In the spirit of Duffy’s asterisk, I have marked several of the formulas with a symbol ╤ to signify that the drink is included for historic or literary reasons rather than as one that might be worthy of replication. The nonalcoholic cocktails are marked with the symbol §.
These formulae are presented as close to that which would have been employed at a high-end speakeasy or private home during the Dry Years rather than as an attempt to suggest the perfect incarnation of the drink. For example, if one enters “mint julep recipe” in the Google search engine, you get more than 500,000 hits; if you enter “the perfect mint julep,” you get 126,000 hits. These are not all recipes, but the bulk of them are. As Abe Dobkin wrote in his Home Bartender’s Guide: “There are almost as many versions of the mint julep as there are julep fanciers.”
One should also be aware that during and immediately following Prohibition, recipes often carried measurements that are not common today. Here is the translation of measuring terms from William Guyer’s The Merry Mixer or Cocktails and Their Ilk: A Booklet on Mixtures and Mulches, Fizzes and Whizzes, in what he termed “simple 1933 units”:
1 dash equals ⅓ of a teaspoon
1 jigger equals 1½ ounces
¼ wineglass equals 1 ounce
1 wineglass equals 4 ounces
1 pony equals 1 ounce
1 barspoon equals 1 teaspoon1
ALEXANDER
⅔ jigger (1½ oz.) dry gin
½ jigger sweet cream
½ jigger Crème de Cacao
PREPARATION Shake well with cracked ice and strain into large cocktail glass.
VARIATION If brandy is used in place of gin, the name is changed to a Panama Cocktail or, more commonly, a Brandy Alexander.
CULTURAL CONTEXT Despite the fact that some people called this drink an abomination and worthy of one of Duffy’s asterisks, the drink remained fashionable and popular. When Crosby Gaige published his Cocktail Guide in 1941, it made his Hall of Fame, composed of the handful of drinks whose composition in most households, restaurants, and grills “is as friendly and familiar as the formula for the baby’s bottle.” He added that the cocktails so honored had been tested and proven in such famous laboratories as the bars of the Waldorf, the Ritz, and 21 in New York, the Palace in San Francisco, the Ambassador in Chicago, and Alciatore’s in New Orleans. Under his recipe for the drink, Gaige added the caveat: LADIES, WATCH YOUR STEP!
BACARDI
Introduced to American imbibers who traveled to Cuba during Prohibition, this drink became, according to Charles Columbe, the author of Rum—The Epic Story of the Drink That Conquered the World, the most popular of all speakeasy rum drinks. The problem was that the drinks were often made with other brands or inferior replicas of the real thing. One place that made the real thing was Tony’s at 59 West 52nd Street in Manhattan, which was the bar of choice for the “vicious circle” of friends who populated the Algonquin Round Table. With members such as writers Dorothy Parker, Harold Ross (founder of The New Yorker), and Robert Benchley; columnists Franklin Pierce Adams and Heywood Broun, and Broun’s wife, Ruth Hale; critic Alexander Woollcott; comedian Harpo Marx; and playwrights George S. Kaufman, Marc Connelly, Edna Ferber, and Robert Sherwood, the Algonquin Round Table embodied an era and changed forever the face of American humor. The group was dominated by scofflaws, but they did not drink at their luncheons as the owner of the hotel forbade it, fearing he could be shut down.
The Bacardi was the drink of choice offered by bartender Tony for The Speakeasies of 1932.
PREPARATION Place in mixing glass and stir thoroughly. Then add fine cracked ice and shake vigorously. Strain into cocktail glass.
CULTURAL CONTEXT The Bacardi cocktail has been the subject of a good deal of controversy over the years—i.e., is it a Bacardi when made with another brand of rum? The drink was the subject of a ruling by the New York State Supreme Court on April 28, 1936, that required the drink to be made with Bacardi rum in order to be called a Bacardi cocktail.
THE BEE’S KNEES
This cocktail got its name from 1920s slang that simply meant “the best” or “cool,” along with a host of other parallel constructions, including “the flea’s eyebrows,” “the canary’s tusks,” “the cat’s pajamas,” “the snake’s hips,” “the dog’s tuxedo,” “the eel’s ankle,” “the elephant’s in-step,” “the snake’s hip,” and “the caterpillar’s spats.”
To make honey simple syrup: combine ½ cup of water and ½ cup honey in a small saucepan. Heat over medium, whisking often, till the mixture reaches a slow simmer and the honey is liquid and smooth. Remove from heat and cool to room temperature.
2 ounces gin
½ ounce lemon juice
¾ ounce honey syrup
PREPARATION Shake with ice, strain into a chilled cocktail glass, and serve.
BETWEEN THE SHEETS
It is often asserted that this drink likely originated in Harry’s New York Bar in Paris in the 1930s, but it actually first shows up in print in the 1919 edition of Harry MacElhone’s formulary. It became very popular during Prohibition. The recipe is adapted from Cocktails and Wines, a booklet produced by the Huyler’s chain of restaurants in 1934. There were sixteen Huyler’s in New York City, including six on Broadway (at numbers 170, 221, 270, 863, 2149, and 2577).
⅓ light rum
⅓ Cointreau
⅓ brandy
1 dash lemon juice
PREPARATION Shake well with cracked ice, then strain into a chilled cocktail glass and garnish with a twist of lemon.
CAVEAT This is one of the drinks that bartender Patrick Gavin Duffy printed with an asterisk, indicating a cocktail he “personally did not recommend.”
CULTURAL CONTEXT David Wondrich puts this drink in context in his Esquire online cocktail guide: “The ancestor of all the Silk Panties, Slippery Nipples, Screaming Orgasms, and other ungodly concoctions that so titillate the Abercrombie & Fitch set, the Between the Sheets dates to Prohibition—when, frankly, the nation’s moral fiber wasn’t what it ought to have been. But then again, neither was the nation’s liquor supply. Which led to perversions like this—smutty name, too much alcohol.”2
BIJOU COCKTAIL
A Jerry Thomas original that was very popular during Prohibition.
1 dash orange bitters
4 dashes White Curaçao
4 dashes Green Chartreuse
½ glass dry gin
½ glass Italian vermouth
PREPARATION According to Knut W. Sundin’s Two Hundred Selected Drinks, shake well, strain into a cocktail glass, and add an olive or cherry according to taste.
CULTURAL CONTEXT A recipe for the Bijou, along with other cocktails, was included in an article in The Washington Post in August 1930, titled “How to Throw a Sure-Fire Party.” It was listed with two possible canapés: potato chips filled with chutney, and caviar and onion. The article showed how far mainstream American newspapers had come in thumbing their noses at Prohibition by 1930.3
BLACK VELVET
This drink was invented in 1861 at the Brook’s Club in London. Prince Albert had died, and everyone was in mourning. The story goes that the steward at the club, overcome with the emotion of the occasion, ordered that even the champagne should be put into mourning, and he proceeded to mix it with Guinness Stout. The half-and-half combination of Guinness on the top and champagne on the bottom symbolized the black or purple armbands worn by mourners.4
During Prohibition, the drink was given new notoriety by New York Mayor Jimmy “Beau James” Walker, who consumed them at all hours of the day and night. Walker was generous with his money, often buying drinks for the reporters following him.5
½ flute champagne
½ flute Guinness Extra Stout
PREPARATION Pour the champagne into a clean/polished and chilled champagne flute. Slowly top up the glass with the stout, being careful to ensure no overspill.
CULTURAL CONTEXT Somewhere along the line, this drink got the reputation as a hangover cure or a “pick me up” with an eye to alleviating the morning’s sad condition. It is listed as such, for example, in Esquire’s 1949 Handbook for Hosts. Actress Tallulah Bankhead wrote in her biography: “Wracked with a hangover I do my muttering over a Black Velvet, a union of champagne and stout.” But she is quick to add: “Don’t be swindled into believing there’s any cure for a hangover. I’ve tried them all: iced tomatoes, hot clam juice, brandy punches. Like the common cold, it defies solution. Time alone can stay it. The hair of the dog? That way lies folly. It’s as logical as trying to put out a fire with applications of kerosene.”6
This drink was invented by Fernand “Pete” Petiot at Harry’s New York Bar in Paris during the early 1920s (5 Rue Daunou—or, as ads in the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune reminded the reader, “Just remember ‘sank roo doe noo’ ”). According to Petiot’s obituary (he died in January 1975, in Canton, Ohio), he came upon the idea after being introduced to vodka in Paris in 1920. The original version was basically vodka, tomato juice, and salt and pepper. A customer suggested Petiot name it a Bloody Mary, as it reminded him of a woman named Mary who worked at the Bucket of Blood, a saloon in Chicago. After Prohibition, Petiot set up shop at the St. Regis Hotel in New York and perfected his recipe, briefly retitling it a Red Snapper (later the name for the drink with gin) to appease the more “delicate American sensibility.” In America, conventional wisdom held that the drink was named for Mary Tudor, the staunchly Catholic daughter of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon who had more than three hundred heretics executed.
When the drink began to take off in America in the mid-1950s, it was commonly seasoned with Worcestershire sauce and/or Tobasco and/or horseradish. Somewhere along the way, bartenders started stuffing celery stalks into the drink along with celery salt olives, and wedges of lemons and limes.
The Bloody Mary—in its original form of tomato juice, vodka, and salt and pepper—is easy to make and allows for infinite variations. Here is the basic modern version from the mid-1950s offered by Smirnoff Vodka in an ad claiming that the drink had been invented by entertainer George Jessel—a great advertising ploy, but a total misattribution that lives on via the internet.
3 ounces heavy tomato juice
1½ ounces vodka
½ ounce lemon juice
6 drops Worscestershire
Dash of salt and pepper
PREPARATION Shake well with ice, strain, and serve.
CULTURAL CONTEXT The invention of the drink was dependent on the creation of tomato juice as a canned or bottled commercial product, which did not occur until 1917 and was not produced in bulk until the early 1920s. Canned or bottled tomato juice did not become popular in America until vodka became widely available around the same time. Not only are there innumerable variations on the basic recipe but offshoots as well, such as the Bloody Molly (with Irish Whiskey), Bloody Maria (with white rum), and Danish Mary (with Aquavit). There is also a version made with gin, which a few (including James Beard) insisted was the original, but the overwhelming evidence points to vodka.7
One of Harry Craddock’s Prohibition-era classics from The Savoy Cocktail Book.
3 parts vodka
1 part Cointreau
1 dash blue vegetable extract food coloring
PREPARATION Shake with ice and strain into a cocktail glass. No garnish.
INSTRUCTIONS How to drink it? As Craddock advised, “Quickly, while it’s laughing at you!”
BRANDY CRUSTA
In the nineteenth century, the “Crusta” was introduced as a drink that included a sugared rim and lemon peel extension of the glass as a garnish, giving it a citrus collar.
Rind of ½ lemon cut into long strip
1 glass brandy
½ ounce lemon juice
1 teaspoon grenadine
3 dashes Angostura Bitters
3 dashes Maraschino
Powdered sugar
PREPARATION Moisten the rim of a small wineglass with lemon juice, dip rim in powdered sugar to give glass a crusted appearance (hence crusta), peel the rind of ½ a lemon and use it to line the glass, fitting the contour of the glass. Then pour into a shaker the grenadine and the dashes of Maraschino and bitters, the juice of half a lemon, and one glass of brandy. Shake well. Pour into wineglass.
CULTRAL CONTEXT It was—and still is—regarded as a drink of pretention, which is why it comes as little surprise that this was the drink proffered by Eddie the chief barman in Al Hirschfeld’s The Speakeasies of 1932, who served at the Mansion at 27 West 51st Street: “The most pretentious place in New York, or it will do until the most pretentious place is built. Luxury and pump with flunkies that work as fast and noiselessly as genii.”8
BRANDY FLIP
In The Speakeasies of 1932, this drink is proffered by Tommy the bartender at Julius’s in Greenwich Village, 159 West 10th Street, which Al Hirschfeld described as “A madhouse without keepers.” By the time Hirschfeld visited the place, it had been closed and padlocked four times. There are many variations on this drink, including those that substitute whole cream for the egg yolk and others that use the whole egg. This was the recipe in The Speakeasies of 1932.
PREPARATION Shake well, strain into small wineglass, and grate nutmeg on top.
CULTURAL CONTEXT The first bar guide to feature a flip (and to add eggs to the list of ingredients) was Jerry Thomas’s 1862 How to Mix Drinks; or, The Bon-Vivant’s Companion. In this work, Thomas declares: “The essential in flips of all sorts is to produce the smoothness by repeated pouring back and forward between two vessels and beating up the eggs well in the first instance the sweetening and spices according to taste.”
BRONX
This was deemed the most popular cocktail of the Dry Years. As G. Selmer Fougner of the New York Sun put it in 1937: “Gin was of course available at every street corner, so to speak; orange juice was equally abundant, and no art was required in the mixture.” The Bronx was bound to lose some of its popularity with Repeal when ingredients other than gin became available again. Fougner and others have given credit for the invention and naming of the drink to bartender Johnnie Solon, who created it at the Waldorf Astoria sometime shortly after 1900.9
As Solon explained to Albert Stevens Crockett in Old Waldorf Bar Days, the drink was created by a patron who challenged the bartender to come up with a new cocktail. The challenge was carried to Solon by a man named Traverson, the headwaiter of the Empire Room. The drink was concocted and given to Traverson to taste. He swallowed it whole and declared that it would be a big hit.
“The name?” Solon told Crockett. “No, it wasn’t really named directly after the borough or the river so-called. I had been at the Bronx Zoo a day or two before, and I saw, of course, a lot of beasts I had never known. Customers used to tell me of the strange animals they saw after a lot of mixed drinks. So when Traverson said to me, as he started to take the drink into the customer, ‘What will I tell him is the name of this drink?’ I thought of those animals, and said: ‘You can tell him it is a Bronx.’ ”10
The remarkable thing is that Solon never touched a drop of liquor, but he had the uncanny ability to create great drinks.
1½ ounces gin
¼ ounce dry vermouth
¼ ounce sweet vermouth
1 ounce orange juice
Garnish: orange slice
PREPARATION Pour the ingredients into a cocktail shaker with ice cubes. Shake well. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with the orange slice.
CULTURAL CONTEXT The most dramatic example of the impact of a single type of cocktail was the Bronx, which along with the Manhattan and the Martini were the preferred drinks of home bartenders and the better speakeasies. In New York City, the Bronx was by all accounts the most popular of all, and New Yorkers were consuming a large number of oranges from Florida that were then reputed to produce more juice than those from California. On September 12, 1925, Stephen Harvey, the mayor of Palm Beach, was in New York and made a stunning claim: the Florida land boom was the result of the Bronx cocktail and the demand for juicy oranges. The boom began the demand for agricultural land and later the demand for residential property.
Bill W., the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, would later trace the beginnings of his alcoholism to a Bronx cocktail that he consumed while stationed as an Army officer in a camp in New Bedford, Massachusetts. The drink was served to him by a patriotic hostess entertaining Bill and his fellow officers. “In those Roaring Twenties,” he remembered, “I was drinking to dream great dreams of greater power.” His wife became increasingly concerned, but he assured her that “men of genius conceive their best projects when drunk.” This was all an illusion, and after Bill hit rock bottom he led himself and others to sobriety.11
This from the Swedish-American Line head bartender Knut W. Sundin’s 1934 edition of Two Hundred Selected Drinks.
2 dashes Angostura bitters
2 dashes Maraschino
½ glass whiskey
½ glass Italian vermouth
PREPARATION Shake well and strain into a cocktail glass and add a cherry.
CULTURAL CONTEXT Though it lacked the universality of the Bronx or the Manhattan, there was a cocktail named after the borough that advertised that if it were separated from New York City, it would be the fifth largest city in America. It appears to have been a favorite on booze cruises leaving from the port of New York.
CHAMPAGNE COCKTAIL
The Champagne Cocktail is one of the few drinks that survived intact from the original 1862 edition of How to Mix Drinks by Jerry Thomas; it appears in The Speakeasies of 1932 as a drink of choice of Harry at the Club Napoleon at 33 West 56th Street.
1 sugar cube
3 dashes Angostura bitters
5 ounces Brut champagne
Garnish: 1 lemon twist
PREPARATION In a small glass or dish, soak the sugar cube with the bitters. Fill a chilled flute with the champagne and add the sugar cube. Garnish with lemon twist.
CULTURAL CONTEXT This was said to be Audrey Hepburn’s drink of choice. It was also featured in the Truman Capote novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s and in the movie in which Hepburn starred.
Named for the Philadelphia men’s club of the same name, which met in the Bellevue-Stratford hotel. The drink dates back to 1896 at the Clover Club of Philadelphia, where it was said to have been invented by teen-aged bartender Ambrose Burnside Lincoln Hoffman. According to the Waldorf Astoria Bar Book, the drink became a staple of East Coast bars and hotels. The Clover Club was seen in this era as one of the all-time classics, right up there with the Manhattan and Old Fashioned. It was very popular during Pro-hibition, featured in, among other places, the Cotton Club.
1½ ounces gin
¾ ounce fresh lemon juice
½ ounce simple syrup
½ ounce Chambord or grenadine
1 egg white
PREPARATION Pour all ingredients into a cocktail shaker with no ice. Shake for about a minute, to emulsify the egg white. Keep a tight grip on the top of the shaker; the shaking of the egg white builds up a lot of pressure in the shaker, and the mixture will want to spill out. Your Clover Club should look rather frothy. Then you can add ice and shake it again. Strain your cocktail into a chilled long-stemmed cocktail glass. Crosby Gaige, who listed it in his 1941 Cocktail Guide as one of the Hall of Fame drinks, added: “Garnish with a four-leaf clover.” Float a mint sprig on top, and you now have a Clover Leaf.
CULTURAL CONTEXT As rapidly as the Clover Club rose to the heights of fashion, so it also came tumbling down after Prohibition ended. In 1934, Esquire magazine cited it as one of the worst drinks of the Dry Years. But the drink hung on, and by 1941 had made enough of a comeback to be listed in the Hall of Fame section in Crosby Gaige’s 1941 Cocktail Guide as one of a certain select group of cocktails that have won and kept a vast clientele, and through “some accidental adumbrations of aroma and flavor, these famous favorites have pleased the public palate, and so flow daily down millions of warmly devoted gullets.” Also in the 1928 collection of celebrity recipes, Bottoms Up, it is picked by comic actor W. C. Fields as his favorite cocktail.
So called by the great expatriate bartender Harry Craddock as a “hair of the dog” hangover remedy. There is a corpse reviver #1 which was long ago overcome in popularity with its revised version.
1 ounce gin
1 ounce premium orange liqueur
1 ounce Lillet Blanc
1 ounce fresh lemon juice
1 to 3 drops absinthe
Garnish: Maraschino cherry
PREPARATION Wash martini glass with drops of absinthe. Discard or leave in the glass according to preference. Place Maraschino cherry in bottom of the glass. Combine remaining ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake to blend, and chill. Strain into the glass over cherry garnish.
CULTURAL CONTEXT Even if Craddock didn’t actually invent the drink, we remember it because of him. He gave the formula for it in his 1930s classic The Savoy Cocktail Book, where he suggested: “Four of these taken in swift succession will unrevive the corpse again.”
This drink dates to Havana around 1900, after the Spanish-American War (“Free Cuba” being the battle cry during that conflict, which began and ended in 1898 and led to Cuban independence). It was especially popular during Prohibition because of the availability of colas.
½ to 1 lime
Ice cubes
2 ounces rum, preferably gold or dark (see headnote)
½ ounce gin (optional)
Coca-Cola, chilled
2 dashes Angostura bitters
PREPARATION Squeeze the lime half or halves into a Collins glass (to yield ½ ounce juice), then drop in the spent lime half. Add 3 or 4 ice cubes. Pour in the rum and gin, if desired, then fill with the chilled Coca-Cola. Add the bitters; stir briefly to incorporate.
CULTURAL CONTEXT This drink has been known to be mixed with this line from Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca: “The only things that the United States has given to the world are skyscrapers, jazz, and cocktails. That is all. And in Cuba, in our America, they make much better cocktails.”
DAIQUIRI
An American named Jennings Stockton Cox is widely acknowledged as having invented the daiquiri, naming it after the Cuban town where he concocted the first one in 1898. The man credited with introducing the drink to America was an American Navy Medical officer named Lucius W. Johnson, who got the recipe and took it back to Washington, D.C., and served it to the Army & Navy Club, where today there hangs a plaque honoring Johnson’s contribution at the club’s Daiquiri Lounge.12
1 jigger West Indies rum
Juice of ½ lime
1 teaspoon powdered sugar
PREPARATION Shake with finely shaved ice and strain into cocktail glass.
CULTURAL CONTEXT The bartender Constantino Ribalaigua Vert perfected the daiquiri at a Havana joint called El Floridita, later known as the Cathedral of the Daiquiri. Each evening, Ribalaigua appeared behind the bar dressed in a white shirt, a bow tie, a stylish vest, and an apron—“like an acrobat making his entrance onstage,” as one historian put it. Among those who flocked to El Floridita were Gary Cooper, Tennessee Williams, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Ernest Hemingway (the greatest daiquiri fan of all time), who consumed them before, during, and after Prohibition.
(FROZEN) DAIQUIRI
The daiquiri itself predated Prohibition, but not the frozen version that was also the brainchild of Constantino Ribalaigua Vert, the bartender of the aforementioned La Floridita in Havana. All he did was change back to shaved ice and use a blender and—voilà—the frozen daiquiri was born.
2 ounces White Bacardi rum
Juice of ½ lime
1 ounce (or slightly less) white Maraschino
10 ounces shaved ice
PREPARATION Mix in electric cocktail mixer for 1 minute. Serve in a cocktail glass a bell-shaped drinking glass usually having a foot and stem and holding about three ounces.
CULTURAL CONTEXT One of the regulars at Vert’s bar was Ernest Hemingway, who wrote on the walls of another famous Havana watering hole: “My Mojitos in la Bodeguita, my Daiquiris in La Floridita.” Crosby Gaige wrote in his 1941 Cocktail Guide that this was the formula used by LaFloridita.
╤ DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON COCKTAIL
Ernest Hemingway’s original concoction, about which he explained: “This was arrived at by the author and three officers of H.M.S. Danae after having spent seven hours overboard trying to get Capt. Bra Saunders’ fishing boat off a bank where she had gone with us in a N.W. gale.” His instructions appear in Sterling North’s So Red the Nose:
• Pour 1 jigger of Absinthe into a Champagne Glass.
• Add Iced Champagne until it attains the proper opalescent milkiness.
• Drink 3 to 5 of these slowly.
CULTURAL CONTEXT So Red the Nose says of Hemingway:
It takes a man with hair on his chest to drink five absinthe and champagne cocktails and still handle the English language in the Hemingway fashion. But Ernest has proved his valor, not alone in his cups. Captain of the swimming team at Oak Park High School—first American to be wounded on the Italian front during the World War (with 227 individual wounds to his credit)—tossed by a bull in the streets of Pamplona while rescuing his friend Donald Ogden Stewart—deep-sea fisherman—big game hunter—and one of the first citizens of Key West. Hemingway could hold his absinthe like a postwar novelist.”13
╤ DEATH IN THE GULF STREAM
The recipe first appeared in print in Charles Baker’s 1939 first edition of Gentleman’s Companion, having been picked up two years earlier from Hemingway in Key West. Baker had gone to see Hemingway on his yacht, the Marmion, with the expressed purpose of gathering recipes from him, including one for raw conch salad, or souse. As the Death in the Gulf Stream is an uncommon drink with literary overtones, it seems proper to quote Baker directly in describing how to make this “picker-upper.”
Take a tall thin water tumbler and fill it with finely cracked ice. Lace this broken debris with 4 good purple splashes of Angostura, add the juice and crushed peel of 1 green lime, and fill the glass almost full with Holland gin … No sugar, no fancying. It’s strong, it’s bitter—but so is English ale strong and bitter, in many cases. We don’t add sugar to ale, and we don’t need sugar in a Death in the Gulf Stream—or at least not more than 1 tsp. Its tartness and its bitterness are its chief charm. It is reviving and refreshing; cools the blood and inspires renewed interest in food, companions and life.14
CULTURAL CONTEXT This cocktail was a favorite drink of Ernest Hemingway, who seemed to have no end of favorite drinks.
E
EL PRESIDENTE
For several generations, the drink was the specialty of El Chico in Greenwich Village, New York City. Here is the recipe from the 1949 Handbook for Hosts, exactly the way that bartender George Stadleman made it at El Chico.
½ ounce orange curaçao
¾ ounce French vermouth
1 dash grenadine
PREPARATION Stir ingredients well with cracked ice, then strain into a chilled cocktail glass. It should pour a delightfully clear, deep orange color. Garnish with a twist of orange peel.15
CULTURAL CONTEXT The El Presidente earned its acclaim in Havana during the 1920s when legions of alcohol-deprived Americans descended on the city by air and sea. It was named in honor of Mario García Menocal, president of Cuba from 1912 to 1920.
F
FISH HOUSE RUM PUNCH
During Prohibition, the drink achieved notoriety as the libation ladled out of the punchbowl on New Year’s Eve 1930 at the Century Association at 7 West 43rd Street in New York City. It became an issue in the U.S. Senate on January 30 of that year when Republican Senator Smith W. Brookhart of Iowa read a letter alleging that “real gin cocktails” and “Fish House Rum Punch” were served at this exclusive club. Brookhart, a fervent supporter of Prohibition, read the letter aloud on the Senate floor to support his argument that drinking in New York City was out of control, even in the establishment clubs. Senator Royal Copeland of New York asked if the Iowan had ever been to the Association. He was told no. The New Yorker replied, “I wondered because I can’t get in there with a pickax.”
Here is the recipe for the drink, sometimes known as the Boston Fish House Punch.
1 cup sugar
3½ cups water
1½ cups fresh lemon juice (6 to 8 lemons), strained
1 (750-ml) bottle Jamaican amber rum
12 ounces cognac (1½ cups)
2 ounces peach brandy (¼ cup)
Garnish: lemon slices
PREPARATION Stir together sugar and 3½ cups water in a large bowl or pot until sugar is dissolved. Add lemon juice, rum, cognac, and brandy, and chill, covered, at least 3 hours. Put half-gallon ice block in a punch bowl and pour punch over it.
CAVEAT This drink is very powerful and aptly labeled “a punch.” In Esquire’s Handbook for Hosts, this warning is attached to the recipe: “The impact of this punch is guaranteed to knock Santa Claus’s beard right off its moorings, or break your lease. If you so desire.”
CULTURAL CONTEXT This drink dates back to Philadelphia in 1732 at the Schuylkill Fishing Company. This establishment was also known as the Fish House, a dignified gentlemen’s society devoted to manly vices, such as cigars, whiskey, and the occasional fishing expedition. Fish House Punch became quite popular—even palatable to the ladies—and it is said that John Adams was so partial to it that it was often served at the White House (of which he was the first resident). It remained popular well into the twentieth century and was often served during the holidays.
FRENCH 75
This drink was created in 1915 at the New York Bar in Paris—later known as Harry’s New York Bar—by Harry MacElhone and first recorded in The Savoy Cocktail Book in 1930. The original recipe called for gin, lemon juice, simple syrup, and some bubbles. A later recipe replaces the gin with cognac. The combination was said to have such a kick that it felt like being shelled with the powerful 75-millimeter field artillery gun. It is also called a 75 Cocktail, or Soixante Quinze in French. The French 75, the predominant light artillery piece used by the Americans, was manufactured by the French. The “75” referred to the 75-millimeter diameter of the shell. Experienced crews accurately delivered as many as fifteen rounds per minute, thus creating the 75’s reputation for efficient power and precision. This recipe comes from The Stork Club Bar Book.
2 ounces gin
1 teaspoon powdered sugar
Juice of ½ lemon
Brut champagne
Cracked ice
PREPARATION Pour all ingredients except the champagne into a flute. Top with champagne and serve.
CULTURAL CONTEXT Popular during Prohibition, the cocktail became the signature drink of Manhattan’s Stork Club, a scene where mobsters (Frank Costello, aka the prime minister of the underworld) rubbed elbows with celebs (Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe) and politicians (the Kennedys).
GEORGE’S SPECIAL
Signature drink at George’s Place, a speakeasy located at 507 Lexington Avenue in New York City. “Plain, green baize on the walls” is part of the description in The Speakeasies of 1932, which also mentions “A few photographs, one of Sir Thomas Lipton drinking beer.” George, we are told, was one of the best at his craft: “Expert, but not showy. He keeps his distance. He uses no green crème de menthe—only the white—a dash of it goes into almost every gin drink he makes.”
2 ounces gin
1 ounce apricot brandy
1 ounce lemon juice
1 dash green crème de menthe
PREPARATION Shake well and serve in cocktail glass with cherry.
Born during American Prohibition, this drink takes its name from a small hand tool used to tap into barrels in which wine or beer was stored. The name is also used figuratively to describe something as sharp or piercing. It has been suggested that the cocktail may have been named for its “penetrating” effects on the drinker.
The first recipe to be specifically called a gimlet appears in a British bartending guide from 1922. The original recipe for this drink was stated in proportions.
½ ounce Coates’ Plymouth Gin
½ Rose’s lime juice
PREPARATION Stir, and serve in same glass. Can be iced if desired.
CULTURAL CONTEXT Raymond Chandler’s 1953 novel The Long Goodbye helped to give this drink literary cache: “We sat in the corner bar at Victor’s and drank gimlets. ‘They don’t know how to make them here,’ he said. ‘What they call a gimlet is just some lime or lemon juice and gin with a dash of sugar and bitters. A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose’s Lime Juice and nothing else. It beats martinis hollow.’ ”
The speakeasy known as Jack and Charlie’s was located at 21 52nd Street, and the presiding bartender was a guy named Bill, “a pleasant, agreeable fellow never guilty of making the drink taste too watery or too strong.” When the authors of The Speakeasies of 1932 asked him to come up with his favorite cocktail, he suggested the Gin Daisy—which he measured in proportions rather than exact amounts.
⅔ gin
⅙ Cointreau
⅙ lemon juice
PREPARATION Serve over cracked ice with fruit ornamentation.
CULTURAL CONTEXT Jack and Charlie’s not only weathered all of Prohibition, but continues to the present under its current name, 21. The original owners Jack Kreindler and Charlie Berns and their families owned the place until 1985. It was here that many years later Al Hirschfeld told a writer for American Heritage magazine that he saw Mayor James J. Walker; Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, and Heywood Broun; a judge or two; and Police Commissioner Whalen drinking here. He added: “Jack and Charlie were wonderful hosts and served the best liquor in town, which they husbanded down below, hidden, so whenever it was raided, they just locked up everything.” The secret vault is still there, behind a two-and-a-half-ton brick-covered door opened by a slim piece of wire; today it is often booked for private parties. “21,” Hirschfeld said, had “the novelty of serving really good food” and kept out “the riffraff, the curious, by charging outrageous prices—twenty dollars for lunch!”16
GIN RICKEY
In The Speakeasies of 1932, this is the drink of choice selected by Bob, the bartender at the Press Grill, which was located at 152 East 41st Street, near the largest of the city’s tabloid newspapers. This seems most appropriate, as no other drink—or series of drinks, in the case of the Rickeys—has such close ties to the world of journalism as the Gin Rickey, or, as it is sometimes called, the Lime Rickey.
1 lime
1 glass gin
Soda or seltzer water
PREPARATION Place a piece of ice in a tumbler. Cut a fresh lime in half and squeeze the juice in the glass. Add one glass of gin and fill balance with seltzer or soda water.
CULTURAL CONTEXT The Gin Rickey was created at Shoemaker’s in Washington, D.C., a popular hangout for newspaper folks along Newspaper Row, which was at a right angle to Rum Row. Both Rows flourished in the years after the Civil War and into Prohibition. Rum Row included the Lawrence Hotel, Tim Sullivan’s popular bar, which sported a beer garden and Shoemaker’s Tavern. George Rothwell Brown recounted that Col. Joseph Rickey, a St. Louis lobbyist and drinkmeister at nearby Shoemaker’s Tavern, was the originator of the “Whiskey Rickey,” composed of whiskey, Apollinaris water (sparkling water), and lime juice, later made with gin and called the “Gin Rickey.”
There are many versions of the story, but the most often repeated involves a fruit vendor entering the bar on an especially hot night and Ricky grabbing a fresh lime. He then asked the bartender to create a drink using juice of the lime. The drink was later modified for gin and other liquors. As The Washington Post reported during the end of the 1894 Democratic convention: “The convention adjourned along about half past 2 o’clock this morning and from that time until long after daybreak there was great joy everywhere. The favorite joy producers were Rickeys of various makes and of various degrees of strength. There were gin Rickeys and whisky Rickeys and brandy Rickeys and every other kind of Rickey known to mortal man.”
A bestseller during Prohibition. From The Professional Mixing Guide or How to Get Drunk Fast, here’s how it was made during the Dry Years and before it had a major role in Mad Men as a vodka martini with three cocktail onions on a toothpick.
⅔ dry gin
⅓ dry vermouth
3 small pearl onions
Twist of lemon (for oil)
PREPARATION Stir well in cracked ice. Strain into cocktail glass prepared with the onions.
CULTURAL CONTEXT It was said to be named in honor of American illustrator Charles Dana Gibson. This is probably false: there’s no evidence the illustrator had any connection to the drink.
Honorific cocktail for the Swedish actress Greta Garbo. It was one of the special drinks concocted by Knut W. Sundin, star bartender on the ships of the Swedish-American line and one of the drinks featured in his 1930 Two Hundred Selected Drinks.
Juice of ½ lime
3 dashes grenadine
1 dash absinthe
⅓ Cointreau
⅔ Bacardi rum
PREPARATION Shake well and strain into a cocktail glass.
CULTURAL CONTEXT During Prohibition, movie heroes and heroines drank like fish and uttered boozy lines recalled decades later. When Greta Garbo made her speaking debut in 1930 in the film Anna Christie, she uttered these unforgettable words: “Gimme a whisky with ginger ale and don’t be stingy, baby.” It was post-Prohibition (1937) when Mae West, playing the charming Peaches O’Day in Every Day’s a Holiday, introduced the famous line: “You should get out of those wet clothes and into a Dry Martini.” The importance of Garbo and West during and after Prohibition were great. As Norman H. Clark noted in his book Deliver Us from Evil: An Interpretation of American Prohibition: “Women learned from Garbo how to embrace, how to express sexual anguish, how to dress, how to drink, and how to smoke. From Mae West they learned smartly and wittily how to defy convention. The Reverend John J. Cantwell, Catholic Bishop of Los Angeles, expressed a militant dismay when he saw that ‘talking pictures’ could actually ‘teach’ a ‘philosophy’ which could undermine ‘the sanctity of the home.’ ”17
H
HANGMAN’S BLOOD
This drink had its literary debut in Richard Hughes’s 1929 novel A High Wind in Jamaica as a compound of rum, gin, brandy, and porter. Hughes said of it: “Innocent (merely beery) as it looks, refreshing as it tastes, it has the property of increasing rather than allaying thirst, and so once it has made a breach, soon demolishes the whole fort.”18
In the 1960s, British novelist Anthony Burgess described its preparation as follows: “Into a pint glass doubles of the following are poured: gin, whiskey, rum, port and brandy. A small bottle of stout is added and the whole topped up with champagne. It tastes very smooth, induces a somewhat metaphysical elation, and rarely leaves a hangover … I recommend this for a quick, though expensive, lift.”
A family of mixed drinks that are composed of an alcoholic base and a larger proportion of a nonalcoholic mixer. The literature of the Dry Years is awash in highballs. For instance, a woman enters a speakeasy and orders a Highball in Dorothy Parker’s “Big Blonde” (1930). Esquire’s 1949 Handbook for Hosts terms it the “high priest of all tall drinks,” and though it requires nothing but liquor, ice, and water or soda, mixing one calls for a certain procedure.
PREPARATION Here is how it is done properly, according to guidelines prescribed in Handbook for Hosts:
• Use a tall glass—at least 12 ounces—preferably uncolored, definitely sparklingly clean, admirably narrow-mouthed so soda will not collapse ahead of schedule.
• Next, put in the ice—one very large or two normal cubes.
• Pour the liquor over the ice—Scotch, bourbon, rye, brandy as you will. The customary amount is a jigger (1½ ounces).
Only now pour in the very cold sparkling water to the desired height, usually four times the amount of liquor. Bubbles thrive on coolness, but rapidly melting ice downs them, so the soda must be pre-chilled in a refrigerator. Some prefer plain water rather than fizz in their highballs, but if you would please palates don’t try to pass off the chlorine-clogged stuff that comes from the kitchen faucet. Use an alkaline-sided mineral water, or any purified bottled aqua—but cold.
In any case, avoid stirring with metal, which is supposed to “squelch” the bubbles. “If one of your guests is stir-crazy,” our 1949 Handbook for Hosts advises, “give him a plastic or glass swizzle stick.”
In any case, serve it up immediately.
CULTURAL CONTEXT H. L. Mencken wrote: “The English, in naming their drinks, commonly display a far more limited imagination. Seeking a name, for example, for a mixture of whiskey and soda-water, the best they could achieve was whiskey-and-soda. The Americans, introduced to the same drink, at once gave it the far more original name of high-ball.”19
JACK ROSE
The Jack Rose was a pillar of basic cocktail-mixing knowledge during Prohibition. The origin of its name is disputed: some credit it to an early twentieth-century gangster named Bald Jack Rose, while others connect it to Jersey City bartender Frank J. May, who was also known as Jack Rose. With its American apple brandy base, aka applejack or Jersey Lightning, the Jack Rose was a featured cocktail at the Cotton Club. It cost $.75.
2 ounces Applejack (Laird’s)
1 ounce grenadine
½ ounce lemon juice
½ lime juice
CULTURAL CONTEXT Featured in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises—“Brett did not turn up, so about quarter to six I went down to the bar and had a Jack Rose with George the barman.”
╤ MAIN STREET PUNCH
Cocktail created by Sinclair Lewis for the Great Celebrity Cocktail Contest in Carmel, California, on the night of Repeal.
Juice of six lemons
½ pound powdered sugar
½ pint brandy
¼ pint peach brandy
¼ pint Jamaica rum
3 pints sparkling water
PREPARATION Stir in large punch bowl with block of ice.
A signature cocktail of the Prohibition Era. The drink has improved since Prohibition when it was often made with sugar syrup or powdered sugar to blunt the taste of inferior whiskey. The recipe in Dexter Mason’s The Art of Drinking calls for ¼ part sugar syrup or powdered sugar, but here is how it was made by those with access to better quality whiskey.
¾ ounce Italian vermouth
1½ ounce rye or bourbon
2 dashes Angostura bitters
1 Marischino cherry
PREPARATION Shake well with cracked ice and strain into cocktail glass. Top with cherry.
CULTURAL CONTEXT Both during and immediately following the Manhattan was one of the trio of most popular American cocktails, along with the Martini and the Bronx. Its allure was given an extra boost by a popular 1929 melodrama from Paramount called Manhattan Cocktail, which was advertised with the tag line: “Mix a beautiful girl with two men—one good, one rich. Add Broadway gaieties, heartaches and temptations and you have a tingling, refreshing style Manhattan Cocktail.” When higher quality whiskey was widely available after Repeal, it seemed to be offered everywhere. A major holiday gift in 1934 was a Christmas Manhattan gift package containing bottles of vermouth, whiskey, and Maraschino cherries—which retailed for $1.98. That same year Agua Caliente racetrack in Southern California offered a special Manhattan made with eight-year-old “Special Reserve” Bourbon for $.25.
MARTINI
In The American Language, H. L. Mencken traced the martini to the year 1899 and the name on the Martini & Rossi vermouth bottle, but other explanations abound. Two other theories appear in Robert Herzbrun’s The Perfect Martini Book: (1) that it was named for the town of Martinez, California, where it was first served; (2) that it was named for a British rifle, the Martini and Henry, because of its accuracy and kick. Peter Tamony, the great etymologist, holds to several variations, including that of a bartender in San Francisco who made a client a special drink to keep him warm on a trip across the bay: the bartender found that his client was headed to Martinez, and so named the new drink.20
The martini, popular during Prohibition, is a far cry from later versions. The martini of the Prohibition era was commonly made with two thirds dry gin and one third French, or dry vermouth, and served with a green olive in the glass. This was called a Dry Martini. Others had their own take on vermouth. Algonquin wit Robert Benchley, who took his martinis at the best speakeasies in Manhattan, gave his recipe as “gin, and just enough vermouth to take away that nasty, watery look.”21
Here is the recipe offered in Dexter Mason’s The Art of Drinking, published in 1930.
1 part gin
1 part French vemouth
1 dash bitters
1 olive
1 twist of lemon peel
PREPARATION Shake with ice and strain into long-stemmed glass. Add olive and lemon peel.
CULTURAL CONTEXT The martini became the cocktail of the Manhattan speakeasies, especially popular in those that catered to artists, writers, and bohemians—reason enough for Broadway columnist Walter Winchell to refer to them as “gintellectuals.” The Martini also acquired a naughty sophistication, by opposing the moralists behind Prohibition with its high alcohol content. It became urbane and sleek, a city drink. In the meantime, glass makers mass-produced V-shaped glasses on a tall stem (so that the hand would not warm the cocktail), which immediately became associated with the drink and is still known today as a martini glass.22
As speakeasies encouraged the mingling of men and women in a way that saloons previously had not, the martini brought with it a whiff of Eros best reflected in these lines from Dorothy Parker:
Two at the very most.
After three I’m under the table,
After four I’m under my host.
(DIRTY) MARTINI
2 parts gin
1 part vermouth
1 teaspoon olive brine
Lemon twist
Cocktail olive
Rub the lemon twist around the rim of a chilled martini glass. Combine gin, vermouth, and olive brine in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake and strain into the chilled martini glass. Garnish with an olive.
CULTURAL CONTEXT As a presidential drink, there has been no other with such a persistent presence as the martini—beloved of selected Democrats and Republicans. It all began with Franklin D. Roosevelt, who is credited with popularizing what is today known as the Dirty Martini—dirty because of the addition of olive brine. He drank them with some regularity, mixing them in a silver cocktail shaker etched with the outlines of palm trees, and served them to many guests, including Joseph Stalin at the 1943 Teheran Conference. Stalin found it “cold on the stomach,” but apparently liked it.23
In 1971, with a thick snow battering the nation’s capital, the normally cantankerous Richard Nixon surprised members of the press corps on New Year’s Eve by inviting them to the White House for cocktails and conversation while mixing up what he described as his “special formula Martini.”
“If he is a connoisseur of anything,” a Nixon observer told a reporter from Saturday Review in 1969, “it is the martini … He is very particular about the brand of gin—he prefers Beefeater—and the way it’s mixed … Nixon favored the ‘In and Out’ martini mixed by his friend Bebe Rebozzo in which the vermouth was put into a shaker, swung around once and then thrown away before adding the gin. ‘That’s very good. Bebe, Very good,’ he would say as part of the ritual.”24
Lyndon Johnson liked the in-and-out martini—a glass filled with vermouth, then dumped out and filled with gin.
RUM MARTINI
This drink, also known as the Jean Harlow, was favored by the film actress.
2 ounces light rum
2 ounces sweet vermouth
Garnish: lemon peel
PREPARATION Pour the ingredients into a cocktail shaker with ice cubes. Shake well. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with the lemon peel.25
MARY PICKFORD
This cocktail was created in Havana by British barman Fred Kaufman, who worked at the Hotel Sevilla, then called the Sevilla-Biltmore Hotel. Pickford was on the island in the early 1920s with her husband Douglas Fairbanks. The cocktail’s discovery was cited in the book When It’s Cocktail Time in Cuba (1928) by Basil Woon.
2 ounces white rum
1 ounce pineapple juice
1 barspoon grenadine
1 barspoon Maraschino liqueur
Garnish: brandied cherry
PREPARATION Combine all ingredients and shake with ice. Strain into a chilled glass and garnish.
CULTURAL CONTEXT The drink has remarkable staying power. In October 2013, it was featured on Rachel Maddow’s Cocktail Moment, a Friday feature on her CNBC show.
Created in 1925 at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, it was named after a tropical flowering shrub. As Salvatore Calabrese described it in Classic Cocktails: “The combination of champagne and orange juice and Grand Marnier produces a similar colour to the Mimosa’s sensitive yellow blooms.”
4 ounces champagne
½ ounce Cointreau or Grand Marnier
1½ ounces orange juice
PREPARATION Pour the liquor and juice in the bottom of a chilled champagne flute; top up with the champagne slowly so as to not spill the wine from excess carbonation. It is optional to garnish with an orange slice or zest.
MINT JULEP
A long drink consisting of bourbon or rye whiskey, crushed ice, sugar, and fresh mint, mixed together usually following a prescribed procedure on the treatment of the mint leaves. The drink is chiefly associated with the American South, with a strong modern association with the Kentucky Derby. This long-established drink—which was never really out of fashion—reestablished itself during Prohibition, perhaps for nothing more than the simple reason that the strong flavor and smell of fresh mint mitigated the effect of less-than-prime whiskey. The author Irvin S. Cobb’s (see Fish House Rum Punch) fictional character Old Judge Priest, who appears in Irvin S. Cobb’s Own Recipe Book, offered this recipe dating back to 1934. Cobb was a bourbon fundamentalist when it came to his juleps and once said of his friend H. L. Mencken: “Any guy who’d put rye in a mint julep and crush the leaves would put scorpions in a baby’s bed.”26
Old Judge Priest Mint Julep …
Take from the cold spring some water, pure as angels are; mix it with sugar till it seems like oil. Then take a glass and crush your mint within it with a spoon—crush it around the borders of the glass and leave no place untouched. Then throw the mint away—it is a sacrifice. Fill with cracked ice the glass; pour in the quantity of Bourbon which you want. It trickles slowly through the ice. Let it have time to cool, then pour your sugared water over it. No spoon is needed; no stirring allowed—just let it stand a moment. Then around the brim place sprigs of mint, so that the one who drinks may find taste and odor at one draft.
CULTURAL CONTEXT The first writer to mention the drink was Washington Irving in his History of New York, in which he characterized the natives of Lord Baltimore’s Maryland (“Merryland,” in this context) as people who “were notoriously prone to get fuddled and make merry with mint-julep and apple-toddy.” The drink has long been associated with hyperbole and tall tales, as this early 1839 observation attributed to novelist Captain Frederick Marryat illustrates: “They say that you may always know the grave of a Virginian as, from the quantity of julep he has drunk, mint invariably springs up where he has been buried.”
§ MOCK CHAMPAGNE
A drink created for the 1930 book Prohibition Punches, featuring legal beverages. This one was created by Mrs. Imogene Oakley of Philadelphia, who insisted: “This recipe has all the good qualities of champagne and none of the bad ones.”
⅓ white grape juice
⅔ White Rock (club soda)
PREPARATION “The mixture may be half and half if preferred, but too much grape juice diminishes the sparkle of the effervescent water,” according to Mrs. Oakley. Serve in long-stemmed champagne glass.
CULTURAL CONTEXT There was a great rush to create cocktail and punchbowl stand-ins for drinks containing alcohol. First Lady Lou (Mrs. Herbert) Hoover was a fan of punch made with plain spring water (either mineral or charged) and then sweetened and flavored with fruit juice, principally oranges, lemons, grapefruit, and berries of all sorts, but sometimes mixed in the juice of tangerines and kumquats.27
THE MONKEY GLAND
A Prohibition classic, the Monkey Gland was devised at Harry’s New York Bar in Paris in 1923. The name is a reference to a surgical procedure by a Dr. Serge Voronoff. For men with performance issues, Dr. Voronoff offered to implant in them the testicle of a monkey, for “rejuvenation.”
1½ ounces gin
1½ ounces fresh orange juice
1 teaspoon grenadine
1 teaspoon absinthe
PREPARATION Pour ingredients into a cocktail shaker and fill with ice. Shake well for 10 seconds and strain into a chilled cocktail glass.
CULTURAL CONTEXT This drink made headlines such as this one from The Washington Post of April 29, 1923: NEW COCKTAIL IN PARIS IS THE MONKEY GLAND, which was followed by text that actually gave instructions as to how to prepare one: “For the benefit of friends over in America who have not exhausted their cellars, here is the recipe: half and half gin and orange juice, a dash of absinthe, and a dash of raspberry or other sweet juice. Mix well with ice and serve only with a doctor handy. Inside half an hour the other day Frank purveyed forty of these, to the exclusion of Manhattans and Martinis.” The Post added: “The monkey gland requires absinthe to be perfect, but its amateurs have found anise a substitute with a sufficient kick.”
CAVEAT Cocktail critic Doug Ford has made, tasted, and reviewed the drink on his Cold Glass website and concludes: “It’s a good cocktail—in fact, it’s a delicious cocktail—but I’m trying to picture myself ordering one across a bar. ‘Good evening, Miss, I’ll have a Monkey Gland, please. And keep them coming.’ ”
NEGRONI
According to cocktail historian Gary Regan, this concoction’s origins are documented in the book Sulle Tracce del Conte: La Vera Storia del Cocktail Negroni, which was written by Lucca Picchi, head bartender at Caffe Rivoire in Florence, Italy. The drink was created at Bar Casoni in Florence, according to Picchi, when Count Camillo Negroni ordered an Americano—sweet vermouth, Campari and club soda—with gin swapped in for the standard soda.
1 ounce gin
1 ounce Campari
¾ ounce sweet Italian vermouth
Thin slice of orange
PREPARATION Pour the liquids over ice in a rocks glass. Stir and sip.
CULTURAL CONTEXT In a June 2010 article in Playboy on classic drinks, A. J. Baime advised: “The Negroni is easy to make at home, but for the ultimate experience, venture to the cafe where it was invented. Though it’s now called Caffe Giacosa, it’s still in the same place on Via della Spada in Firenze.”
OLD FASHIONED
Likely one of the earliest North American cocktails, with the first reference appearing in 1806—this may be one of the oldest of all American drinks, or at least the first for which there is a record. Franklin D. Roosevelt, the President who presided over the end of Prohibition, fa-vored this drink along with his famous Dirty Martini. According Oscar Getz in his book Whiskey: An American Pictorial History, this was FDR’s preferred formula:
1 sugar cube
1 dash Angostura bitters
Club soda
2 ounces rye whisky
Slice of orange
Twist of lemon peel
Piece of pineapple
PREPARATION Muddle lump of sugar, dash of Angostura bitters, and splash of club soda in an Old Fashioned glass. Add ice cube, slice of orange, twist of lemon peel, piece of pineapple, and whiskey. Top it off with a splash of club soda.
CULTURAL CONTEXT The Old Fashioned was also the drink preferred by President Harry Truman. He and First Lady Bess each enjoyed one before dinner during their White House years. Truman did not add fruit to his Old Fashioneds, following the advice of Crosby Gaige, who wrote in his 1941 Cocktail Guide: “Serious-minded persons omit fruit salad from Old Fashioneds while the frivolous windowdress the brew with slices of orange, sticks of pineapple, and a couple of turnips.” The Old Fashioned, which went out of style in the last quarter of the twentieth century, has been given a reprieve as the drink of choice for the character Don Draper on the Mad Men cable television series.
ORANGE BLOSSOM
During Prohibition, this was one of the most popular illicit drinks. It is said to have been created in an attempt to mask the taste and odor of “bathtub gin.” It is essentially just a mixture of orange juice and gin, although there are many variations using a wide variety of ingredients. The Old Waldorf Astoria Bar Book has a recipe for Orange Blossom No. 1:
¾ ounce gin
¾ ounce sweet vermouth (i.e., Cinzano Bianco)
¾ ounce orange juice
PREPARATION Pour the ingredients into a mixing pitcher or glass filled with ice cubes, stir well, and strain.
CULTURAL CONTEXT One evening in the early 1920s, humorist Robert Benchley stood at the bar at Tony’s Restaurant, a popular 49th Street eatery and speakeasy, and turned to his good friend and fellow member of the Algonquin Round Table, Dorothy Parker, and said:
“Let’s find out what all the fuss is about.”
He then stunned his friends by downing an Orange Blossom cocktail. Although Benchley had frequented the midtown speakeasy scene with his colleagues from Vanity Fair and the New York World, he had to this point avoided alcohol. While his friends indulged themselves with round after round of bootleg liquor, Benchley had consumed only juice and soft drinks. Now at age thirty-one, he had consumed his first drink. There are other versions of the story that are spelled out in Michael A. Lerner’s book Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City. But as Lerner then points out: “The exact facts of the story, however, matter much less than what they illustrate. Regardless of when and where Robert Benchley took his first drink, until Prohibition came along he had, in spite of the company he kept, embodied the traditional middle-class Protestant dry. Something about the dry experiment changed Benchley’s attitude toward alcohol. He became emblematic of a cultural rebellion against Prohibition that rejected the dry crusade’s moral vision for America.”*28
PARADISE COCKTAIL
The Paradise Cocktail is an example of a drink that got a boost through a cameo appearance in a movie produced during Prohibition. It was Kay Francis and William Powell’s drink of choice in One Way Passage (1932).
1 ounce apricot-flavored brandy
¾ ounce gin
Juice of ¼ orange
PREPARATION Shake with ice and strain into cocktail glass.
This was Marlene Dietrich’s entry in the Carmel-by-the-Sea contest, which she described as “very pretty and very tasty.”
2⁄5 Curaçao
2⁄5 Kirschwasser
1⁄5 Chartreuse
PREPARATION Use a wineglass that is wet. Pour in the Curaçao; on top of this, the Kirschwasser; and on top of that, the Chartreuse. The dampness of the wineglass will cause each layer—the red, amber, and yellow-green—to lie, sandwich-like, on top of the one below.
CULTURAL CONTEXT A 1966 Broadway musical named Pousse Café with music by Duke Ellington was a complete disaster.
A pick-me-up/hangover remedy that appears in The Speakeasies of 1932 as an offering from John, the bartender at the Log Cabin, a speakeasy in the Fifties east of Seventh Avenue above a garage.
2 teaspoons of Worcestershire sauce
Yolk of a fresh egg
Dash of red pepper
Pinch of salt
2 tablespoons of malt vinegar
PREPARATION Put the Worcestershire sauce in a wineglass. Add the unbroken egg yolk and sprinkle with a little red pepper and salt. Put the malt vinegar on top.
CULTURAL CONTEXT Not to be confused with the original prairie oyster, a testis of a bull calf used as food.
Named after William E. “Pussyfoot” Johnson (1862–1945), a staunch Prohibitionist and respected chief law enforcement officer for the U.S. Indian Service. Johnson implemented effective “catlike policies in pursuing lawbreakers in the Indian Territory,” as he himself explained in Who’s Who in America, obtaining some 4,400 convictions during his tenure (1908–1911). As Albert Marckwardt points out in American English: “Johnson was also active in the Anti-Saloon League and frequently lectured on temperance. Not only was he instrumental in the passage of Prohibition in 1919, he took the ‘cause’ to London, where it was not always met with enthusiasm. In fact at Essex Hall an angry lush in the crowd he was lecturing to threw a stone and blinded him in one eye.”
1 ounce lemon juice
2 ounces lime juice
6 ounces orange juice
1 egg yolk
6 ounces cold sparkling water
Garnish: orange slice
PREPARATION Combine lemon, lime, and orange juices, and egg yolk in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake vigorously and strain into a chilled Tom Collins glass. Top off with the sparkling water. Stir gently. Garnish with orange slice.
ROB ROY
Then as now, the Rob Roy is probably the most famous Scotch-based cocktail. A first cousin to the Manhattan, it was invented in 1897.
½ part Scotch
½ part sweet vermouth
Dash of Angostura Bitters
PREPARATION Shake with cracked ice and strain into a cocktail glass.
CULTURAL CONTEXT Rob Roy was a real historical character, but the name of the drink is a reference to a popular operetta. Opening in New York in October 1894, the hit play’s name of Rob Roy served as inspiration for the cocktail because of the reddish color and use of Scotch.
The Rock and Rye cocktail managed to make its way through Prohibition as both a sweet libation and as a home remedy, often being prescribed medicinally, especially as a cough medicine. The best-known method of preparation was similar to Harry Craddock’s, from his 1930 Savoy Cocktail Book, which simply called for dosing whiskey with rock candy and lemon.
1 teaspoon rock candy syrup or grenadine
Juice of ½ lemon
1 glass rye whiskey
PREPARATION Stir together in the same glass and squeeze lemon peel on top.
CULTURAL CONTEXT In The Speakeasies of 1932, there was an establishment called the Dixie, which was hidden behind the false front of a cigar store in the Forties block west of Sixth Avenue. This is the formula for the drink advocated by John the bartender, whom Al Hirschfeld describes as “the kind of man you’d not hesitate to have your mother meet.”
Bill the bartender at the Stonewall, a speakeasy at 91 Seventh Avenue, suggested this as his libation of choice in The Speakeasies of 1932.
1 glass gin
Yolk of fresh egg
1 teaspoon grenadine
Juice of ½ lemon
Soda water
PREPARATION Shake ingredients well and strain into medium-size tumbler and fill the balance of the glass with soda.
SAZERAC
Purportedly “America’s first cocktail,” Sazerac is the emblematic drink of New Orleans. Born on a steamy New Orleans street called Rue Royal in 1838, it was the creation of a descendant of an escaped slave named Antoine Peychaud, who assembled a mix of ingredients to make a cocktail that would, as one writer put it, “outlast fads, floods, and whatever else his town could dish out.” The original elixir was a combination of cognac, from Sazerac de Forge et Fils in France, and bitters made by Peychaud himself. In 1873, the drink was changed when American rye whiskey was substituted for cognac. A dash of absinthe was added by bartender Leon Lamothe, who is now regarded as the Father of the Sazerac. In 1912, absinthe was banned in the United States because of the presence of wormwood (a supposed hallucinogenic), so Peychaud substituted his special bitters in its place.
1 jigger (1½ ounces) rye whiskey
2 dashes anisette
Dash of Pernod
Dash of Angostura bitters
PREPARATION Shake with cracked ice and strain into cocktail glass. “For this New Orleans powerhouse, the glass must be thoroughly chilled,” advise the editors of Esquire’s Handbook for Hosts.
CULTURAL CONTEXT President-elect Warren G. Harding and a large company of friends and advisers, including his personal physician, visited the Grunewald Hotel in New Orleans. At the Harding party’s first luncheon at the hotel after Harding expressed his desire for a drink, scotch and soda highballs were supplied from owner Theodore Grunewald’s private stock. According to Meigs O. Frost, the reporter who was at the luncheon, Harding turned to his host:
“Mr. Grunewald, I was in New Orleans a couple of years ago, very quietly, by myself. Just a United States Senator from Ohio on vacation. On one of your streets, Royal Street, I think, I drank a cocktail with an odd name I have forgotten, but a flavor I never forgot. It was the finest cocktail I ever had in my life.”
“Was it a Sazerac, Mr. President?” asked Grunewald.
“That’s it,” said Harding.
“Mr. President,” said Grunewald, “this hotel is my personal residence. I stocked my personal cellar before Prohibition became effective. I have all the ingredients, and one of the old Sazerac bartenders works for me here as a waiter in this hotel. Would you care to taste a Sazerac again?”
“I certainly would,” Harding replied.
Grunewald stepped to a house phone and gave his order quietly. Fifteen minutes later, a waiter arrived bearing a huge silver tray laden with Sazeracs in old-fashioned bar glasses.
Harding took a sip, and Frost reported that “a slow smile spread across his face.”
He then called across the room to the rest of his party. “Put down those highballs. Come here and taste this! Here’s a real drink!”
Grunewald then told Harding, who was about to embark on a cruise leaving from New Orleans, that there would be two bon voyage baskets awaiting Harding in his cabin, and underneath the fruit would be six quarts of Sazeracs. Harding then embraced Grunewald and invited him to stay in the White House during the upcoming Inauguration.29
“Scofflaw” was the winning entry in a 1924 competition of the Boston Herald that asked readers to coin a new word for those who refused to have their drinking habits dictated by politicians. The word officially made it into the language on January 15, 1924, when the winning entry was announced. Within two weeks of the contest result, the Scofflaw cocktail appeared at Harry’s American Bar at 5 Rue Daunou, Paris.30
1½ ounces rye whiskey
1 ounce dry vermouth
¾ ounce fresh lemon juice
¾ ounce grenadine
Garnish: lemon twist
PREPARATION Combine all ingredients with ice and shake. Strain into a chilled glass and garnish.
CULTURAL CONTEXT The Scofflaw still appears in many cocktail manuals and is a staple of today’s speakeasy-style bars. In 2007, Christopher Hirst of The Independent (London) revived some drinks of the past for a series on cocktails and raved about the Scofflaw: “Though you might expect a drink concocted in such circumstances to be an unremarkable novelty, the Scofflaw is sensationally good. Ruby red in color, it has an intriguing complexity and an exquisite sweet-sour balance.”
A stiff drink made of cognac, Cointreau, and lemon juice, in a 3–2–1 ratio that’s shaken and served up. Created by Harry at Harry’s New York Bar, Paris, after the First World War, for an eccentric captain who turned up in a chauffeur-driven motorbike sidecar. It was an immensely popular drink during Prohibition.
¾ ounce Cointreau
¾ ounce lemon juice
1½ ounces cognac
PREPARATION Shake well with cracked ice, then strain into a chilled cocktail glass that has had its outside rim rubbed with lemon juice and dipped in sugar. Serve in a cocktail glass.
CAVEAT Listen to David Wondrich of Esquire magazine on this one: “This is a drink whose suavité is beyond question—it’s the Warren Beatty of modern mixology. It’s so easy, in fact, to be seduced by this clever old roué that a word of caution would not be out of place here. These gents have a way of stealing up on you and—bimmo! Next thing you know it’s 8:43 on Monday morning and you’re sitting in the backseat of a taxi idling in front of your place of employ. In your skivvies.”
A short Tom Collins popular during the era when short went long (highballs), and long went short.
1 ounce lemon juice
1 teaspoonful fine granulated sugar
2 ounces dry gin
PREPARATION This drink is served in an Old Fashioned glass. The sugar and lemon juice should be stirred well; then add 2 cubes of crystal clear ice and pour the dry gin over it. Serve with short glass stir rod.
Stubby Collins (Angostura)
Make the same as a Stubby Collins, but add several hearty dashes of Angostura Bitters so as to give it a nice, rich pink color and added zest. This variation appears in The Professional Mixing Guide or How to Get Drunk Fast.
TWELVE MILE LIMIT
One of a group of cocktails with names that allude to aspects of the Eighteenth Amendment, the Volstead Act, and the cluster of ancillary legislation that arose around them. Saveur magazine, which recently featured the drink, said of it: “The very drink it inspired taunts the measure with its especially strong yet beachy combination of rum, whiskey, brandy, grenadine, and lemon juice.”
1 ounce silver rum
½ ounce rye whiskey
½ ounce brandy
½ ounce grenadine
½ ounce fresh lemon juice
Garnish: 1 lemon twist
PREPARATION Combine rum, whiskey, brandy, grenadine, and juice in a cocktail shaker filled with ice; cover and shake until chilled, about 15 seconds. Strain into a chilled highball glass and top with lemon twist.
CULTURAL CONTEXT Indeed, the “rum fleet” itself was a curious flotilla. A 1923 report on Prohibition described some of its elements: “A former Spanish cruiser, once pride of the fleets of the haughty Dons, has been spotted among them. The one-time palatial yacht of a noted American industrial captain has flashed her dainty heels back and forth in the new brotherhood of the coast, keeping company with blunt-nosed and weather-beaten old fishing schooners from the Grand Banks. Smaller craft, made glorious in the war through the daring of Yankee tars who manned them, have joined this pack of sea vermin preying on the self-respect and decency of a people.”31
W
WARD EIGHT
One of the most popular of all Prohibition cocktails, it came out of the Dry Years a champion—in 1934, Esquire magazine named it the drink of the year.
2 ounces rye or bourbon whiskey
¾ ounce freshly squeezed lemon juice
¾ ounce freshly squeezed orange juice
1 teaspoon grenadine
Garnish: orange slice and/or Maraschino cherry (optional)
PREPARATION Combine whiskey, lemon juice, orange juice, and grenadine in a cocktail shaker that is half filled with ice. Shake well for at least 30 seconds. Strain mixture into a cocktail glass. Garnish with an orange slice or Maraschino cherry if you wish.
CULTURAL CONTEXT If Boston has a signature drink, it is the Ward Eight. The widely ac-cepted version of its origin was that it was created at Boston’s Locke-Ober restaurant in 1898 to celebrate the election victory of Martin Lomasney (aka the Boston Mahatma, aka Czar of Ward 8), who was seeking a seat in the Massachusetts state legislature. Lomasney was the local political machine’s power broker in Ward 8 (at Boston’s South End). He was famous for saying, “Never write if you can speak; never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink.”
WHISKEY SOUR
The whiskey sour has a long history in the world of cocktails, making an appearance in the first published cocktail book, Jerry Thomas’s 1862 The Bon Vivant’s Companion or How to Mix Drinks. It has been claimed that the sour evolved from the practice of adding lime juice to rum rations to prevent scurvy among sailors in the British Navy in the 1700s. Although this assertion is hard to prove, it makes sense: fresh fruit was perishable, so the juice would be doctored with rum (or gin, or later sometimes whiskey) in order to preserve the juice as well as to ensure the health of the sailors.
1 large teaspoon powdered white sugar, dissolved in a little seltzer or Apollinaris water
Juice of ½ small lemon
1 wineglass bourbon or rye whiskey
PREPARATION Fill the glass full of shaved ice, shake up, and strain into a claret glass. Ornament with berries.
CULTURAL CONTEXT A columnist writing in the Charlotte News (North Carolina) during Prohibition was quoted by Fletcher Dobyns in The Amazing Story of Repeal on the subject of bringing women into the speakeasies. It alluded to the palliative use of whiskey sours: “And so it is. I have seen women with snowy hair and wrinkled faces sipping cocktails with ‘purty gals’ who looked to be still in their teens, and have watched them walk unsteadily from the table after using a few whisky sours and a bottle or so of beer to hold down the cocktails they had imbibed.” The columnist added that the Prohibitionists promised to abolish the old saloon “and it has been done. No brass rails here. No longer is the grogshop a man’s institution. Under soft lights, to the strains of dreamy music, the boys and ‘gals’ sit at tables, are waited on by uniformed youngsters, and, oh, well.”32
YALE COCKTAIL
Cocktails named for colleges and universities date back to the 1890s when they were introduced at the Holland House bar in Manhattan. This one survived as a popular Prohibition drink.
1 dash orange bitters
1 dash Pernod
1½ ounces gin
PREPARATION Shake well with cracked ice, strain, and serve in cocktail glass. Twist of Lemon peel, for oil.
CULTURAL CONTEXT It is right and fitting that this cocktail, which was popular during Prohibition, be included in this collection. Yale and the state of Connecticut were especially loathed by the Drys because of their opposition to Prohibition. “Not only is the Yale student sentiment prevailingly wet,” wrote Irving Fisher in his 1926 plea for more stringent enforcement, “but the city and state in which Yale is located are among the wettest in the Nation.” Fisher, a Yale economics professor, dwelt on the Yale undergraduate: “Besides living in this damp atmosphere, the students largely come from the great Wet cities, especially New York, and a large fraction of the students are from homes of the well-to-do who can support wine cellars.”34
* During Prohibition, the Algonquin Hotel was Dry, which applied to the Round Table where civility and sobriety reigned. The members of the group met for drinks after work in Midtown speakeasies. This has not stopped modern writers from assuming that these fabled lunches were boozy—e.g., in Virginia Reynolds’s The Little Black Book of Cocktails: The Essential Guide to New and Old Classics, the Algonquin is listed and discussed as one of a few “Resplendent Drinking Establishments of Literary Fame.”