The Life & Times of Jerry Thomas

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http://thejerrythomasproject.blogspot.com/2010/11/life-and-times-of-jerry-thomas.html

With the growing interest and research into our cocktail forefathers and vintage libations, particularly the punch category, I thought it'd be appropriate to share the following article by Herbert Asbury, first published in December 1927 in H.L Mencken's American Mercury.

Asbury's article is a fascinating look at the life of Professor Jerry Thomas, written right at the heart of Prohibition in America which goes some way to explain the tone adopted by the author. Asbury later reprinted Thomas's work in 1928 and went to the effort of returning the book to its original state after being bastardized in the 1887 reprint.

This really is a must-read for anyone that has an interest in cocktails and cocktail history, particularly those who have read Dave Wondrich's outstanding Imbibe. The article is broken down into six parts so you may want to nip away from your computer now to fix yourself a couple of glasses of Gin Punch, however if you can't make it in one sitting then please bookmark the link and return at a later date.

For those that wish to compound any of the recipes included in the article please see the following Table of Measurements which is included again at the bottom of this page.

Enjoy!

PROFESSOR JERRY THOMAS by HERBERT ASBURY

PART I

The Lord smiled benevolently upon the city of New Haven, Connecticut, on a stormy Winter’s night in 1825, and his official tot-bearer, the stork, rode the gale from heaven and deposited a little stranger within the little cottage home of Mr. and Mrs. William Daniel Thomas, respectable though pious people, who were ever ready to drop a coin into the collection plate or provide a fried chicken for the pastor. They gazed upon the infant in bewildered but worshipping awe, and listened raptly to the wails which racked his puny frame. They named him Jeremiah.

“We’ll make him a preacher,” said Mr. Thomas. “Or a professor,” he added, thinking of the adjacent Yale College and the dignified savants of the faculty.

“A preacher,” Mrs. Thomas decided, and murmured ecstatically. “The Reverend Jeremiah Thomas! Oh, will, maybe a D.D.!”

“Of course,” agreed Mr. Thomas. “By all means a D.D.”

But, alas, the fond hopes of doting parents! A power transcending that of man had decreed the fate of the innocent babe, and no such exalted destiny had been plotted for him upon the heavenly charts. He did not become the Rev. Jeremiah Thomas; it was not written that he should receive and interpret, and, when necessary, amend the commands and wishes of the Almighty. Nor did he become a teacher at Yale, although the Yale boys learned much from him before he left New Haven to give his message to the world. Instead he became simply Jerry Thomas – but for more than three score years he lived a life of singular usefulness, and blessed many communities with the abundance of his service. He was a great artist with a touch of true genius, and the importance of his influence upon the gentler and more aesthetic aspects of American culture has been neither properly recognized nor properly estimated. Indeed, he lies in an obscure grave, untopped by granite shaft or public memorial.

Briefly, Jerry Thomas was a bartender, but what a bartender! His name should never be mentioned in the same breath as that of a frowsy gorilla, who, in these dark days of Prohibition, may be found lounging behind the bar of a dingy basement speakeasy, sloshing lukewarm ginger-ale into a dirty glass half-filled with raw alcohol, and then calling the unspeakable concoction a drink. Jerry Thomas had nothing in common with the Volsteadian simian, there is no more a basis for comparing them than there is for comparing Michael Angelo to Bud Fisher, or Dante to Eddie Guest. For Jerry Thomas was neither frowsy nor an ape; he was indeed an imposing and lordly figure of a man (Homo sapiens), portly, sleek and jovial, and yet possessed of immense dignity. A jacket of pure and spotless white encased his great bulk, and a huge and handsome moustache, neatly trimmed in the arresting style called walrus, adorned his lip and lay caressingly athwart his plump and rosy cheeks. He presented an inspiring spectacle as he leaned upon the polished mahogany of his bar, amid the gleam of polished silver and cut glass, and impressively pronounced the immemorial greeting, “What will it be, gentlemen?” – a sacred rite which the modern poison slinger has corrupted into a swipe at a pine board with a greasy cloth and a peevish, “Whatcha want, gents? Hooch?”

In these decayed and evangelical times, when drinking has reverted to a savage guzzling of liquid dynamite, the name of Jerry Thomas arouses no answering spark of manhood from the craven victims of bootleg liquor or the cowed and beaten slaves of the Anti-Saloon league. But to the ancients who weep beside the bier of a lost art it brings back beautiful memories of golden fizzes and stimulating juleps, of cobblers, slings and sangarees. For Jerry Thomas was the greatest drinks mixer of his age; his praises were sung by enlightened and Christian men from the Gulf of Mexico to the barren coast of Maine, and from the Golden Gate to Broadway. Aye, even in Europe he was recognised as a master craftsman; he visited Liverpool, Southampton, London and Paris in 1859, bearing with him his magnificent set of solid silver bar utensils, constructed at a cost of $4,000 for his own personal use, and astounded the effete of drinkers of the Old World with the variety and extent of his virtuosity.

It was Jerry Thomas – rise please – who invented those celebrated cold weather beverages which have come down to us as the blue blazer and the Tom and Jerry, the former a powerful concoction of burning whiskey and boiling water which, if properly employed, would render the hot water bottle obsolete. And it was Jerry Thomas who, a few years before the Civil War, gave the aid and encouragement of his genius to the cocktail, then a meek and lowly beverage pining for recognition and appreciation, and by self-sacrificing work in the laboratory raised it to its rightful place among the drinks. A perfect flood of new mixtures soon showered upon a delighted world, and the Metropolitan Hotel at Prince Street and Broadway, in New York, where Jerry was Principal Bartender in the days when New York was the scene of the soundest drinking on earth, became the first great cocktail house.

As a mark of gratitude for his invention of the Tom and Jerry and the blue blazer, and for his researches in the field of the cocktail, his host of admirers invested him with the honourable, if honorary, title of Professor, by which he was thereafter known, and which he carried with becoming dignity through the remainder of his earthly pilgrimage. Thus he fulfilled one of the ambitions which his father had expressed for him as he lay, a helpless little one, in the cradle of the New Haven cottage. But the church, ever an obstacle to human progress, failed to recognise his genius.

Edited December 1, 2010 by evo-lution (log)

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PART II

But it was not only as a scientist and beverage dispenser that Professor Thomas deserves a monument and the plaudits which are now wasted upon generals, bishops, movie actors, channel swimmers and aviators, for his interests were numerous and his fame in other lines was great; in many different ways, indeed, he lent force and direction to the cultural advance of the nation. He was a pioneer minstrel showman of the Pacific coast, and owned a music hall in New York wherein Lew Dockstader began the career which was to make him the most celebrated minstrel man of his time; and he sponsored the first public exhibition of Thomas Nast’s cartoons, and did much to popularise the work of that famous artist. And he also achieved renown as a collector, ; he owned more than three hundred gourds, of every conceivable shape and size, the finest and most important group of these natural curiosities in the United States, if not in the world. Indeed, the collection may well have been unique. Moreover, he was an author whose work has been sadly neglected by the critics, even by those high-powered, super-intellectuals among them who possess the occult power of reading things in a book the writer never heard of. These giants sing the praises of realism, yet have persistently ignored the product of one of the few men who were ever able to make the real even more so, and who at the same time could take a frightened, trembling wretch and by the skilful application of a cocktail, cobbler, a julep or a sangaree, sweetened to his taste, transform him into a stalwart hero, eager and able to bare the world upon his shoulders. The attention of these critics is respectfully invited to the volume into which Professor Thomas poured his vials of his wisdom; nay, his very soul, and published under this simple title:

This erudite work first appeared early in 1862, and quickly went through half a dozen large printings. Said the preface to the first edition:

"It struck us that a list of all the social drinks – the composite beverages, if we may call them so – of America, would really be one of the curiosities of jovial literature; and that if it was combined with a catalogue of the mixtures common to other nations, and made practically useful by the addition of a concise description of the various processes for brewing each, it would be a blessing to mankind. There would be no excuse for imbibing, with such a book at hand, the villainous compounds of bar-keeping Goths and Vandals, who know no more of the amenities of a bon-vivant existence than a Hottentot can know of the bouquet of champagne. “There’s philosophy,” says Father Tom in the drama, “even in a jug of punch.” We claim the credit of philosophy preaching for example, then, to no ordinary extent in the composition of this volume, for our index exhibits the title of eighty-six different kind of punches, together with a universe of cobblers, juleps, bitters, cups, slings, shrubs, etc., each and all of which the reader is carefully educated how to concoct in the choicest manner. For the perfection of this education the name, alone, of Jerry Thomas is a sufficient guarantee. He has travelled Europe and America in search of all that is recondite in this branch of the spirit art. He has been the Jupiter Olympus of the bar at the Metropolitan Hotel in this city. He was the presiding deity at the Planters’ House, St. Louis. He has been the proprietor of one of the most recherché saloons in New Orleans as well as in New York. His very name is synonymous in the lexicon of mixed drinks with all that is rare and original. And as he is as inexorable as the Medes and Persians in his principle that no excellent drink can be made out of anything but excellent materials, we conceive that we are safe in asserting that whatever may be prepared after his directions will be able to speak eloquently for itself. “Good wine needs no bush,” Shakespeare tells us, and over one of Jerry’s mixtures eulogy is quite as redundant."

So rapturously was “The Bon Vivant’s Companion” acclaimed, and so phenomenal its success that scores of imitations soon appeared, and the book-stalls of the nation groaned beneath the weight of volumes purporting to give directions for the concocting of all sorts of delectable beverages. But through all this excess of publishing Professor Thomas’s work remained steadfastly fist in the hearts of his countrymen, everywhere accepted as the production of a Great Master. Even to this day the real adept at manipulating a cocktail-shaker and other such utensils, one who approaches the act of compounding a drink in the proper humbleness of spirit, regards it somewhat as the Modernist regards the Scriptures: as perhaps a trifle out-moded by later discoveries, yet still worthy of all respect and reverence as the foundation of creed and practice. The last edition was published in 1887, and was something to weep over, for not only had the elegant preface and the important contribution of Professor Schultz been omitted, but Professor Thomas’s bursts of lyric writing had been subjected to the censorious scissors and the ravening blue pencil, and the title of the work had been changed from the roisteringly significant “Bon Vivant’s Companion” to the vulgar and prosaic “Bartender’s Guide, or, How to Mix All Kinds of Plain and Fancy Drinks.” Worse, the elegant preface had given way to uninspiring, “Hints for Bartenders.” In this form the book lacked spirit, it was little more than a dull account of instructions to take a little of this and a little of that, shake them up and pour them down. I have been unable to find any record of how and when Professor Thomas passed to his reward, but I should not be surprised to learn that he expired of shock and horror with the final edition of his invaluable contribution to American science and culture in his hands. It is impossible to believe that he acquiesced in the editorial mutilations.

When Professor Thomas sat down to write “The Bon Vivant’s Companion” and spray his nectarian delights upon a parched and thirsty world, he was very full of his subject – I speak figuratively – and his enthusiasm took the form of appending brief but appropriate comment to certain of his most beloved recipes. Thus, when he had set down the sum total of human knowledge concerning the preparation of that blood brother to the cocktail, the brandy crusta, one snifter of which would make a Prohibition agent of today burst into tears and tear up his bootlegging contracts, he added, “then smile.” Again, when he had described a favourite beverage in great and glamorous detail, he concluded with the simple injunction, “Imbibe!” Occasionally he soared into the more rarefied strata of literary endeavour and brought down a poem; it is one of those inspired moments, when the mantle of Omar lay caressingly across his shoulders, that we are indebted for the proper method of preparing mulled wine, a not so mild beverage which in those simple and lawless days was usually consumed amid the tender intimacies of the home;

Edited December 1, 2010 by evo-lution (log)

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PART III

The dictionary of American Biography and other standard works of reference, to their shame be it said, contain no accounts of Professor Thomas’s life, and extensive research has failed to unearth any information about the period of his early youth. It seems fair to assume, however, that he did not attend Yale College or otherwise employ his time in dissipation, for at the age of twenty we find him a very eager but humble assistant to the Principal Bartender of a New Haven saloon, where he soon attracted favourable attention by his indefatigable quest of knowledge and lush inventiveness. He remained in New Haven for two years, constantly adding to his store of wisdom, and conducting a series of experiments by which he definitely disproved the theory, then widely held, and in recent years revived, that the alcoholic capacity of the American college boy was (and is) unlimited. In 1847, having exhausted New Haven as well as a majority of the Yale lads, he decided to seek hardier subjects for his tests, and so shipped before the mast and sailed out of New York aboard the Annie Smith. The skipper of the Annie Smith was a notorious martinet, but he served excellent grog, and Professor Thomas hoped that with this as a basis he might invent something which would relieve the sailor’s life of much of its hardship. The plight of the seaman had always saddened him.

The Annie Smith docked at San Francisco in the early Fall of 1849, after an eventful voyage around Cape Horn, and Professor Thomas left the vessel without the formality of saying goodbye to the skipper, for that verjuiced person had failed to recognise genius even when it was constantly under foot, and had looked with vigorous disapproval upon al his attempts to improve the grog and drinking habits of the crew. The Professor wisely remained in seclusion until the Annie Smith had sailed on her return voyage, and then became first assistant to the Principal Bartender of the El Dorado saloon, a famous resort of early San Francisco. There he continued his researches, and found excellent laboratory animals in the booted, bewhiskered, red-shirted, artillery-laden miners who flocked into the Dorado eager to exchange their new-found wealth for the products of the bartender’s genius. For these gentlemen, rough of exterior but sound drinkers, Professor Thomas prepared the simple beverages of the period, but on occasion he compounded novel mixtures which crashed through their systems and shook them loose from their boots, or at any rate from their gold dust. It is related that once, when a party of desperadoes swarmed into the El Dorado intent on robbery, he suavely suggested that they refresh themselves before proceeding with their nefarious enterprise, they assented, whereupon he prepared a dram which stretched them quivering and helpless upon the floor. The Vigilantes then hanged them with considerable ceremony.

Professor Thomas refused to divulge the composition of the potion with which he laid the bandits low, insisting that it had neither commercial value nor artistic merit, and that he would never again mix it unless confronted by a similar emergency. So far as can be ascertained he died with the secret locked in his heart. But the undoing of the robbers had not exhausted his powers of invention, as the customers of the El Dorado learned a few days later when there came into the saloon a giant laden with gold dust and with three layers of pistols strapped around his equator. He had been many months in the mines and was fit to be tied; he yearned for adventure, and loudly proclaimed that whiskey was a beverage for nursing infant, and that the only way a distillery could get him would be to fall upon him.

“Barkeep!” he roared. “Fix me up some hell-fire that’ll shake me right down to my gizzard!”

Professor Thomas surveyed him calmly and shrewdly estimated his capacity, which was obviously abnormal. He realised that here, at last, was a man worthy of his genius.

“Come back in an hour,” he said, “I shall have something for you then.”

The giant stamped out of the saloon, and Professor Thomas retired to the back room. His reputation, he realised, was at stake; if he did not produce something which would take the roar out the colossus, all would be lost, even honour. So he grappled with the problem and within an hour emerged, his brow wrinkled by furrows from the violence of his effort, but with a magnificent idea sizzling and crackling in his brain. A deep silence fell upon the barroom as the Professor, looking neither to the right nor the left, moved slowly into position behind the bar, and with great care took from their places in a special rack two silver mugs, with handles. These were the show utensils of the El Dorado, for they had been imported from New York at great expense, and the mere fact that they were being handled was sufficient to indicate that something of importance impended. Carefully setting the mugs upon the bar, Professor Thomas twirled his great moustache and turned to his audience.

“Gentlemen” he announced, impressively, “you are about to witness the birth of a new beverage!”

A sigh of anticipation arose from the assemblage, and with one accord the mass of men moved forward, respectfully, until they stood five feet before the bar, with the giant, still booted, in the front rank. Professor Thomas smiled and poured a tumbler full of Scotch whiskey into one of the mugs, following it with a slightly smaller quantity of boiling water. Then, with an evil-smelling sulphur match of the period, he ignited the liquid, and as the blue flame shot toward the ceiling and the crowd shrank back in awe, he hurled the blazing mixture back and forth between the two mugs, with a rapidity and dexterity that were well nigh unbelievable. This amazing spectacle continued in full movement for perhaps ten seconds, and then Professor Thomas quickly poured the beverage into a tumbler and smothered the flame. He stirred a teaspoonful of pulverised white sugar into the mixture, added a twist of lemon peel, and shoved the smoking concoction across the bar to the booted and bewhiskered giant.

“Sir!” said Professor Thomas, bowing, “The blue blazer!”

The boastful miner threw his head back and flung the boiling drink down his throat. He stood motionless for a moment, smacking his lips and tasting the full flavour of it, and then a startled and horrified expression spread over his face. He swayed like a reed in the wind. He shivered from head to foot. His teeth rattled. His mouth opened and closed, but he could say nothing. He sank slowly into a chair. He was no longer fit to be tied.

“He done it!” he whispered at last. “Right down to my gizzard! Yes, Sir, right down to my gizzard! Yes, Sir, right down to my gizzard!”

Finally, he staggered to his feet, flung a bag of gold dust upon the bar, and wandered unsteadily into the night; and thereafter drank no more for three days, for the effect of a blue blazer, prepared by an artist, is by no means ephemeral. “The blue blazer does not have a very euphonious or classic name,” wrote Professor Thomas in the “Bon Vivant’s Companion”, “but it tastes better to the palate than it sounds to the ear. A beholder gazing for the first time upon an experienced artist compounding this beverage, would naturally come to the conclusion that it was a nectar for Pluto rather than Bacchus. The novice in mixing this beverage should be careful not to scald himself. To become proficient in throwing the liquid to one mug from the other, it will be necessary to practice for some time with cold water.”

Edited December 1, 2010 by evo-lution (log)

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PART IV

The blue blazer soon became the most popular winter beverage on the Pacific Coast, but the strain of constantly preparing it so wearied Professor Thomas that within a few months he concluded to retire from the practice of his art for a short period of recuperation. He therefore resigned his position as first assistant to the Principal Bartender of the El Dorado, and betook himself to the Yuba River goldfields, near Donaville, where he staked out a claim and busied himself with the prosaic occupation of digging gold. But after a week he could no longer stand supinely by and witness monstrous indignities which the unskilled bartenders of Donaville perpetrated nightly upon helpless liquors, so he returned to his life work, tending bar in the saloon owned by Claycraft & Cheever. During the daylight hours, however, he continued to work his mine, and by the following spring had amassed a fortune of some $16,000 in gold dust. And having by that time educated the Donaville bartenders in good mixing habits, he cast for cultural benefits that he might confer upon the booted and bewhiskered miners. After a careful survey of the field, he decided that the principal need of the goldfields was refined amusement. It is true that the mining camps fairly swarmed with drinking places, and dance-halls staffed by hussies in short skirts, but Professor Thomas judged that such entertainment as they provided was neither refined nor educational; he was especially pained by the drinking habits of the hussies and their admirers, who generally took their liquor straight and thereafter abandoned themselves to disgraceful antics. To remedy this situation, he organised a minstrel band, with which he toured the gold country throughout the summer. Ned Beach and Tom King were the end men, while the troupe also included Billy Wallace, Dan Coombs and Charley Stevens, all very famous singers and blackface comedians. The show prospered, but when winter came Professor Thomas suddenly abandoned the enterprise and sailed for Central America. The reason for his departure remained a mystery until a miner, another bewhiskered giant, boasted that he had asked Professor Thomas to prepare a certain beverage, and that the Professor was obliged to hang his head and admit that he had never heard of it. The giant explained that the drink was peculiar to Central America.

Within a few months Professor Thomas had stocked his mental reservoir with the wisdom of Central Americans, and then took ship to New York. There he learned that the Yale boys were again strutting boastfully about New Haven with no bartender to guide them. He immediately answered the call of duty and hastened to his home town, where he opened a new barroom, introduced the blue blazer, and soon put the Yale lads in their proper places. His task completed, he disposed of his New Haven holdings and journeyed to South Carolina to study the julep in its native haunt. When he had added this to his repertoire he went to Chicago, and for several months eked out a lonely existence in that outpost of civilisation, which had not then been subjected to civilising influences of machine guns. From Chicago he dropped down to St. Louis, where he became Principal Bartender at the Planters’ House, one of the most famous hotels in America, especially noted for its fried chicken and waffles, its catfish and candied sweet potatoes. It was while he was presiding over the Planters’ House bar, in the early fifties, that Professor Thomas reached the apex of his career by inventing a beverage which he first called the Copenhagen, and then the Jerry Thomas, but which has thundered down the years as the Tom and Jerry. I give herewith the original recipe for this prince of cold weather drinks. It should be prepared in a punch bowl, or other large container:

Five pounds of sugar

One dozen eggs

Half a small glass of Jamaica rum

One and a half teaspoonful of ground cinnamon

Half teaspoonful of ground cloves

Half teaspoonful of ground allspice

Beat the whites of the eggs to a stiff froth, and the yolks until they are thin as water, and mix together and add the spice and rum, and thicken with sugar until the mixture attains the consistence of a light batter.

Take a small bar glass, and to one teaspoonful of the above mixture, add one wineglass full of brandy, and fill the glass with boiling water; grate a little nutmeg on top. Adepts at the bar, in serving the Tom and Jerry, sometimes adopt a mixture of one-half brandy, one-fourth Jamaica rum and one-fourth Santa Cruz rum, instead of brandy plain. This compound is usually mixed and kept in a bottle, and a wineglass is used to each tumbler of Tom and Jerry.

A teaspoonful of cream of tartar, or about as much bicarbonate of soda as you can get on a dime, will prevent the sugar from settling to the bottom of the mixture.

With the invention of the Tom and Jerry and the introduction of the blue blazer into the Missouri metropolis, Professor Thomas concluded – though mistakenly – that he had civilised St. Louis and taken the curse off the hard mid-Western winter. So he surrendered his post as Principal Bartender at the Planters’ House, and amid the wailing of the citizenry embarked upon flat-bottomed stern-wheeler which, in time, landed him at New Orleans. There he dipped into his money bags and opened a barroom which the preface to his literary work describes as a very recherché establishment. But he soon became discouraged, for his heart was in the preparation of cold-weather beverages, and there was scant demand in Louisiana for the blue blazer and the Tom and Jerry. So he sold his New Orleans holdings and returned to New York, where he was immediately engaged as Principal Bartender of the Metropolitan Hotel, then under the management of William M. Tweed and the centre of the city’s nightlife, which in those days was quite abundant. Professor Thomas celebrated his return to the chilly North by mixing a huge punch bowl of Tom and Jerry, which was given away free to all customers for a week, and by introducing several fine Southern mixtures to the jaded palates of the principal men of Gotham. Chief among them was the crusta, a beverage of rare merit, first compounded by Santini, owner of a celebrated Spanish café in New Orleans. In “The Bon Vivant’s Companion” Professor Thomas gave the following instructions for preparing the brandy crusta, head of the family:

Three or four dashes of gum syrup

One dash of Boker’s bitters

One wine-glass of brandy

Two dashes of Curacao

One dash of lemon juice

First, mix the ingredients in a small tumbler, then take a fancy red-wine glass, rub a sliced lemon around the rim of the same, and dip it in pulverised white sugar, so that the sugar will adhere to the edge of the glass. Pare half a lemon the same as you would an apple (all in one piece) so that the paring will fit in the wine-glass, as shown in the cut, and strain the Crusta from the tumbler into it. Then smile.

Edited December 1, 2010 by evo-lution (log)

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PART V

When Professor Thomas began his experiments with the cocktail, this splendid concoction, whose name is now daily taken in vain by thousands of weird mixtures in thousands of American homes, was then the puling infant of the great family of beverages, and had few friends and practically no admirers. “The cocktail,” wrote Professor Thomas, “is a modern invention and is generally used on fishing trips and other good sporting parties, although some patients insist that it is a good in the morning as a tonic.” Indeed, at this period it was not only a morning drink, an eye-opener, but was seldom served over the bar: as Professor Thomas indicates, it was generally bottled and sold for trips into the country and other expeditions. In the course of time it became more popular, but as late as 1879 it had not become the standard before-dinner drink that it was in later years, and as it is now throughout this great land. “In the morning,” said a paper called Under the Gaslight, in 1879, “the merchant, the lawyer, or the Methodist deacon takes his cocktail. Suppose it is not properly compounded? The whole day’s proceedings go crooked because the man himself feels wrong from the effects of an unskilfully mixed drink.”

After much research, Professor Thomas concluded that the lowly estate of the cocktail was in part due to the faulty bitters employed in its composition. He therefore busied himself in his laboratory, and in due time appeared with Jerry Thomas’s Own Bitters, prepared accordingly to the following formula:

One-fourth pound of raisins, two ounces of cinnamon, one ounce of snake root, one lemon and one orange cut into slices, one ounce of cloves, and one ounce of allspice. Put the mixture in a good sized bottle and fill with Santa Cruz rum.

This discovery was made soon after Professor Thomas opened the first of his New York barrooms at Broadway and Washington Place, and during the next few years cocktail drinking increased so greatly that the beverage became the favourite morning tipple of all men of convivial habit, and few self-respecting New York businessmen would attempt to begin a day without one. However, very few of the myriad of present day cocktails were known. The first edition of “The Bon Vivant’s Companion” lists but ten different varieties – the bottle, the brandy, the fancy brandy, the whiskey, the champagne, the gin, the fancy gin, the Japanese, the soda, and the Jersey. They were all simple mixtures, and with the exception of the last three are sufficiently described by their names. The Japanese cocktail was thus prepared by Professor Thomas:

One tablespoonful of orgeat syrup

One half teaspoonful of Boker’s Bitters

One wineglass of brandy

One or two pieces of lemon peel

The Jersey cocktail he composed of sugar, bitters and cider, while in the soda cocktail he substituted soda for the cider. Both were rather innocuous.

Professor Thomas’s ballyhoo for the cocktail was carried on with great energy for almost a score of years, and the last edition of his masterpiece contains the formulae for no fewer than twenty-four different kinds, including such favourites as the Manhattan, the Absinthe, and the Martini, which was originally called the Martinez. He also gave directions in that edition for preparing the morning glory, the Saratoga and the coffee cocktails, which were popular for many years but seldom heard now. He made the morning glory thus:

Three dashes of gum syrup

Two dashes of Curacao

two dashes of Boker's bitters

One dash of Absinthe

One pony of brandy

One pony of whiskey

One piece of lemon peel, twisted to express the oil

Two small pieces of ice

Stir thoroughly and remove the ice. Fill the glass with Seltzer water or plain soda, and stir with a teaspoon having a little sugar in it.

And thus the coffee cocktail:

One teaspoonful of powdered white sugar

One fresh egg

One large wineglass of port wine

One pony of brandy

Break the egg into the glass, put in the sugar, and lastly the port wine. Shake up very thoroughly, and strain into a medium bar goblet. Grate a little nutmeg on top before serving.

“The name of this drink,” wrote Professor Thomas with characteristic meticulosity, “is a misnomer, as coffee and bitters are not to be found among its ingredients. But it looks like coffee when it has been properly concocted, hence probably its name.”

Professor Thomas, in his work, also described five very interesting drinks called the Bishop, the Protestant Bishop, the Archbishop, the Cardinal, and the Pope. Thus he made a Bishop, “Stick an orange full of cloves and roast it before a fire. When brown enough, cut it into quarters, and pour over it a quart of hot port wine, add sugar to taste, and let the mixture simmer for half an hour.” To make an Archbishop, he substituted claret for port, to make a Cardinal, he substituted champagne for claret, and to make a Pope he substituted Burgundy for champagne. He prepared a Protestant Bishop thus: “Mix four tablespoons of white sugar, two tumblers of water, one lemon in slices, one bottle of claret, four tablespoons of Santa Cruz rum or Jamaica rum, and ice.” All of these beverages were described in the first edition of “The Bon Vivant’s Companion,” but in the last edition the Archbishop, the Cardinal and the Pope were omitted because of protests from the Protestant denominations, which complained that the proportion of four Catholic drinks to one Protestant was unfair.

Edited December 1, 2010 by evo-lution (log)

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PART VI

Professor Thomas left the Metropolitan in 1859 to brave the dangers of a trans-Atlantic voyage, but he was both seasick and homesick, and in less than a year he was again in New York, and at Broadway and Washington Place opened the most ornate barroom in the metropolis. But within another twelve months the Wanderlust led him in a covered wagon to San Francisco, where he was Principal Bartender at the Occidental Hotel for almost two years. Then he joined a wagon train to Virginia City, Nevada, where he introduced sound drinking practices and amassed another small fortune in gold dust. In 1865 he returned to New York and roamed no more.

He opened a barroom at Broadway and Twenty-Second Street which became one of the most celebrated saloons in the history of the city, and was frequented by the best citizens. Thomas Nast was then a young man struggling to find his place in the field of art, and Professor Thomas graciously extended a helping hand to him by opening his back room to the first exhibition of Nast cartoons. A hundred drawings of prominent personages were displayed upon the walls, and Nast leaped into instant popularity. Later Ned Mullin, a brilliant but dissipated caricaturist, exhibited his work in Thomas’s gallery.

After seven years of continuous success and popularity, he sold his property at Twenty-Second Street and opened another equally elaborate place at 1239 Broadway, where he remained for eight years. He finally disposed of this establishment to John Morrissey, a noted sporting figure. Morrissey came to New York in the early fifties during Gotham’s golden age of gambling, when more than 6,000 gaming places were in open operation on Manhattan Island. Of these some 3,000 were first class establishments catering to men of sound financial substance and furnished with an elegance unsurpassed in later years. A majority of these early houses were in Park Row, Park Place, and lower Broadway, and in Barclay, Vesey and Liberty Streets, which are now entirely given over to business. They included such celebrated resorts as those operated by Orlando Moore, Handsome Sam Suydam, Jack Wallis, John Colton and Pat Herne. Wallis was a Chinaman who had been a Faro dealer for French Jose, but had won the business from his employer on the toss of a coin. Many of the best houses were owned or backed by Reuben Parsons, the gambling monarch of the period, who was widely known as the Great American Faro Banker. Morrissey’s most noted place was in Broadway just north of Tenth Street, not far from the present Grace Church. His house in Saratoga Springs, which he founded in 1867, later came under the ownership of Richard Canfield, probably the most famous gambler New York has ever produced. In all of these elegant establishments faro was the principal game, and for more than twenty years after the Civil War it occupied the place in the affections of American fanciers that bridge and poker hold today.

After John Morrissey had purchased the Broadway property Professor Thomas moved downtown and in August, 1875, opened Thomas’s Exchange at No. 3 Barclay Street, which soon became as popular as any of his other places. Morrissey operated the Broadway house as a pool-room for a year or so, when it again came into the hands of the Professor, and was remodelled as a theatre. It opened with a minstrel show in which Lew Dockstader made his first hit as a comedian. Dockstader’s brother Charley was also a member of the company, as were Tommy Turner, Billy Bryant, Frank Kent, and Charley White, then the dean of minstrelsy. It was soon after he opened his Barclay Street bar that Professor Thomas began to form his notable collection of gourds, which soon crowded cartoons and caricatures out of his mind, and within a few months literally covered the walls of his back room.

In Barclay Street, now largely devoted to the sale of religious images and literature, Professor Thomas spent the remainder of his professional career, surrounded by his gourds and warmed by the respect and admiration of all enlightened drinkers. He strove to the last to inculcate proper drinking habits in his clientele, and during his later years, as is the fashion of decaying men, became just a bit finicky, particularly about the Tom and Jerry and the blue blazer. He insisted that they were intended for cold weather only, and refused to prepare a Tom and Jerry until the first snowfall. It is related that he once smashed a punch-bowl containing the mixture which he found in the bar of a business rival in early September. He was even more strict with the blue blazer, and would prepare it for no man until the thermometer registered ten degrees or less above zero. Thus battling for classical standards in his chosen art, he passed away, mourned and honoured. He remains the greatest bartender in American history.

Edited December 1, 2010 by evo-lution (log)

[evo-lution]

With regards the Blue Blazer, this is a pretty sensational throwing technique. Been pondering whether this would be achievable with flaming liquid...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcuEkldGs5M

[slkinsey]

What I'd like to see is someone master the old-school technique of tossing the foaming cocktail of booze and shaved ice in a big arc between two tins.

[Kohai]

That guy needs to go into bartending.