NOTES ON INGREDIENTS:
By the 1880s, 1 tablespoonful of sugar was considered excessive, and the amount was reduced by half to two-thirds, and indeed 1 teaspoon or 1½ teaspoons is sufficient; I will not dictate as this is a personal matter. The water, included at the beginning to help the sugar dissolve, was soon replaced by a squirt of seltzer which, once bartenders switched to syrup for sweetening (use 1 to 2 teaspoons of gum), migrated to the top of the drink. The canonical Sour spirits were brandy (the early favorite), Holland gin, applejack (this made for a “Jersey Sour”), bourbon (generally, but not always favored over rye—a New York Sour, for instance, calls for rye), and Santa Cruz rum (these last two being the latter-day favorites). The 1887 edition of Thomas’s book adds a dash of curaçao.
For an
Egg Sour
, use 1 ounce each of brandy and curaçao for the spirits and add a whole egg. In 1922, the great Anglo-Belgian (shades of Hercule Poirot!) bartender Robert Vermiere suggested that “a few drops of white of egg improve all Sours.” This, the European school of Sour-making, was the one that recolonized America after Prohibition, and the Sour with a head on it was a standard specialty of FDR-era Cocktail lounges. (It should be pointed out, however, that as early as 1904 the
Chicago Tribune
was talking about an artificial, presweetened “acid and white of egg mixture” that was sold to bars by the gallon; but it was never considered good form to use such a thing.)
NOTES ON EXECUTION:
For a midcentury Sour, begin by squeezing the lemon into a small bar-glass, add the sugar and water, stir, then finish with spirits and ice. Done. The claret, always a nice touch, is best applied with a dasher top. Failing that, careful pouring from a jigger (use about ½ ounce) over the back of a spoon will do. The idea is to have a “pleasant-looking, red-headed drink,” as the
Chicago Tribune
observed in 1883.
For one of the advanced sours of the 1880s, use syrup and shake everything but the float, if using one (and don’t forget the curaçao!). Strain into a 4-or 5-ounce footed glass, add a healthy splash of seltzer if you like, float the float if you want that, and finish with a piece of pineapple, a couple of orange wedges, and a few berries.
KNICKERBOCKER
In 1852 or 1853, the list of mixed drinks obtainable at one of Boston’s fancier saloon/restaurants found its way into the newspapers. It was widely reprinted, generally as an example of the moral decline that the nation was sliding into as it hit the three-quarters of a century mark. Among the many drinks listed (some versions have as few as fifty-six, others are in the high sixties) are quite a few whose formulae have eluded history, fascinating compounds like the “Jewett’s Fancy” (Jewett was the Boston-based publisher of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
), the “Vox Populi,” the “Tippe Na Pecco,” and even the famous “Fiscal Agent.” But a few, at least, would later find their way into Jerry Thomas’s book, among them the Knickerbocker (its recipe-double in the book, the White Lion, shows up in an augmented version of the list published in 1855, as coming from a California saloon).
If this Boston Knickerbocker is the same as the Professor’s, that makes it in fact the first of the lesser Punches on record. Its origins are likely to lie in New York, then thickly populated with Knickerbocker thises and Knickerbocker thats. Even the ice company was named Knickerbocker, and the drink calls for a fair amount of the stuff—but then again, the 1850s also saw the knee-breeches become knickerbockers, and it’s entirely possible that the drink took its name from them, it being an abbreviated, “knickerbocker” sort of Punch (indeed, Charles B. Campbell, in his 1867
American Bartender
, attaches a “Punch” to its name). In any case, for a while there in the 1850s and 1860s it was a popular drink, even turning up, in somewhat bastardized form, in England. But then, for whatever reason, it faded away, and the last one hears of it is in 1882, when a writer for the
New York World
admonished, “in the resume of what is good to drink in the summer-time the Knickerbocker should not be forgotten.” An old-timer, no doubt. But the thing is, he’s not wrong: With its rum and its lime juice, its syrups and liqueurs, the Knickerbocker is the spiritual progenitor of the Tiki drink. Think of it as an 1850s Mai Tai—similar drink, different island.
(USE SMALL BAR-GLASS.)
½ A LIME OR LEMON, SQUEEZE OUT THE JUICE, AND PUT RIND AND
JUICE IN THE GLASS
2 TEA-SPOONFULS OF RASPBERRY SYRUP
1 WINE-GLASS
[2 OZ]
SANTA CRUZ RUM
½
[1 OZ]
TEASPOONFUL OF CURAÇOA
Cool with shaved ice; shake up well,and ornament with berries in season.If this is not sweet enough,put in a little more raspberry syrup.
SOURCE: JERRY THOMAS, 1862
NOTES ON INGREDIENTS:
Choose the lime over the lemon. Some find this recipe too tart. Rather than adding more raspberry syrup (which can be purchased in larger organic markets or easily made by macerating raspberries in rich simple syrup), I prefer to increase the curaçao to 2 teaspoons. Raspberries, blackberries, orange pieces, even pineapple can be part of the garnish. The only difference between Thomas’s Knickerbocker and his
White Lion
is that the latter replaces three-quarters of the raspberry syrup with pulverized sugar. I’ll take the knee-pants.
Campbell makes his with half brandy and half port, with pieces of orange and pineapple in the glass; delicious, but no Knickerbocker.
NOTES ON EXECUTION:
This drink should be built and shaken in the glass for authenticity. But if you don’t have a shaker small enough to cover a 6- to 8-ounce tumbler and would prefer not to pour it back and forth between glasses, the floor, your shirt, and the boss’s wife, g’ahead and cheat and make it in the big shaker. It really doesn’t make a damn bit of difference to the final drink. Just don’t shake the lime rind in with everything else; it can make the drink bitter if bruised.
II. DAISIES AND FIZZES
If the Sour has one fault, it’s that it lacks zip (this of course is also its virtue; zip is a fine thing, but all zip all the time can get to be a bit much). Whereas Punches are capacious enough in size and conception to allow clever combinations of liquors to be deployed, not to mention several kinds of juice and extra dashes and fillips of this and that, the Sour is a drink designed for mass production: straightforward, efficient, and a little bland. But charge your basic Sour with fizz-water, and it sparkles and dances in the glass, bland simplicity transforming itself into clean directness. This is particularly true if you strain the Sour before you charge it.
This secret was long known to the makers of Gin Punch, and, indeed, as embodied in the John Collins had been revealed to the American tippling public since the late 1850s. But it didn’t come into its own until after the Civil War, and when it did there was—as so often in American saloon culture—a certain amount of confusion about what to call it. Was it a John Collins? A Daisy? A Fizz? Why not all three? Eventually, each of these names would be applied to its own class of drinks, all broadly similar but nonetheless possessing the small, idiomatic differences that are the mixographer’s delight.
We’ve already examined the Collins option (which has its own nomenclatural confusions). Now for the other two. We’ll begin with the Daisy, since it’s the first to make it into the historical record.
THE DAISY
Charlie was detailing his romantic troubles to a couple of friends. Naturally wanting to help, Harry ordered “three cocktails, strong, cold, and plenty of it!”
“Stop,” interrupted Charlie, as the waiter was about to leave the room, “Stop, no cocktails for me. I’ll take a glass of lemonade!”
“A glass of what?” thundered Harry.
“Ha! ha! ha! Lemonade. Well that’s a good thing for a man in the dumps! Wouldn’t you rather have a concentrated zephyr, in a daisy, or an iced dew drop. Nonsense, man. . . . Lemonade, indeed.”
Thus Henry Llewellyn Williams in his 1866 novel,
Gay Life in New York, or Fast Men and Grass Widows
. I must applaud Harry’s judgment. While many a nineteenth-century formula for concentrating zephyrs has survived, as this book readily attests, the Iced Dew Drop appears lost forever. Not so the Daisy, which flourished for a time, practically died out, and then came roaring back in spectacular, albeit disguised, form, and is almost always just the thing for a man or woman in the dumps or out of them (as old-time bartender Jere Sullivan recalled in 1930, Daisies were “cooling, refreshing and peculiarly tasty”).
After Williams’s novel, the next we hear of the Daisy is in the 1876 supplement to Jerry Thomas’s book, where its formula reveals it to be a Sour—with brandy, whiskey, gin, or rum—that is sweetened in part with orange cordial, strained, and fizzed. The only way that this differs from the book’s Fizzes is in those “2 or 3 dashes of orange cordial.” But Thomas’s book doesn’t tell the whole story. Where the Fizz went on to become a staple of bar-drinking, in some hands the Daisy—one hears most often of the Brandy Daisy, but the Whiskey and Gin versions also turn up from time to time—evolved into something of a dude’s drink, a little bit of fanciness that came empinkened with grenadine and decanted into some sort of recherché, ice-filled goblet or mug and tricked out with fruit and whatever else was in the garnish-tray. By the time Prohibition rolled around, both kinds—the old, orange liqueur-up kind and the newer, grenadine-rocks kind, were in circulation.
It’s worth going into this much detail about the Daisy because of something that happened in Mexico while the Great Experiment was running its course in
el Norte
. First off, in 1929 or thereabouts, the new American-financed gambling and golf resort at Agua Caliente, outside Tijuana, introduced its house cocktail, the “Sunrise Tequila.” Tequila. Lime juice. Grenadine. A little creme de cassis. Ice. Soda. In other words, a tequila Daisy, modern type. Second, a little after repeal, journalists and other travelers who visited Mexico started talking about a “Tequila Daisy,” and in 1936 this even pops up north of the border, in Syracuse, New York, of all places. Unfortunately, nobody bothers to record which kind of Daisy they’re drinking, the old-school one, which was often served in Cocktail glasses with only a minimal amount of fizz, or the new-school one, like Agua Caliente’s Sunrise. This is important because of the Spanish word for “daisy.” If they were drinking them old-school, you see, they were drinking tequila, orange liqueur, lime juice (much more common than lemon in Mexico), and maybe a little splash of soda—and ordering them as “margaritas.”
BRANDY, GIN, WHISKEY, OR RUM DAISY (OLD SCHOOL)
The original Daisy of the 1870s.
(USE SMALL BAR-GLASS.)
3 OR 4 DASHES
[1 TSP]
GUM SYRUP
2 OR 3 DASHES
[1½ TSP]
ORANGE CORDIAL
THE JUICE OF HALF A LEMON
1 SMALL WINEGLASS
[2 OZ]
OF
[SPIRITS]
Fill glass half full of shaved ice.
Shake well and strain into a glass, and fill up with Seltzer water from a syphon.
SOURCE: JERRY THOMAS, 1876 (COMPOSITE)
NOTES ON INGREDIENTS:
Jerry Thomas made all his Daisies according to the same pattern; for the orange cordial, I like to use Grand Marnier. Whoever it was that revised his book, however, recommended varying the cordial according to the spirit used, calling for maraschino with rum (specifically Santa Cruz) and gin (Hollands), with orgeat syrup replacing the gum in the latter. With whiskey, there’s no cordial at all, but again orgeat steps in for the gum. Other mixologists liked other cordials; Harry Johnson, for example, was particularly fond of yellow Chartreuse in a Daisy, although he used an awful lot of it: ½ ounce, on top of ½ tablespoon of sugar, and all to balance out 2 or 3 dashes of lemon juice.
In Jerry Thomas’s Daisies, anyway, the cordial is intended as an accent, not as the main sweetener. As always, the precise amounts will be a matter of taste.
Thomas’s reviser suggests finishing the Brandy Daisy with “2 dashes of Jamaica rum.” Rum with brandy? You bet.
By the way, the term
small wineglass
appears to be a reaction to the obsolescence of that measure; within a few years recipe writers would be claiming that a wineglass was 4 ounces (by then they were measuring spirits in 2-ounce jiggers, just to be safe).
NOTES ON EXECUTION:
The big question here is what kind of glass to put the thing into. In 1876, it would have been the standard small bar-glass. In 1887, the guy who revised Thomas’s book has his strained into a “large cocktail glass.” Others went for a Fizz glass, a Punch glass, or a “fancy bar-glass.” I prefer the Cocktail glass, since it limits the amount of fizz that goes into the drink, ensuring that it sparkles yet still has a Cocktail-like throw-weight to it. It should be noted that in the context of 1887, a large cocktail glass held approximately 3½ ounces.
BRANDY, GIN, RUM, OR WHISKEY DAISY (NEW SCHOOL)
The fancy Daisy of the 1910s.
BRANDY DAISY RUM DAISY
GIN DAISY WHISKEY DAISY
ALL THE ABOVE DAISIES ARE MADE AS FOLLOWS:
JUICE ½ LIME AND ¼ LEMON
1 TEASPOONFUL POWDERED SUGAR
2 DASHES
[1 TSP]
GRENADINE
1 DRINK
[2 OZ]
OF LIQUOR DESIRED
2 DASHES
[½ OZ]
CARBONATED WATER
Use silver mug, put in above ingredients, fill up with fine ice, stir until mug is frosted, decorate with fruit and sprays of fresh mint and serve with straws.
SOURCE: HUGO ENSSLIN,
RECIPES FOR MIXED DRINKS
, 1916