Imbibe! (40 page)

 

ORIGINS OF THE CLAIM:
Advanced as a passing comment in the
New York Times’
s “About Clubs and Clubmen” column, July 24, 1904.

 

PRO:
Randolph B. Martine (1844-1895), a New York judge and former district attorney, definitely existed, and he was (it so appears) a member of the Manhattan Club. He also liked a drink now and then, going by his public and outspoken opposition to the puritanical Dr. Parkhurst’s attempt to enforce the Sunday closing of saloons—and, more important, by his status as a regular at Phil Milligan’s Tenderloin District saloon, where “high-class sportsmen, the gambling fraternity and the ‘sporty’ elements of the Legislature and the Judiciary” congregated. This is not proof, to be sure, but it certainly does nothing to rule the judge out, either.

Beyond mere personal proclivity, there’s some other confirming evidence. One of the earliest printed mentions of the Martini is in Harry Johnson’s 1888
New and Improved Illustrated Bartender’s Manual
. In his book,

Johnson prints a recipe for the “Martini Cocktail”—yet, as Lowell Edmunds points out in his groundbreaking
Martini, Straight Up
, in the illustration of the drink it is labeled a “Martine Cocktail.” Indeed, the Martine continues to appear as such in the occasional recipe book for another twenty years or so, including Charles Ranhofer’s magisterial gastronomical compendium,
The Epicurean
, from 1893 (Ranhofer, as head chef at Delmonico’s, was well placed to observe what the swells were drinking, and to page through his book is to gain the impression he was not given to making mistakes). And when the International Association of Bartenders met in Chicago that same year, it was the Martine that was among the items of their agenda, not the Martini (if the
Chicago Tribune
is to be believed).

 

CON:
In 1884, Martine was reportedly “proud of the fact that nothing but champagne, in the way of alcoholic beverage, [had] crossed his lips for five years.” Thus the
Albany Journal
, anyway, for what it’s worth. The invention of the Martine Cocktail is not listed among the judge’s accomplishments in his obituaries (on the other hand, to mention such a thing might have been considered a breach of judicial dignity) nor has my research turned up any other reference to this story. By the mid-1880s, vermouth and gin—or something, anyway—was traveling under the Martini moniker, as evidenced by an 1887 reference in the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
to the “bewildering depths of the ‘Martini cocktail,’” and this is certainly the name that ultimately prevailed. On the other hand, the drink’s name could have been affected by its being compounded with Martini vermouth, available in New York since 1867 (in 1891, quite early in the drink’s history, we find the
Washington Post
insisting that the drink had to be made with “the Martini vermuth”)—or even by the widespread fame of the British Martini-Henry rifle. Hence the joke current in the 1890s about the visiting Brit who orders a “Winchester” when he wants a Martini (“I knew it was some sort of a demmed gun,” he explains).

 

VERDICT:
Possible, but not proven.

THE CLAIM:
Gin and vermouth were first mixed at New York’s Turf Club, a rather rowdy organization (hence the above nickname) for socially prominent gamblers that, from 1880 to 1883, occupied the Leonard Jerome mansion on the corner of Twenty-sixth Street and Madison Avenue (the same building that later housed the Manhattan Club and gave rise to the myth about Jennie Jerome having a hand in the Manhattan’s creation). “Gambling was high there,” later recalled “King of the Dudes” Evander Berry Wall, “so extravagant that after a few years the club went out of existence. But during its reign all other clubs in New York were deserted.”

 

ORIGINS OF THE CLAIM:
A Turf Club Cocktail made of gin and vermouth appears in the anonymous
How To Mix Drinks—Bar-Keeper’s Handbook
published by the G. Winter Co in 1884—the same year the first reference to a Martinez appears.

 

PRO:
The evaluation of this one relies on the existence of a certain amount of confusion between the Martini/Martinez (combining gin and vermouth) and the Manhattan (combining whiskey and vermouth) at the time those drinks were first coming to public notice.
¹⁰

Case in point: The first known mention of the Manhattan (a September 1882 article from the Olean, New York,
Sunday Morning Herald
) notes that “It is but a short time ago that a mixture of whiskey, vermouth and bitters came into vogue” and that “It went under various names—Manhattan cocktail, Turf Club cocktail, and Jockey Club cocktail.” On the other hand, there’s the bartender interviewed some fifteen months later by the
Chicago Tribune
, who said, “Manhattan cocktails are in demand, too . . . I introduced them some time ago, and they have become quite popular. They are made of vermouth and gin.” Therefore, whiskey + vermouth = gin + vermouth; a Manhattan=a Martini/Martinez; and a Martini/Martinez = a Turf Club. Got it? (As you may have noticed, I’m ignoring the Jockey Club. Why add to the madness? In any case, the Turf Club and the Jockey Club were in the same building.)

 

CON:
Gin and vermouth went into the annals of mixology as a Martini, not a Turf Club. Also, as the drink’s popularity grew, nobody ever stepped forward to claim the drink for the Turf Club. (On the other hand, the use of Martini vermouth might have affected the name; see the Judge Martine Theory. Also, the early dissolution of the Turf Club would’ve helped to take the name out of circulation. And if Thomas Burnett, the club’s head bartender, was responsible for the invention he was in no position to take credit, seeing as he was killed in a train wreck in 1883, a couple of years before the drink really caught on.)

 

VERDICT:
In a muddle like this, anything is possible.

A list of every book, pamphlet, article, item, blog, post, or squib I have consulted in the assembly of the present work would swell what is already a bulky text beyond any reasonable limits. To some degree, it would also be redundant: I have included sources for each of the recipes, and attempted to give enough information elsewhere to allow quotations to be tracked down by those determined to further pursue them. I will therefore not even attempt to list all the pre-Prohibition books and periodicals I have consulted in the two years I’ve spent writing this book, or the secondary sources I have turned to to corroborate what I found there.

There is, however, a clutch of modern books—by which I mean ones written after the close of the Saloon Age—that have very much helped me to form my views on Jerry Thomas and the drinks of his age (at least, the parts of those views that make sense), and I would be remiss in not citing them. William Grimes’s
Straight Up or On the Rocks
(2001) is still the best connected narrative of the history of mixed drinking in America, followed by Gary Regan’s introduction to
The Joy of Mixology
(2003). Lowell Edmunds’s
Martini, Straight Up
(1998), Richard Barksdale Harwell’s
The Mint Julep
(1975), and Guillermo Toro-Lira’s
Alas de los querubines
(2006) are all invaluable monographs on essential drinks (the last is a history of Pisco Punch). Ted “Dr. Cocktail” Haigh’s
Vintage Spirits & Forgotten Cocktails
(2005) is an essential aide to exploring some of the byways of booze. Byron and Sharon Peregrine Johnson’s pioneering
Wild West Bartenders’ Bible
(1986) is still the best modern look at how you ran an old-time saloon. Henry Crowgey’s
Kentucky Bourbon: The Early Years of Whiskeymaking
(1971) is thorough, accurate, and uninfected by bourbon jingoism. Stanley Clisby Arthur’s 1937
Famous New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix ’Em
is one of the first attempts to uncover the history of American drinks and still of great value. For any questions of technique, I have made a beeline to Dale DeGroff’s
Craft of the Cocktail
(2002). If Dale can’t do it, it can’t be done.

The things that have made this possible though, are the computerized databases of nineteenth-century books and periodicals. As I noted in the Introduction, Cocktails, Punches, Fizzes, and the like were not considered worthy of headlines or historical attention, and their traces in the press of the day are well buried, if omnipresent. To dig them up the old-fashioned way, by scrolling through reel after reel of microfilm, is a lifetime’s work. Thankfully, such a thing as Optical Character Recognition software exists, imperfect as it is. But with its help, this buried culture of the bar can be unearthed and examined. This is truly a revolution in the study of popular culture (if it can uncover something as trivial as the history of the Florodora Cooler, think what it can do with things that are
really
important, like the origins of jazz). In general, though, it should be noted that this technology is all very new and making it yield useful results requires persistence and often more ingenuity than I am able to command.

Two of the most useful and best-designed of these databases are also entirely free. The
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
was a beautifully written paper, and the Brooklyn Public Library has every issue from 1841 to 1902 (
http://brooklynpubliclibrary.org/eagle
) available online. Google Books is also easy to use, and the sheer number of obscure volumes available to search—and view in full text!—is staggering (
http://books.google.com
); and when you’re done there, check out their patent search (
www.google.com/patents
); lots of cool barware. Equally useful and well-designed are the databases supplied by ProQuest for the
New York Times
, the
Chicago Tribune
, the
Washington Post
, and a handful of other urban dailies as well as a goodly collection of other old periodicals, including the indispensable
Police Gazette
. Unfortunately, some of these (the newspapers; check the individual papers’ websites) are quite expensive, charging several dollars for articles that may or may not have what you are looking for and others (the American Periodical Series) cannot be accessed at home at all. As long as you’re trooping off to a major research library, it’s also worth having a look in the America’s Historical Newspapers database. While ProQuest is better on the latter part of our period, this one is better on the earlier part.

Then there’s NewspaperArchive (
www.newspaperarchive.com
). This one you can access at home, as much as you want for a quite reasonable yearly fee. Millions and millions of pages of American (and a few foreign) newspapers, all scanned and searchable. But the scanning is atrocious, frequently yielding gobbledygook (to be fair, their source microfilm is often illegible) and your results cannot be displayed in chronological order. In short, it requires the temperament of Buddha and the patience of a rock to wring meaningful results out of this resource, but there is more gold there for the collecting than anywhere else. (NewspaperArchive has few of the big urban papers and many, many small-town ones, but then as now these tended to run items from their city cousins.)

Finally, I must mention the Library of Congress’s invaluable American Memory Collection, a massive pile of digital stuff that includes hundreds of travel books, newspapers, magazines, and other writings of precisely the sorts in which the history of mixology lurks (
http://memory.loc.gov
). Without these, and a number of others besides—the archives of the
Times
of London, the fantastic Internet Library of Early Journals (free at
www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ilej
)—this would have been a far poorer, and thinner, book.

I could not have done this by myself. Well, parts of it I could have—the jumping to conclusions, the unsubstantiated opinionizing, the throwing my hands up in the air and saying “Who the hell knows,” all that stuff I can do without any help whatsoever. But wherever I’ve managed to avoid that and actually offer something substantial that makes sense, I’ve had help. I can’t thank everyone who pitched in here—hell, so may people have rallied around this project that I can’t even
remember
everyone (it doesn’t help that a significant part of the road-testing was conducted in bars). In other words, if your name is not on this list and should be, you have my sincere apologies and it’s my round.

There are some people without whom there would be no book at all. The divine Ms. Theodora Sutcliffe, although contemplating a book on the Professor herself, was generous enough to share her research with me at a very early stage, which infected me with the bug. Throughout this project, Dale DeGroff has been my model of the perfect saloonkeeper, a wise and convivial presence who can meet any challenge with confident good humor and competence; he and the Professor would have got along famously. My editor, Marian Lizzi, has been patient beyond belief with a project that stretched far beyond its appointed bounds; no author could hope for better. My agent, Janis Donnaud, stuck with this celebration of the life and works of somebody few people have ever heard of until it found its perfect home. My fellow partners in Beverage Alcohol Resource, Dale (again), Doug Frost, Steve Olson, and Paul Pacult, displayed remarkable forbearance as my writing drew me away from our collective enterprise. Brendan Vaughan, Tara Q. Thomas, and David Mahoney, my editors at
Esquire
,
Wine & Spirits
, and
Drinks
, respectively, were similarly tolerant.

There are many, many other people who assisted in the research. Some—William Grimes, Angus Winchester, John C. Burton, and John Myers—lent or even outright gave me rare old bartender’s guides, the essential building blocks of this book. Many others were kind enough to answer my queries, look things up for me or even send me items of interest even without my asking, among them Brian Rea, Gary Regan, Phil Greene (whose brother Ed procured me a copy of Dick & Fitzgerald’s original 1859 copyright), Ted “Dr. Cocktail” Haigh (who provided lots of good advice and a few rare illustrations), Lowell Edmunds, George Thompson, Guillermo Toro-Lira, Robert Hess, Anistatia Miller & Jared Brown, Philip Duff of Bols (who generously sent me enough
corenwyn
to test the gin drinks), Chris McMillan, Paul Erickson, Jeff Pogash, John Burton (who graciously allowed me to use the business card of Jerry Thomas in his collection), Mauro Mahjoub, Jorg Meier, George Sinclair, Michael Waterhouse, Barry Popik, and David A. Smith of the New York Public Library.