Splificator

Don't say that! There are those of us to whom the stuff is an essential staple. It was hard enough to get it back. I'd rather not have to have a case of it airfreighted over from Germany every time I want to mix up a bowl of Regent's Punch. A bowl here and a bowl there and soon you're spending real money. That said, Jonathan Swift couldn't stand the stuff either, so you're in good company.

Only one solution: Pousse l'Amours all around.

No Orange Bitters? ← What, and get rid of a bottle of booze? And shantytown, I feel your pain. I could just as easily come up with a list that looked like this: Glenlivet 12 Highland Park 18 Bowmore 16 Macallan Fine Oak 15 Glen Rothes 1985 Van Winkle Family Reserve rye William Larue Weller Elijah Craig 12 Bushmills 10 malt Suntory Hibiki 12 Or this: Talisker 25 Longmorn 15 Glenlivet Nadurra Macallan sherry cask 18 Ardbeg 10 Rittenhouse 10 Woodford Reserve Old Fitzgerald bonded Redbreast 12 Nikka 10 Or--well, you get the picture. Then there's tequila....

Okay, I'll play. Rittenhouse bonded rye Havana club 3-year-old rum Tanqueray gin Bols genever Martell Cordon Bleu cognac Batavia Arrack van Oosten Fee's Whiskey Barrel bitters Noilly Prat dry vermouth Carpano Antica vermouth Grand Marnier Okay, not optimized for versatility, but optimized for deliciousness. If I could add two bottles (I'm sure I'd find a way of smuggling them in; I generally do), I'd add Inner Circle Green Dot rum and Vieux Pontarlier absinthe.

You'll definitely have to strain out the lemon solids, which will turn a most unappetizing brown precipitate. You will, however, need a very large strainer for this. A good use for those high thread-count sheets you find just to fancy to sleep on. And yes, the acidity declines as well, but in exchange you get a mellow richness that's pretty fine.

That topic is so big, so confusing and so defended by entrenched positions that I'm not going to attack it anytime soon. In the meanwhile, there's a good deal of discussion of this topic over here at Chanticleer Society.

Katie-- While those shooters sound divine, they're about 30 years too young: my focus will be on the birth of the shooter, back in the pukka-shell and Pacer years of the late 1970s. Boy, I wish I knew! Seriously, I'm not aiming at anything systematic; it's just a way to move some of the more interesting information I've come across from the inbox to the outbox, and perhaps to revisit some of the stuff I wrote about in Imbibe! in the light of new information.

Pardon the shameless self-promotion, but I'm now writing a biweekly column for The Faster Times that might interest some of the--how do I put this--more detail-oriented forumites. It's about bartenders, barflies and their shared history, based mostly on bits and pieces from my archives. Topics to date include Jerry Thomas's second book, the career of Henry Ramos and what the swells were drinking in 1916. Coming up next: shooters. (And please note that I'm only responsible for the Annals of the Bar part, not the aggregated stuff it's lumped in with).

Just to make things clear, I meant that as much, or more, about what I do as about what I come across. Once you learn how to make drinks, it's frightfully easy to make good ones, and I find myself spinning them off one after another--but here's the thing, there's a huge difference between good drinks and great drinks. A good drink will make you say "mmmm." A great one will make you say "wow!" Reading this manifesto made me remember that I should try to shoot for greatness more often, whether I reach it or not.

It is interesting, at least, in that it suggests that perhaps peach bitters were once something quite different from what is on the market now. ← Precisely. In this case it was probably something like the Dutch Hoppe's Peach Bitters, which is basically a low-proof, not-very-sweet liqueur with a slight bitter edge. It's meant to be drunk straight.

I'd like to briefly dip my oar into these waters. I have a copy of this little book, I've read through it, and on the whole I'm impressed. It's made me think a little bit about complacency and creativity, and for that I thank them. Now that I'm comfortably midde-aged I would phrase things more diplomatically than they do, but in many respects I think their manifesto is spot-on. There are too many drink books that repeat the same recipes and recycle the same factoids, even now. There are too many cocktail bars that can muddle lemon verbena and watermelon in Lillet and top it off with house-made bitters (usually not bitter at all, N.B.) but would blink if you handed them a bottle of bonded applejack and asked them to make something butch with it. There are too many pleasantly-flavored, utterly forgettable sours floating around the cocktailosphere. (I'll also add that there are far too many "challenging" drinks laced with heavy doses of Averna, Chartreuse, and their ilk--the buzz spirits of 2008-2009--that are only challenging in an Emperor's New Clothes sense; but here rogue rocktails is guilty of beholding the mote that is in its brother's eye but considering not the beam that is in its own.) Finally, there are an awful lot of people taking the whole thing terribly, terribly seriously. When mixing drinks moves away from its bistro roots into fine-dining, a lot gets lost. These guys are conscious of that. As they say, "a bar exists to serve customers, not cocktails."

I've been drinking these--occasionally, to be sure, but nonetheless--since the early '90s, when my wife Karen and her friend Melissa Clark (now a famous food writer) used to make them after closing at the Manhattan restaurant where they worked. I think they pried the recipe out of Mr. Boston. In any case, they always made them with more gin and less cassis. The way I do 'em now is with 1 1/2 oz gin, 1 oz vermouth and 1/2 oz cassis, which is pretty much what they used to do. Made thus, it's a rather delightful drink, and nice to have in the repertoire.

Quot potatores, tot sententiae: sua Caudigalla Sodalitatis Pegus cuique, to paraphrase some dead old Roman or another--which is to say, even the most fundamental issues of mixology, such as how to balance a cocktail, are governed entirely by the taste of the balancer. To me, 2 oz Plymouth, 1/2 oz lime juice, 1/2 oz orange curacao (var. Grand Marnier) and a dash each of Angostura and Angostura orange sounds.... ...okay, I had to go make myself one. It's utterly delightful. I agree that a light hand must be used with the Angostura orange, though; most pungent. Edited to correct hiatus in manuscript.

Why don't we avoid any West Coast-East Coast beef and call them the "Jimmy's Pegu" (after Jimmy of Ciro's; lotsa juice)and the "Harry's Pegu" (after Harry Craddock; less juice). Readers of My Secret Life will find the discussion amusing, anyway.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure there was a Caperitif brochure floating around the bar.

Yeah, exactly. Also noteworthy is the call for a "small teaspoon" and, of course, the use of "glasses" to measure things instead of proportions as in the general run of Craddock's drinks. Plus a lot of the ingredients are hardly standard bar stock: jellies and marmalades, lemon syrup, fresh peaches and apricots, etc. Craddock's book was a lightly-edited catch-all, with many books plundered wholesale; this certainly seems like another one.

I've long harbored a suspicion that all the "6 people" recipes in the Savoy come from a common source, some pamphlet or booklet that has escaped our notice. There are 55 of them (56 if you count the Pineapple Julep), only a tiny handful of which have turned up elsewhere: the Martinez is, well, the Martinez, and the Ping-Pong Special and the Diabola are adapted from Robert Vermiere. None of them were associated with Harry Craddock in the media of the day, and they all have a certain country-house, Jeeves-bring-in-the-drinks-tray quality to them. The ingredients are certainly more continental and British than American, but that could be Craddock's editing.

Harry wrote the book when he was working at Ciro's, in London--but the 2-sided jigger was an American thing ("jigger," or "gigger," is an American word, a cognate of "thingamajig"). The Brits used single-sided measures. Plus, before working at Ciro's, McElhone worked at the Plaza, in New York--with a small break in between served in the trenches. So where did he see that Gordon's jigger? And who's got one? It's all confusing as hell and I wish it would go away.

The "out" system is a perennial source of confusion, as with a typically English approach to weights and measures it refers to how many of any particular measure will make up a gill (which is 5 imperial ounces, or approximately 4 1/2 American ounces). British spirits measures came in regulated sizes, of which there was a dizzying profusion: Gill Half-Gill (= 2-out) Third-Gill ( = 3-out) Quarter-Gill (= 4-out) Fifth-Gill (= 5-out) Sixth-Gill (= 6-out) Those are the ones I have or have seen, anyway (actually, I'm not sure about the 5-out). Anyway, this makes a 6-out measure, like Clark uses, 1/6th of 4.5 oz. No wonder they went metric. The 3-out measure was quite common, as was the 6-out; I've been trying to get those to sync up with the 2/3-1/3 description from McElhone for years, but still can't get it to come out right. Edited for triggernometry.

The Cocktails by Jimmy book is definitely from 1930 (I've found reviews for it), and in fact it came out at pretty much the same time that year as the Savoy book, which means that Jimmy's relatively juice-heavy version (4 parts gin to 1 part each "Curacao" and "Lime Juice," as detailed upthread) is as legitimate as Craddock's and that he must be placed at the head of that school. I don't think we can draw any conclusions from the fact that Jimmy and Harry both worked at Ciro's, since the Pegu Club didn't appear in one of harry's books until at least four years after he left that establishment. I suspect the drink was loosely detailed in, say, 1926 or therabouts in some English publication we have yet to uncover, and we're looking at competing interpretations. Jimmy calls for "Dry Gin"; if anyone had wanted the drink to be made with Hollands, by the 1920s they would have had to specify that. That said, I've been playing around with Holland gin sours and finding them dangerously palatable.

"Judge, Jr." was the nom-de-plume for Norman Anthony, editor in chief of Judge magazine, the leading American humor magazine of the day (and where Harold Ross worked before founding the New Yorker). Since he--whether alone or, as is more likely, with the assistence of his editorial staff, interns, friends and readers--compiled the book here in America during Prohibition, he had to make do with what he could get, both in terms of ingredients and suggestions for mixing them. His first book is, however, the first place the French 75 appears in print, so it's not a total wash.

Here's what I use: Grizzly 4 1/2" Mallet It pretty much reduces the ice--any kind of ice--to snow in no time flat. But yes, you do have to use a firm surface. And you'll need a good scoop to get the stuff out of the bag, as it tends to clump up.

It was Zeitgeist, in San Francisco (nuff said)--and it was a regular Bud. I didn't actually witness this; a former bartender was telling me about it. But knowing Zeitgeist, I believe it.

Gosling's si, SJ no. Mathilde should work a-ok. Don't forget the nutmeg.

Or you can buy a woodworker's maul and some canvas coin sacks and really go to town. FWIW, my favorite spirit in a julep is Martell Cordon Bleu cognac. Expensive, to be sure, but even at 3 oz per drink it only ("only") costs $10 per, which is less than I'll pay for a simple Manhattan in a bar. And oh, my.