At the end of Prohibition, one of New York’s most famous bartenders, Patrick Gavin Duffy, assembled a manual called The Standard Bartender’s Guide, which would stay in print for many decades. Duffy, as the bartender of Manhattan’s Ashland House (Fourth Avenue at 24th Street) for some forty years, served drinks to famous folks like Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and J. P. Morgan, and he chronicled their favorites tipples in his well-regarded book. Duffy was the man who is given credit for the creation and naming of the highball in the year 1895. The name, according to the most commonly cited etymology, came from the practice of raising a ball on a pole as a signal for a train to speed up or maintain maximum speed. The implication was that the dilution of liquor in a highball allowed the drinker to drink faster and more efficiently.1
In the first edition as well as all subsequent editions (including one revised by James Beard, a tippler of some note, in 1966), Duffy issues a strong warning about some of the drink recipes that had been included among the more than nine hundred in the original formulary:
Most of the following extensive and carefully selected list of cocktails have been served over first class Bars in the United States, South America, Canada and Europe, since our Civil War. There are, however, a considerable number which were created here during the period of Prohibition 1917–1933 and some of these are obviously of irresponsible origin. During these years, the huge traffic in liquor was conducted by the inexperienced and lawless element of the nation and the great hotel, restaurant and legitimate saloon men who were the backbone of the business had absolutely no part in it. For this spirit of resignation and law-abiding behavior, the public did not accord due credit. The youth and many adults of the great cities, seeing they were forbidden a custom their fathers were free to enjoy, now took to the “Speak-Easy,” and gilded Cabarets and the orgies which followed became more and more wild until finally those well-meaning persons who brought Prohibition on became alarmed and sought Repeal as eagerly as they had, two decades before, clamored for the “Dry Law.”
Duffy then goes on to admit (as he would in all future editions of his own collection) that some of the “Cocktail Creations” of those hectic days were bad ideas. He then cautions barkeepers and others against adopting some of them for general use. He added that they were published as a matter of record and as a mirror in which future Americans could see the follies that the enactment of the Eighteenth Amendment produced. The drinks he disapproved of—and which included his asterisk of disapproval—included one drink in which gin, Scotch, brandy, vermouth, and cream were muddled together. He added: “Nor indeed, can we give our support to any concoction consisting of Gin and Rye, Gin and Scotch, Gin and Brandy or to any beverage where two kinds of strong liquor are included especially when they are ‘shaken together with bitters, cream and Raspberry Syrup.’ ”
Over time as new type was set and as revised editions of Duffy’s book were printed, the asterisks disappeared and terrible drinks like Alexander’s Sister and the Cowboy Cocktail (⅔ Scotch and ⅓ cream, iced and strained into glass) began to appear along with the palatable ones. As others rushed to publish their own compilations, the Cowboy was dutifully copied and appears in such books as The Old Mr. Boston Bartender’s Guide, The Diner’s Club Drink Book (1961), The Ultimate Cocktail Book (1998), The Ultimate A–Z Bar Guide (1998), and The Complete World Bartender Guide: The Standard Reference to More than 2,400 Drinks (1993), among others. If one looks hard enough through old drink recipes put out by distillers, one can also find such variations as the Adios (essentially a Cowboy made with the addition of a teaspoon of strained honey and topped with grated nutmeg (from The Art of Drinking) and the Rum Cowboy (from a Sibony Rum booklet published in the 1930s).*
Almost all the truly bad drinks cited by Duffy and others involved mixing liquor with milk or cream. As William Grimes put it in his history of the cocktail: “Prohibition launched a thousand alcoholic milk shakes that can curdle the blood even at a distance of sixty years.”2
So it is that some of the worst concoctions of the Dry Years have survived. Duffy’s asterisk-free editions are now long out of print, but they live on through a number of massive drinks collections on the internet.
Before moving onto the question of which drinks to include in my formulary, there is the question of what actually belongs there and what does not. The issue is more than purely academic, as many of today’s faux speakeasies feature drinks that were yet to be invented at the time of Repeal. A case in point is the Zombie, which was a post-Repeal rum drink of three rums and tropical fruit created by a Don the Beachcomber in 1934, which became the signature drink of the 1939 World’s Fair at Flushing Meadows. Another example is the Mai Tai, which cocktail historians have concluded was a 1944 creation of Trader Vic’s.
In November 1933, the Mayflower Club, by all accounts the swankest of all the Washington, D.C., speakeasies, was raided and padlocked, and its proprietor hauled off to jail. The place was so well established that it featured an elegant menu that listed all seventeen cocktails and a similar number of mixed drinks. The menu was published several days later, and today serves as a guide to what was actually in vogue during the Dry Years. All the cocktails and many of the mixed drinks are included in what follows—albeit with some interpretation: a drink called a Dykeree is almost certainly a Daiquiri.†3
The cocktails listed on the menu are all in the formulary, with the exception of a drink called the Club Mayflower, whose formula has been lost awaiting rediscovery by some future cocktail archaeologist.