Imbibe! (24 page)

I don’t want to make too much of this; a glass of Purl-Royal with 1 teaspoon or less (the recommended dose) of Stoughton’s “bitters,” as they soon came to be known, is not the same thing as a Cocktail. For one thing, it’s got no charisma. Royal or not, drinking Purl was more a health-maintaining duty, like taking your vitamins, than a wicked sport, like playing out a string of Sidecars and Widow’s Kisses. Plus, it’s got no booze in it. Of course, neither does the Champagne Cocktail, and nineteenth-century mixographers—including Jerry Thomas—had no problem including that in their Cocktail sections. But when Dr. Stoughton suggests his bitters be taken in “a dram of Brandy,” then we’ve got to pull up our reins. Of the four ingredients of the American Cocktail, here are the two most important, already consorting together in a glass, almost a full century before the drink surfaces in America. Just to make things more interesting, before too long we have evidence that people were already adding a third.

When Scotland rose in rebellion in 1745, the Scots clan leader Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, lent himself warily to the Jacobite cause. In April of the next year, when Scotland’s hopes and a large number of Frasers were shot to bits on the bleak moor of Culloden, he made sure to be nowhere near the battlefield (“None but a mad a fool would have fought that day,” he is reported to have said). But he was nonetheless captured by the British, imprisoned, and condemned to have his head chopped off in the Tower of London. This was his right as a Peer of the Realm; had he been less exalted in rank, he would’ve been hung. Anyway, on the eve of his execution in March 1747, the eighty-year-old Lord Lovat was, understandably, somewhat troubled in mind.

“But pray,” he asked one of his attendants (according to a pamphlet published at the time), “have you got any Wine for me in the Morning; and some Bitters, if I should want to carry any to the Scaffold?” There were no bitters left in the bottle, so he sent somebody out with a shilling for a bottle of “Stoughton’s Elixir”—still the leading kind of bitters, although not without competition (Stoughton himself had died in 1720, but his squabbling heirs carried the business on without him). In the meanwhile, though, the warder came up with a bottle of “burnt brandy and bitters” that had been lying around since the Lord’s trial.

Now, to make Burnt Brandy, you set brandy on fire (often with a live cinder or coal, leading to its alternate name, “Coal Brandy”) and melt sugar over the resulting flame; when the flame gets low, you stir the sugar in and drink it. Originally, this was a medicine: from the mid-1600s to the mid-1800s, it was what any respectable physician would prescribe for congestion or stomach disorders. But even with much of the alcohol burned off it was still taken recreationally (Pepys drank it that way; why are we not surprised?). So, brandy and sugar, mixed up with bitters and kept in a bottle. This is awfully like the bottled Brandy Cocktail of Jerry Thomas’s day, only that used water to reduce the proof and this used fire.

In any case, the next morning, as Lord Lovat discussed the disposal of his clothing, tested the sharpness of the axe, and reviewed the arrangements for handling his head (he “desir’d that . . . when taken off, [it] might be receiv’d in a Cloth”), he had recourse to that bottle. If ever there was a time . . .

After Lord Lovat’s decapitation, bittered booze dropped out of the historical record for a few key decades. Was the actual Cocktail—spirits, bitters, sugar, and water combined—born in Britain? It’s more than possible, and there’s even a passing reference to a drink called “cauld [that’s Scots for ‘cold’] cock” in William Creech’s 1791 essay collection,
Edinburgh Fugitive Pieces
, for us to puzzle on. But if it was of British birth, it was born ahead of its time and nobody paid much attention; it would have to be transported to the New World to receive its due.

The American Colonies had long been supplied with all the necessary components of the Cocktail, including thirst. Spirits were everywhere, sugar was cheap, and water was plentiful and clean (not always the case in the mother country). You could even get genuine Stoughton’s Elixir. Well, more or less—patent or no patent, its near-universal popularity ensured that it was imported, but also that the concoction was widely counterfeited and imitated.

In fact, a whole lot of bitters were being consumed in America, and outside the major cities, it’s doubtful if any of it generated so much as a farthing in royalties. In the Colonies, do-it-yourself was the mode of the day. The forests abounded in medicinal roots, barks, and herbs; the alcohol to infuse with them was cheap and plentiful as long as you weren’t too particular about what it was made from; and if you needed a recipe, there was one right there in John Wesley’s
Primitive Physic
(since this John Wesley and the one who founded Methodism were one and the same, the book had wide distribution).

Judging by the extant published recipes (admittedly from a generation or two later) Americans liked more booze and less bitter in their mix. By the Revolution, in America at least, the Southwark apothecary’s bitter drops had undergone a transformation from product to genre, from Xerox to xerox, Kleenex to kleenex. And once the Colonies rose up in revolt, the homemade stuff had the field to itself, since imports stopped entirely—at least to the rebels; there are records of Stoughton’s Elixir being shipped to the king’s troops by the caseload.

Wars make history, but they also obscure it. Among all the bold and desperate events, it’s easy for little things to get lost. One of those little things involved bitters. At some point between Lexington and Concord and Yorktown, it became acceptable for Americans to swallow a full dram of these high-proof domestic bitters as a morning eye-opener. When Americans take to something, they don’t hold back. If a dash of bitters in a glass of wine is good in the morning, then a full two ounces of the stuff will be better. After all, it’s medicine, right? And medicine is good for you—particularly if it makes you feel good. (Some facets of American life never change.)

The early years of the Republic were drinking times, and intemperate or not, eye-openers and humor-qualifiers were the order of the day, with Bitters and Slings leading the pack by a few comfortable lengths. At some point during those years, somebody somewhere thought to pour some of the former into the latter. Whether this seminal moment was inspired by the example of Purl Royal or Burnt Brandy and Bitters, or it was entirely a manifestation of native genius is immaterial; what is important is that Americans recognized the delightfulness and versatility of this formula; that we nurtured it and cherished it and allowed it to thrive.

It didn’t hurt that—well, it didn’t hurt—that by diluting what was already diluted and sweetening it up, one turned a medicinal drink that didn’t taste good into one that tasted great and still kept a therapeutic cover without actually being good for you (that is, assuming that a glass of bitters was in some way good for you). As one Victorian mixographer sagely observed, “It is a cosmopolitan practice to pamper the appetite under pretence of preserving the health.” The morning bitters-and-sling man could pretend, not least to himself, that he wasn’t a morning dram drinker (which would be bad); that he was only following the path of wisdom by taking a little preventative medicine. In fact, people were calling the morning Cocktail “a glass of bitters” well into the next century, even though they had merely a shade of bitters in them.

 

When did this transformational act occur, and how did the resulting mixture get the name
Cocktail
welded on to it? This is some of the most wrangled-over territory in American cultural history. But rather than rehearse what has already been hashed to death, I’ll try to simply lay forth the known facts—the earliest testimonies to a drink called “Cocktail”—and let them dictate the conclusions (for a more detailed discussion, see Appendix I). As a kind of control, let’s begin with the
Pennsylvania Gazette
, which in 1788 published a fairly comprehensive list of the spirit-based recreational drinks of America. In it we find mention of, among others, Toddy, Grog, Sling, Bitters, and “stinkibus,” whatever that might be, but no Cocktail as of yet.

Fifteen years later, on April 28, 1803, the
Farmer’s Cabinet
, a newspaper out of Amherst, New Hampshire, printed a little humor item purporting to be a page from the diary of a “lounger”—basically, an affluent young ne’er-do-well. In it, the author (probably Joseph Cushing, the paper’s editor) has this character waking up lateish after an “Assembly” the night before and feeling “queer.” At nine, he has a cup of coffee, which doesn’t help. Let’s give the highlights of the rest of the morning as the diarist himself wrote it:
10.Lounged to the Doctor’s—found Peter—talked of the girls—smoked half a cigar—felt rather squally: Van Hogan came in—quiz’d me for looking dull—great bore.—11. Drank a glass of cocktail—excellent for the head . . . Went to the Squire’s—girls just done breakfast.
Mem
. Girls not so bright after dancing. . . . Went to the Col’s . . . drank a glass of wine—talk’d about Indians—call’d Miss———a Squaw—all laugh’d—damn’d good one—. . . jogg’d off. Call’d at the Doct’s . . .—drank another glass of cocktail.

 

That “glass of cocktail” at 11 a.m. is the very first on record—provided, of course, that it is indeed a real Cocktail. The
Farmer’s Cabinet
doesn’t tell us what went into it, and for a while there in the very early part of the century that name appears here and there attached to drinks that in later years any self-respecting saloon denizen would have looked at with slantendicular gaze had it been proffered to him as a Cocktail—e.g., “rum and honey,” which may be a fine drink but ain’t no Cocktail. But I find it strongly suggestive that the two things we can deduce about the
Cabinet
’s “glass of cocktail”—that it’s therapeutic in the morning and that it’s favored by a loungy, sporty, dissolute set—were precisely those that defined the Cocktail for most of the ensuing century.

If the Cocktail was well-enough known by 1803 for the
Cabinet
to include it without explanation, not everybody was in on the secret, as Harry Crosswell discovered in 1806. On May 6, Crosswell, the controversial editor and writer of the Hudson, New York,
Balance and Columbian Repository
, a political paper of the Federalist/ anti-Democratic persuasion, printed a snarky little item at the expense of the (Democratic) loser of a local election, in the form of an expense/profit ledger. Under “Gain,” it simply reads “Nothing”; under loss, besides the election, there’s a categorized list of drinks (candidates used to buy drinks for prospective voters—a custom I for one wouldn’t mind seeing return to fashion), including “411 glasses bitters” and, more important, “25 [glasses] cock-tail.” Now, I have no idea whether the list of drinks was a real one, but it was at least a realistic one. Nothing else on it (it also included rum and brandy Grogs and Gin Slings) was in any way obscure or controversial.

Those glasses of Cocktail, though, were unfamiliar enough to snare one reader, who wrote in about it in a letter Crosswell printed the next week, on May 13:

 

All good questions, except the last—which was of course the one that Crosswell’s answer chiefly focused on:

 

Would that Crosswell had answered the correspondent’s other questions in like detail; this chapter would be much shorter. Nevertheless, it’s still one of the most famous and oft-repeated quotations in the history of American tippling. There are, however, a few things left to tease out of it. Setting aside the blogospheric political hyperbole and even the definition itself, which would with one or two minor adjustments describe what people thought of when they thought of a Cocktail for the next four generations, let’s focus on that “bittered sling.” As we’ve seen, Bitters were one thing and Sling was another; so “bittered sling” was rather like “Jägered Kamikaze” or “Vodka and Red Bull”: two drinks, mixed together and consumed not by frat boys but by the 1806 equivalent, Democrats, who were proverbial for the woo-hooness of their brand of populism.

The next reference came eleven days later, when the
Sun
, a Democratic paper from Pittsfield, Massachusetts (some thirty miles west of Hudson), printed a letter taking Croswell to task for various political crimes and, along the way, getting in a swipe at him for “publishing grog stories,” and strictures on “cock tail.” Clearly, a known—even slightly notorious—drink, or else the insult would be meaningless. After that, seven years of silence, unless you count the early morning glass of “whiskey and bitters” John Melish was offered in central Pennsylvania in 1811 (this appears to have been a local specialty: eight years later Adlard Welby found the same people, more or less, drinking the same thing). The oft-cited 1809 date for the word’s appearance in Washington Irving’s
Knickerbocker’s History of New York
is wrong.
⁵
Finally, in 1813, Cocktail popped up again, this time in the metropolis: the “News for [read ‘from’] New York” page of the
Tickler
, a Philadelphia humor rag, contained a comic account of a dispute between a couple of mooks “about the superior virtues of gin-sling and cock-tail.”