

SOURCE: HARRY JOHNSON
, BARTENDER’S MANUAL
, 1900

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:

 

 

 

 

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)

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 simplified 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

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