Imbibe!

Table of Contents

 

“
Imbibe!
rescues barman Jerry Thomas, an American hero, from the dustbin of history. We drinkers and readers are in the debt of his scribe, Dave Wondrich, who proves an engaging and intellectually curious guide to the barroom netherworlds where ‘bottle conjurers’ and other ne’er-do-wells ‘carved their deeds in ice.’”

 

“David Wondrich has drunk his way through two centuries of American cocktails and other mixed drinks. He emerges to tell us, with clarity and wit, what he encountered, how it was made, and how to make it now. In his re-creations of the drinks of yesteryear, he stops at nothing, even growing his own snakeroot to make Jerry Thomas’s Bitters. Thomas was called ‘the Professor’ in his day. If this title belongs to any living expert on the cocktail, it belongs to Wondrich.”

 

“David Wondrich is such an envy-producing polymath that it drives me to drink. Brilliant historian, beautiful writer, former punk rocker, absinthe-maker, mixological marvel, and perhaps, yes, even
wizard
. Plus he can grow an amazing beard. There are few people in the world I rely on to be so authoritative and so entertaining all at once, and to mix an amazing cocktail at the same time. And those few people are David Wondrich.”

A PERIGEE BOOK
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division
of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
• Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) •
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of
Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) • Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel
Park, New Delhi—110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632,
New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24
Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

 

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

 

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Copyright © 2007 by David Wondrich

 

Parts of this book have previously appeared, in greatly altered form, in
Drinks
; in Slow Food USA’s news-letter,
The Snail
; and on
Esquire.com
.

 

All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without
permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s
rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
PERIGEE and the “P” design are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

eISBN : 978-0-399-53287-0

1. Cocktails. 2. Drinking customs. 3. Thomas, Jerry, 1830-1885. I. Title.
TX951.W5663 2007
641.8’74—dc22 2007027096

 

 

 

PUBLISHER’S NOTE: The recipes contained in this book are to be followed exactly as written. The publisher is not responsible for your specific health or allergy needs that may require medical supervision. The publisher is not responsible for any adverse reactions to the recipes contained in this book.

 

Most Perigee books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchases for sales promotions, premiums, fund-raising, or educational use. Special books, or book excerpts, can also be created to fit specific needs. For details, write: Special Markets, Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

Back in 1985, when the legendary New York restaurateur Joe Baum asked me to create a classic bar for him at the fine dining restaurant Aurora, he sent me on a search for a book that would explain what he meant by a classic bar:
How to Mix Drinks, or The Bon Vivant’s Companion
by Jerry Thomas. After my initial unsuccessful attempts searching bookstores and without the Internet for quick reference, I finally discovered that Joe had neglected to mention that the book was written in 1862 and had been out of print since the Herbert Asbury edition was published in 1928. Eventually I got my hands on a copy of the later edition and started down a road that changed my thinking about bars and cocktails, and brought me to the Rainbow Room—a road that led to a revival of interest in real drinks made in a culinary style with real ingredients following original recipes, which continues to this day.

The bigger-than-life characters found in Jerry Thomas’s world actually seemed familiar to me, given my deep working knowledge of numerous New York City watering holes in the late 1960s—joints where the collection of con men, politicians, sporting types, and jazz-loving foreigners was as colorful as the crowd in any Bowery music hall of the mid-nineteenth century. The bartenders at Jimmy Ryan’s Club, where I practically lived back in those days, would have been right at home in one of Thomas’s saloons; they could determine as you approached the bar whether you had two nickels to rub together and give you the bum’s rush before you could open your mouth to order.

Colorful characters aside, what the barrel-chested and bejeweled Jerry Thomas embodied that has been lacking in the post-Prohibition bars in this country is an insatiable curiosity for the strange-sounding concoctions collected during extensive travels and adapted to his personal style—concoctions, I soon discovered, that were crafted from ingredients half of which no longer existed. But that left me undeterred in my quest to make Joe Baum’s vision of a classic bar a reality.

Jerry Thomas’s book taught me how to craft drinks without the aid of commercial mixers; remember, all we knew as journey-men bartenders in those years was what we had learned from other untrained bartenders who came before us. That usually comprised a shot of spirits and a good portion of sour mix or daiquiri mix and a shake. The artificial foaming agent in the mix made the drink look great; as for flavor, those who wanted it drank straight spirits. Bloody Marys were one of the few drinks we made from scratch, and not many knew how to prepare a decent Bloody Mary mix with the right balance between the hot pepper and the sweet tomato juice.

Thomas talked about sugar syrups and how to make and then use them with fresh citrus juices. He was not generous with descriptions on technique and how to assemble these drinks, but there were enough hints here and there to fill in the blanks. Those hints, and lots of trial and error, led to my first all-fresh-ingredient cocktail menu at a time when cocktail menus were as rare as hens’ teeth. When I moved to the Rainbow Room with my newfound skills and the benefit of Joe’s celebrity and public relations machine behind me, the idea of old-as-new-again became the cutting edge; classics revived made quite the splash in the trade and eventually in the general market.

Back then I could have used a book like David Wondrich’s as a teaching tool, to take the bartenders through the logical steps of punch to sling to cocktail, allowing them to experience firsthand how the whole culture of the cocktail evolved; even tasting them through the steps.

Wondrich has provided us with the most important and authoritative book on the American cocktail to date. He pitches and swaggers his way through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, from poems to periodicals, from songs to books, becoming more intoxicated with each new find. As the pieces accumulate like an enormous jigsaw puzzle, the picture begins to make more and more sense.

Against the backdrop of Western civilization, the cocktail, like the whole American experiment, is in its infancy. But the nature of this bibulous tradition—born, as Wondrich so deftly demonstrates, in the
sporting life
—is such that even though all the drinks, stories, and recipes are less than 250 years old, there is very little left in the way of documentation.

Undeterred, Wondrich has uncovered a remarkable trail left like broken twigs on a forest path that lead the reader through the gaming rooms, saloons, gentlemen’s clubs, and coffeehouses—to reveal the real story of the evolution of the American cocktail.

 

—Dale DeGroff, founder,
The Museum of the American Cocktail

My introduction to Jerry Thomas wasn’t nearly as dramatic as Dale’s—characteristically, I read about him in a book, one or another of the various histories of American lowlife Herbert Asbury published in the 1920s and ’30s. It was the early 1990s, and I was in graduate school, keeping my head down and anticipating a somewhat dull but (I hoped) pleasant life in academia. Asbury’s raffish accounts of old New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and New Orleans—I read them all—and their various thugs, crooks, players, and sports were a lot more colorful than the Latin scientific poems I was studying. But work is work, so I reluctantly shelved Gallus Mag and Bill the Butcher, Bathhouse John, Belle Cora, and the bartender known as “the Professor” (who seemed to be in every book) and got back to my Manilius and Martianus Capella.

But funny things happen sometimes. Toward the end of 1999, I found myself working as an assistant professor of English at a Catholic college on Staten Island, and my place in academia fully as dull, but not nearly so pleasant, as I had pictured it. So when I got a phone call from my friend Josh Mack, then a honcho in Hearst’s New Media division, asking if I might be interested in a little side project, I was pretty receptive. And when I found out that the project involved adapting the cocktail section from one of
Esquire
’s old entertaining guides for the Web, I was flat-out excited. As Josh knew, I had been writing a few little pieces on music for the
Village Voice
as a way of blowing off steam, and I liked to mix the occasional cocktail. Since this combined writing and mixing . . . Sure.