NOTES ON INGREDIENTS :
For “powdered,” read “superfine.” Otherwise, as the man says. Plymouth gin works well in this as a substitute for the Old Tom. And take that business about the drops of orange flower water seriously—too much of it and that’s all you’ll taste.
NOTES ON EXECUTION:
“Shake and shake and shake until there is not a bubble left but the drink is smooth and snowy white and of the consistency of good rich milk,” as Mr. Ramos told the reporter. This takes at least a minute. When making this for guests, I like to pass the shaker around and let everyone have at it until their arms get tired. Both Ramos’s recipe and all the accounts of practice at his bar imply that the seltzer was shaken in with the drink, but modern practice is to strain the drink into a tall glass and then add the seltzer, giving it a quick stir. In either case, this drink isn’t meant to actually fizz.
III. TWO POPULAR COOLERS
Among the drinks Hinton Helper encountered in Gold Rush-era San Francisco was something called a “Cooler.” Unfortunately, he gives no description of it. But it’s a pretty safe assumption that it had ice, and liquor of some kind, and maybe some soda water. That’s what all the others had, anyway. It took a while for this loose derivation of the old soda water and citrus Gin Punch to propagate, but by the turn of the century the bartender’s bibles were full of Coolers; of simple, tall things that are of little mixological interest but are mighty refreshing on a hot day, especially with air-conditioning still a generation or two over the horizon.
Every town had one. Chicago had its “Mamie Taylor,” with Scotch and lime and ginger ale (Taylor was a comic actress of the 1890s). Atlantic City had its Horse’s Neck, which was simply ginger ale with a long, long lemon twist—although many liked theirs with a “stick” of rye or gin in it. New York had its
Remsen Cooler
, named after a member of the Union League. (Old Tom, long, long twist, plain soda—Harry Johnson thought this was a Scotch drink, but he was confusing it with the “Ramsay Cooler,” made with Ramsay whisky, from the Port Ellen distillery on Islay; unfortunately, his confusion has infected the annals of mixology.) There was a
Boston Cooler
, with rum and lemon and soda, a
Narragansett Cooler
(bourbon, orange juice, ginger ale), and so on. You could fill a book with them, if you were of a mind to. There are two, however, that are worth special notice, one because of its overwhelming popularity and the other because of its story.
THE JOE RICKEY (AND THE GIN RICKEY)
“Colonel” Joe Rickey was a wheeling-dealing Democratic lobbyist from the town of Fulton, in Callaway County, Missouri. He was a veteran of the Confederate army, liked the races, knew how to play poker, and could fill a back room with smoke with the best of them. Somewhere along the line, he invented a simple cooler that he would have bartenders make for him. Various places have been given as the scene of inspiration: The bar across the street from the Southern Hotel in St. Louis, the St. James Hotel in New York (this little hostelry, right up Broadway from the Hoffman House, was a favorite resort of the Sporting Fraternity), Joe Chamberlin’s in Washington. I have no doubt at one point or another the Colonel instructed the bartenders in all those places how to make his drink. He instructed bartenders
everywhere
how to make it. But the first place he seems to have done it, at least so as anyone noticed, was at Shoe-maker’s, a quiet, skew-angled old place on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., famed for the quality of its whiskey and the political wattage of its clientele (some called it the “third Room of the Congress”). There, some time between 1883, when Rickey hit town, and 1889, when the drink made it into the
Washington Post
, Rickey had George Williamson, the saloon’s beloved head barkeeper, start making ’em for him.
They couldn’t be simpler: a slug of whiskey, and only whiskey (some say rye, some say bourbon, but there is agreement that Rickey preferred the fine Belle of Nelson brand), the juice of half a lime or a whole one if the limes were small, some ice, and some soda water. Done. You’ll note the absence of sugar. That’s because it was intended as a Cooler, and as Rickey went around saying, “Any drink with sugar in it . . . heats the blood, while the Rickey, with its blood-cooling lime juice, is highly beneficial” (thus the
Brooklyn Eagle
’s Washington correspondent in 1892). In any case, the drink spread from “Shoo’s” (as Shoe-maker’s was known) to all Washington, from Washington to New York, and then to points all over the globe. Except Kansas. At least, that’s what the
Kansas City Star
said in 1890: “When a Kansas man orders a ‘Joe Rickey’ he instructs the barkeeper to leave out the ice, the lime juice and the soda.”
Kansans notwithstanding, the drink was a sensation. Rickey moved to New York and went into the soda-water business and got his face on a whiskey label. In 1903, though, he took carbolic acid in his room at the Hoffman House and died. His health had been failing and his finances troubled. Or maybe it was just that everybody was going around putting gin in his drink, and had been doing so for at least eleven years. The drink, anyway, lived on, and deservedly—that business of sugar heating the blood is probably bunk, but its absence certainly makes for a drink of unparalleled coolness, while the soda works to dilute any excess acidity.
The mixture is simple. It consists of one half a lime, whisky, ice and soda.When properly and carefully mixed it is said to come nearer
supplying what a drinker wants in hot weather than anything else yet discovered.
SOURCE:
WASHINGTON POST
, 1889
NOTES ON INGREDIENTS:
Bourbon or rye, rye or bourbon. Half a normal-sized lime is plenty. For a
Gin Rickey
, use gin.
NOTES ON EXECUTION:
The
Brooklyn Eagle
’s man explained it perfectly: “The juice of [half] a lime is squeezed into a goblet, which is then filled with crushed ice. Then a portion of whiskey or gin, in quantity to suit the taste, is poured in. The glass is then filled up with club soda or carbonic water.”
FLORODORA
In 1900,
Florodora
, a thoroughly silly bit of musical fluff imported from the London stage, opened at New York’s Casino Theater. Monster hit. It wasn’t the plot, which involved perfume manufacture, phrenology, and a skein of tangled attractions, set half on the fictitious Philippine island of Florodora and half in Wales.
(Wales?)
It wasn’t Leslie Stuart’s music, although that was popular enough to make him rich. (He blew it all in the approved manner, on champagne, horses, and chorus girls.) It wasn’t the leads, the dancing, or the scenery—not the fixed scenery, anyway. You see, Cyrus W. Gilfain, who owns the island of Florodora, has a daughter, Angela. And Angela has six friends who go everywhere together—six well-developed young friends with shapely ankles, who all happen to be brunettes five feet four inches tall, with a penchant for dressing in identical costumes. In an era when sex was sex and public entertainment was most certainly not sex save in the most abstract terms, the “Florodora Sextette” was hot, hot stuff.
The six girlies involved—Daisy Green, Marjorie Relyea, Vaughn Texsmith, Margaret Walker, Agnes Wayburn, and Marie Wilson—were catnip to New York’s rich young (and not-so-young) sports, and they knew it. Wilson parlayed a stock tip from James R. Keene into a $750,000 score, and then turned around and married his horseracing pal Frederick Gebhard. Green caught a Denver financier, Wayburn a South African diamond magnate, and Texsmith a silk-manufacturer, all seven-figure men. Marjorie Relyea won out with a Carnegie, who promptly died and left her a pile. We don’t know exactly what happened to Miss Walker, but Broadway legend has it that all six pretty maidens married millionaires; the odds are certainly in her favor.
If ever there was a show that demanded to be commemorated with a drink, and preferably a fragrant, slightly silly one that hits like a roll of quarters in a clutch purse, it was this one. Lo and behold:
A party of professional people were in a Columbus avenue restaurant in New York the other night after the show. One of the “Florodora” pretty maidens was in the crowd, and her persistent refusal to partake of anything but lemonade irked the rest.
“If you’ll get me something brand new,” she said, “I’ll drink it.” Jimmy O’Brien, the head inventor of drinks, was called. He thought until the noise of his thinking drowned the whir of the electric fans.
Then he turned out this drink. That was in 1901, as reported by the
New York Evening World.
Alas, the article was silent as to which of the pretty maidens it was, but she sure had the chorus girl thing down, didn’t she?
Put three or four dashes
[2 tsp]
of raspberry syrup in the bottom of an ordinary glass, squeeze in the juice of a whole lime, add just enough Plymouth gin to catch the taste
[1½ oz]
and half fill the glass with finely cracked ice.
Then pour in the best ginger ale until the glass is brimming.Vibrate the mixture with a long bar spoon until it is ice cold and turn it into a cold stein. Float a slice of orange and a pitted cherry on top, put the
stein to your lips, shut your eyes and take an express transport to Elysium.
SOURCE:
NEW YORK EVENING WORLD
, 1901
NOTES ON INGREDIENTS:
If you want to turn this into a
Florodora, Imperial Style
, replace the gin with cognac. You should probably replace the ginger ale with champagne, while you’re at it: The recipe, from Jacques Straub’s 1914
Drinks
, doesn’t mention it, but “Imperial” or “Royal” drinks almost always have champagne.
NOTES ON EXECUTION:
You can also build the whole thing in the glass you serve it in.
IV. THE COBBLER
“America is fertile in mixtures: what do we not owe her? Sherry Cobbler, Gin Sling, Cocktail, Mint Julep, Brandy Smash, Sudden Death, Eye Openers.” So said Charles Reade, the Victorian novelist, in 1863. If he were writing today, of course, the list would be rather different: Apple Martini, Screaming Orgasm, Dirty Girl Scout, Irish Car Bomb—like that: insert your own pointed observation on the decline of public morality in America. At least, if past performance is any guarantee of future results, we can be fairly certain that our mixological indiscretions won’t live on to embarrass us. Reade’s list represented the state of the art of mixed drinking in his day. What survives? The Julep (once a year, anyway), and the Cocktail, in the form of the Old-Fashioned (although outside of Wisconsin not one bar in twenty can make a proper one anymore). But for the “Sudden Death,” alas, not even a recipe remains, and the others exist only in the fragile, age-browned pages of old bar books.
If someone had waved Reade’s little list under the nose of the average drinking man of 1863 and made him choose one drink to survive the test of time, odds are heavy he would’ve gone for the Sherry Cobbler. It was, Harry Johnson observed in the 1888 edition of his
Bartender’s Manual
, “without doubt the most popular beverage in the country, with ladies as well as with gentlemen.” And not just this country, either—“the sublimity of the sherry cobbler” as one old Virginian called it, was a worldwide hit. In 1855, a traveler through Panama pokes his head into “a drinking saloon,” only to find “the sallow bar-keeper . . . concocting a Sherry-Cobbler for a fever-stricken Yankee.” In 1862, it’s a gang of Aussies piping ’em into a visiting English cricket team. And in 1867, if the French judges at the Exposition Universelle de Paris deemed our Hudson River School paintings worth but a single medal, and that of the second class, the French crowd lined up at the Exposition’s American Bar held different views regarding our Sherry Cobblers: They were going through 500 bottles of sherry a day.
All well and good, but what exactly is the Sherry Cobbler? Nothing but sherry, sugar, a lot of ice, a bit of fruit (a slice or two of orange muddled in with the ice and a few berries on top), and a straw. The straw is key: As the
Grand Island Times
(that’s in Nebraska) pointed out in 1873, the “straw is a very useful article—when one end is bathed in a Sherry Cobbler.” But not only was it useful, it was also something much more important. It was
new
. Now, I’ve never seen a definitive history of the drinking straw, but from what I’ve been able to gather, the Sherry Cobbler was the killer app that brought it into common use. When Mr. Tapley builds one for Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit, “plunging a reed into the mixture . . . and signifying by an expressive gesture that it was to be pumped up through that agency by the enraptured drinker,” poor Martin’s astonished. They didn’t
do
that sort of thing in Europe. Leave it to those mad, ingenious Yanks.
The ice was pretty new, too. Nobody seems precisely sure where the Cobbler got its name, but the most plausible theory posits that it’s from the little “cobbles” of ice over which it’s built. It’s significant that the drink seems to have been first introduced in the late 1830s, the decade that saw the “frozen water trade” take off in America: At least, the first reference to it I’ve found comes from 1838, and in 1840 one Brantz Mayer, of Baltimore, in an article in the New York weekly
New World
entitled “What Is a Sherry Cobbler?” calls it “the greatest ‘liquorary’ invention of the day” and wonders “How happens it that ’t was not discovered before?” Without ice, a glass of sweetened sherry with a little orange bruised into it doesn’t hold much excitement. Add ice, and it’s fascinating.
In the fullness of time, the Cobbler treatment got applied to an array of other wines; Jerry Thomas lists a Catawba Cobbler, a Claret Cobbler, a Hock Cobbler (i.e., with a German white wine) and a Sauternes Cobbler. Most of these pop up in travelers’ accounts from the 1850s, so somebody was drinking them, anyway. He even lists a Whiskey Cobbler, which is rather going against the nature of the drink (to this we may add a Brandy Cobbler, which seems to have been current in New York in the 1850s, and even a Gin Cobbler—although that one’s English, and they had a way with American drinks, and not a good way). But the Sherry version remained far and away the most popular, and indeed, along with the Mint Julep, was one of the two drinks that introduced America and the world to the pleasures of taking ice in your alcoholic beverages as a matter of course.