Splificator

Yeah, all it ended up doing is replacing good alcohol with bad--burgundy with Boone's Farm, gin with vodka, bourbon with SoCo. Thanks a lot.

Couldn't agree with you more; that's why I posted this--definitely needs kicking around and tweaking. AFAIK, vodka didn't surpass gin in sales until the mid-'60s; I'm sure the Man in the Grey Fannel Suit's Martinis were gin, as were, for instance, Cary Grant's in North by Northwest. But as for the '60s, I'm stumped. Maybe the Harvey Wallbanger? The Screwdriver? The Black/White Russian? To be perfectly honest, it should probably be one of those Old-Fashioneds you make by ligtly squeezing an eyedropper full of something mysterious over a sugar cube and forgetting about the bitters, the whiskey, the garnish, the ice or the glass.

For an upcoming project, I've been assembling a list of New York's signature drinks, decade by decade since the end of the American Revolution. This is, of course, highly subjective--if you went strictly by the numbers, it'd be a very dull list indeed, with most of the entries reading "beer" or "whiskey" or "the Martini." I've tried instead to make it a little more impressionistic, avoiding repitition and attaching drinks to the decades when they hit their peak--i.e., when they were still new enough that everybody wasn't sick of them, yet had been around enough that everybody knew how to make them. I've also tried to pick drinks that were representative of what was going on in drinking culture in general. Anyway, I thought I'd post the list here for comment, discussion and correction, partly because it's a fun topic and partly because I'm not convinced that I've nailed the latter part of the list--the bits since Prohibition. Note that, although the list is centered on New York, it also applies pretty well to the rest of urban America (well, maybe not New Orleans, which always had its own thing going on). New York’s Signature Drinks, by Decade 1790s: Punch (brandy and/or rum, lemon and/or lime juice, sugar, water and nutmeg) 1800s: Sling (gin or brandy, sugar, water and nutmeg) 1810s: Julep (brandy and rum or gin, sugar, water and mint) 1820s: Apple Toddy (brandy or apple-brandy, baked apple, sugar and hot water) 1830s: Gin Cocktail (gin, bitters, sugar and water or ice) 1840s: Sherry Cobbler (sherry, orange slices, sugar and ice) 1850s: Brandy Smash (brandy, sugar, mint and ice) 1860s: Whiskey Sour (whiskey, lemon juice, sugar and ice) 1870s: Gin Fizz (gin, lemon juice, sugar, ice and soda water) 1880s: Manhattan Cocktail (rye whiskey, sweet vermouth, bitters and ice) 1890s: Martini Cocktail (gin, sweet vermouth, bitters and ice) 1900s: Scotch Highball (Scotch whisky, soda water and ice) 1910s: Dry Martini (gin, dry vermouth, orange bitters and ice) 1920s: Old-Fashioned (bootleg whiskey, sugar, bitters, orange, cherry and ice) 1930s: Sidecar (brandy, Cointreau, lemon juice and ice) 1940s: Daiquiri (white rum, lime juice, sugar and ice) 1950s: Ultradry Martini (gin, whisper of dry vermouth and ice) 1960s: Gin and Tonic (gin, tonic water, lime and ice) 1970s: White Wine Spritzer (white wine, soda water and ice) 1980s: Vodka Martini (vodka, whisper of dry vermouth and ice) 1990s: Cosmopolitan (citrus vodka, triple sec, lime juice, cranberry juice and ice) 2000s: Rye Manhattan (rye whiskey, sweet vermouth, bitters and ice)

A slug of rye, a splash of maraschino, a splash of simple syrup and a couple of dashes of Angostura bitters. Not very colorful, I suppose, but pretty durn tasty.

Root, baby, root!

Thanks, gents, for the very kind words. I'd like to add that, once you've secured your starter book (Gary's and Dale's are both magnificent), it's not a bad idea to go right to the source and pick up a reprint of either Jerry Thomas' Bartenders Guide, if you're mostly interested in saloon-era drinks, or the magnificent Savoy Cocktail Book; not everything in them will be clear, but either one (or both) will give you plenty to play around with and will let you uncover your own forgotten classics. Happy mixing! --DW

As his, uh, manager, I can state that the Brooklyn version of Stoughton bitters is executed thus: Macerate one-half ounce each of gentian root, orange peel, quassia bark, chamomile flowers (all available from www.cedarvale.net) and calumba root (available from www.baldwins.co.uk) in twenty five ounces of brandy and fifteen ounces of Everclear or equivalent. After five weeks, stir in an ounce by weight of burnt sugar, strain it and bottle it. This recipe, he informs me in his slurred version of the lilting elven tongue, is adapted from the one found in the 1914 Wehman Brothers' Bartenders' Guide, which is in turn lifted from other, earlier guides. He also tells me that the other old recipe, the one with Virginia snakeroot, is more common, but since snakeroot can cause various internal organs to shut down not even the elves will hazard it. Richard Stoughton patented his Stoughton's Elixir in London in 1712; it was evidently the second patent medicine on record. It was a popular import here in the colonies, and after the Revolution it was widely counterfeited until it became a generic apothecary's recipe; as such, it was the first cocktail bitters. Supposedly, Stoughton's original formula had 22 ingredients, while none of the imitations has more than 5 or 6. Perhaps a search of the British patent office's records would provide an original formula, but that's beyond the competency of our tipsy little elves.

You can say that again--I was absorbing those all summer, at least until the mint-patch was reduced to a sea of sticks. Oh, Lord.

One thing to bear in mind when wrestling with Jerry Thomas' recipes is that he--or whoever wrote under his name (remember, he died in 1885, two years before the edition in question came out)--collected them from disparate sources and showed no discernible interest in consistency. Before the jigger was introduced (circa 1880-1890), there was no true "standard" measurement. In 1895, George J. Kappeler, head bartender at New York's tony Holland House, could write "A jigger is a measure used for mesuring liquors when mixing drinks; it holds two ounces. A pony holds half a jigger." In Thomas' day, though, you had to use the bar's standard glassware, which was clearly subject to some variation. In general, the wineglass used was the sherry glass, which held approximately 2 ounces (cf. Paul E. Lowe's Drinks As They Are Mixed, from 1904: ""The jigger...has the same capacity as a sherry glass (2 oz.)..."). The pony was the bar's smallest glass, the kind used to serve liqueurs. It held anywhere from 3/4 oz to 1 1/4 oz.

Well, actually, it's a bookworm's frustration at having spent the last 18 hours riffing repetitively in E minor with all the pots pegged to eleven. \m/

First off, thanks for all the kind words--if I did the smilies thing I'd put the blushy one in here (is there a lushy blushy one?) Second off, how the sausage gets made: In other words, a friend of a friend calls up; her company is under contract to assemble a series of simple, colorful how-to books with a flip-open format. One of them is supposed to be on cocktails, and they just realized that it's due in a month and they don't have any real plan for it or even a writer. Wanna take a crack at it? This explains why there's no Whiskey Sour in the book. I forgot. The one advantage to the flip-top format is if you're making the drink you can stand the recipe up in front of you without looking around for stuff--kitchen timer, pint glasse, cell phone, falafel, the cat--to prop open the book. That's how it's designed to be used, anyway--you're not supposed to actually read the damn thing.

I wouldn't go putting too much credence in Barty-King and Massel; their book, although most useful and full of interesting stuff, lacks, let us say, scholarly rigor and is full of poorly grounded and undigested historical information. In any case, I've paged through Mayerne's Distiller of London and don't recall seeing anything like the Draque in there, or the 1590 rooster-tail spoon (I'll give it another look-see next time I'm at the New York Public Library, just in case). But even if it is in there, it remains to be explained how the term lay dormant for 216 years, only to crop up again in the Hudson Valley among folks among whom the use of the rooster-tail spoon was, as far as I know, completely unknown (the earliest cocktails would have been stirred with a "toddy-stick," a slender muddler-type device made out of wood or metal, rather than a spoon).

Just to muddy the waters a bit, let me add this; it's an ad from the Kingston, Jamaica Gleaner, March 2, 1916: "For a Delicious Thirst-Quencher Try this Special West Indian Swizzle. One teaspoonful [crikey!--DW] Dr. Siegert's Angostura Bitters. Two-thirds wine glass J. Wray & Nephew's Old Rum. One-third wine glass water. A little Syrup or Sugar if liked. One wine glass shaved ice. Place in a shaker and shake well, then strain into a Cocktail Glass. J Wray & Nephew, Port Royal Street, Kingston." So. Swizzle and Cocktail, same-same?

That's always been my understanding of the purpose of the float.

Originally, it would definitely have been Angostura, the bitters of the British West Indies. Now, I'd say whatever works. That goes for floats, too--provided the drink doesn't end up like the mess I got in Trinidad when I ordered a swizzle, which consisted of three kinds of sticky fruit juice, two or three liqueurs, some bitters, some simple syrup, a small scoop of ice and--vodka. AND NO SWIZZLING. The guy just stuck a straw in it and handed it to me. Disgusting. I left it on the nearest table.

I don't know how helpful this is, but here's the essay I did on the Queen's Park Swizzle for the Esquire Drinks Database (I'd link to it--it's available through www.esquire.com--but it's a bit tricky, at least for a Luddite like me). In general, AFAIK, the Swizzle in the form we know it dates from the mid-19th century (before that, the West Indies had no reliable supplay of ice, a sine qua non for a proper Swizzle). The earliest mentions I've seen call for rum or gin--both quite popular in the British West Indies--sugar, ice and, almost invariably, bitters. Barbados' once-famous "Green Swizzle," beloved of all P.G. Wodehouse fans, was evidently the recipe to introduce limes to the mix. Beyond that, if old-school swizzlenomics was an engine for innovation, I haven't seen it (unless you count tipping in a splash of curacao as innovation). In other words, I think George's rules are exactly right, historically speaking, with one exception: traditionally, swizzles were made by the pitcher as well as by the glass.

An ounce and a half of rum? For shame, Sam, for shame. For a true swizzle, you want to double that. Trust me.

I'd have to truthfully state that I haven't had an LIIT in at least 20 years. I guess that that's an answer in itself. And, dear Divalasvegas, I guess that also means you'd find me a lot less fun than I was back in the day. Ah, well.

Ditto, in the late '70s.

While I would perforce have to agree with this from a strictly gustatory point of view, I think that there's another perspective that some might want to take into account. The Old-Fashioned, the drink being referred to here, is the world's first retro cocktail--an 1890s reaction to the gussification of the cocktail. At the time, to make a "standard" whiskey cocktail, if there was such a thing, a bartender would've filled a large bar glass with a mess of fine ice, dashed some simple syrup and some bitters into it out of little bottles with squirt tops, added a "gigger" of liquor (most likely bourbon or rye) and as often as not a dash of absinthe, stirred the whole thing or shaken it depending upon his doctrinaire preference, strained it into a fancy stemmed glass and applied the lemon peel to it (sometimes there was also a cherry, or a pickled walnut, or what-have-you). Now, there's absolutely nothing wrong with this. But it's not the way old-timers had learned to take their cocktails, back in the days of Andrew Jackson, when the barkeeper produced a cocktail by taking a small tumbler, placing a lump of sugar in it, adding a little water and crushing the sugar with a "toddy-stick" (basically, a slimmer version of our muddler; it could be made of hardwood, silver or even--at the El Dorado, in Gold-Rush San Francisco--of solid gold). Once the sugar was crushed, he would dash in some bitters from of a bottle fitted out with a cork with a length of goose quill thrust through it, pour in a tot of liquor (as often as not, brandy) and add a large lump of ice hacked from the block behind the bar. If it was a fancy cocktail, he might splash a little "curacoa" in it, twist a swatch of lemon peel over the top and rub it around the rim. So the Old-Fashioned was an automobile-age look back to the days when railroads were a dangerous novelty; when Indians still roamed east of the Mississippi; when the best restaurants served roast bear and the passenger pigeon was a popular game bird; when barrooms were alive with "the merry raps of the toddy-stick." It's a liquid plea for a saner, quieter, slower life, one in which a gent can take a drink or two without fear that it will impair his ability to dodge a streetcar or operate a rotary press. That's why I like to muddle my sugar cube when I make an Old Fashioned. Edited to correct a couple of the little illiteracies.

switch out the stock for water switch out the bacon for tofu switch out Paris for Peoria switch out Hendrix for Hootie switch out Rita Hayworth for Loretta Young

I actually prefer the Cinzano with bourbon Manhattans and the M&R with rye--the Cinzano has an extra spiciness that tweaks the bourbon up to a little more life. And I also like the Boissiere dry vermouth quite a bit; the one I really dislike is the M&R, which is increasingly more common. Off to the country now, where I will be drinking...well, i'll have to see what I can find in rural Pennsylvania. Beer.

Call me a dope, but I actually like both Noilly Prat (white, of course) and Martini and Rossi (red). In fact, I prefer them both to their Vya equivalents for everyday use, which I define as in Martinis and Manhattans. I like the way the NP's dry nuttiness blends with gin without dominating it, even when mixed in equal parts (my favorite Martini these days--don't forget the dash of orange bitters). Similarly, the M&R's rounded sweetness mixes well with rye without masking it (I like 2 parts rye to slightly less than 1 part vermouth, with Angostura bitters or, for special occasions, Abbott's bitters). Drunk on their own, I agree completely that neither is anything special; I'll take the Vya white or the Carpano red any day. But seeing as I probably drink 50 Martinis or Manhattans for every straight aperitif I'll have, it's almost a moot point for me.

As far as I know, Melissa Clark got her information right from the source, at the Noilly Prat factory (winery? distillery? aperitifery?). And I know for a fact that there is another, darker, longer-aged NP available in France, because I have some of it in my refrigerator. It's much closer to Vya than the regular NP, although I haven't done a side-by-side tasting (no Vya left, and I, too, balk at paying upwards of $20 for vermouth when the $8 NP we get is beyond adequate--although the Vya is a lovely vermouth). I don't believe this NP-extra, or whatever it's called (I don't have a bottle, just some of the liquid) is the standard stuff one gets in France; it's some kind of factory special/extra, etc. When Melissa is back in town I'll ask her about it. I was in France a few weeks ago, and the NP I bought at the supermarket in Cognac and mixed Gotham Cocktails with appeared to be identical to the stuff we get here.

"THE DRUNKEN SAXONS ...Malmesbury says that excessive drinking was the common vice of all ranks of people. We know that King Hardicanute died in a revel, and King Edmund in a drunken brawl at Puckle Church. Thus did mankind reel through the dark ages quarreling, drinking, hunting, hawking, singing Psalms, wearing breeches, grinding in mills, eating hot bread, rocked in cradles, buried in coffins, weak, suffering, sublime. Well might King Alfred exclaim 'Maker of all creatures, help now thy miserable mankind.'" --Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 1883