Imbibe! (7 page)

The wet goods were equally simple and robust. While Madeiras and sherries excited the merchant class and the swells drank champagne as always, for everyone else rum loomed large, particularly in the earlier part of the period. The good stuff came up from Jamaica and St. Croix in the Virgin Islands, the less good from Boston and Providence and the towns thereabouts. In fact, when, a bit later in the century, Maine-born dialect humorist Artemus Ward opined that New England rum was “wuss nor the korn whisky of Injianny, which eats threw stone jugs & will turn the stummuck of the most shiftless Hog,” he was reflecting the consensus of public opinion. (The great exception here was Daniel Lawrence & Sons’ Old Medford rum, a byword for quality from 1824 to 1905, when the company fell into the hands of a Lawrence who happened to be a Methodist bishop and promptly closed it.) But speaking of whiskey, barkeepers mixed drinks with that, too, although not necessarily the ones fortunate enough to work in the established cities of the East. There, the epicures preferred imported French brandy or Dutch gin—“Hollands,” as it was known—or the aged domestic brandy distilled from peaches and their pits. In the backcountry, it was whiskey (and generally unaged whiskey at that) all the way down, interrupted only by the occasional tot of applejack or other rough fruit distillate.

But that’s the way things went in the backcountry. In the city, loaf sugar—a relatively refined off-white affair that came in hard, conical loaves (barkeepers had to cut pieces off with snips)—prevailed among the discriminate, such as the two black chimney sweeps satirized (gently, for once) in 1825 in the pages of the
New York Literary Gazette
for having palates so delicate that they would always insist on “white sugar” in their Slings. The indiscriminate or underfunded used a darker, more raw form of sugar (also produced in loaves), or molasses, or whatever the country provided in the way of maple sugar or honey or what-have-you. In the city, lemons and limes were common; in the country, they were scarce. On the other hand, country topers could count on fresh milk and eggs and clean water whereas their city brethren found all of those problematic.

The 1810s and ’20s saw considerable development in the barkeeper’s art, as pioneers such as Willard of the City Hotel and Cato Alexander made their influence felt and new drinks—the individual Punch, the iced Mint Julep, the Cocktail—achieved near-universal popularity. Things were happening in the boonies as well, particularly as rum began its long decline from its perch as America’s spirit of choice and Pennsylvania’s old Monongahela rye and old Bourbon from Kentucky began to come into their own.

 

 

In the fifteen-odd years between Jerry Thomas’s birth and his apprenticeship behind the bar, the profession of barkeeper changed utterly. Not everywhere, of course. The land was still infested with a vast profusion of low doggerys where the man behind the stick was required to do nothing more complicated in the way of serving liquors than put them in a glass, if that—for most of the century, it was customary to put the bottle and a glass in front of the man ordering straight goods and allow him to help himself (those who took advantage could expect to face the barkeeper’s ridicule).

But in the best places, the barkeeper at work was, as we have seen, a marvel of the age. It was ice that did the trick; that turned him from a host and server, albeit an unusually busy one, into a juggler, a conjuror, and an artist. Iced drinks had always been available for the few, but in the 1830s, with the burgeoning trade in fresh, clean New England ice, delivered by horse-drawn carts from insulated central warehouses even in the hottest months of the year, ordinary people started getting used to the stuff, expecting it, calling for it in their drinks. Suddenly, the bartending game was entirely transformed. Ice, combined with the American drinking public’s ever-increasing preference for individual drinks made to order over things drunk communally out of bowls, meant that the barkeeper had to add a whole set of tools to his kit. Once the blocks—in New York, at least, they were cubes twenty-two inches per side—reached the bar, they had to be butchered, as it were; cut into useable pieces. This meant ice-tongs and ice-picks (both single-and multipronged), ice-shavers, ice-breakers, ice-axes, ice-scoops, ice-bags, ice-mallets—a whole world of new tools to master. It also meant straws: the state of nineteenth-century dentistry dictated that if at all possible the stuff be kept away from direct contact with people’s teeth.

And it also meant the eclipse of the venerable toddy-stick. Once bartenders started mixing their drinks with ice, its days were numbered as the primary mixing tool due to the awkwardness of fitting both it and the ice in the same glass (its sugar-breaking function was obviated by switching to syrup). By the 1860s, after ice had found its way into just about any drink that wasn’t made with actual boiling water, old-timers were reduced to fond memories of how “the ring of the tumblers, as [the toddy-stick] hit the sides in mixing, had its peculiar music, with which nearly every one was familiar.” Bartenders would still keep one around, to be sure, but its uses were very limited.

For stirring, bartenders replaced the toddy-stick with a long-handled spoon with a twisted stem, whose design ap-peared to have remained pretty much unchanged until Prohibition. Far more interesting, though, was the new method of mixing iced drinks delineated by Charles Astor Bristead in his 1852 novel
The Upper Ten Thousand
, when one of his characters prepares a Sherry Cobbler:

This way, the ice itself did the mixing. Neat enough, and effective (I’ve done it myself countless times in hotel rooms). It wasn’t long, though, before the knights of the bar figured out that this is much more fun if you don’t keep the glasses jammed together. Case in point, this description (from Mayne Reid’s 1856 novel
Quadroon
) of a Mississippi riverboat bartender making a Julep:

 

I shouldn’t wonder. Ten or twelve tosses and the drink was mixed, and all without spilling a drop—or rather, as one barfly of the day observed, at least without seeming to.

Although spectacular, this method did have its drawbacks. For one thing, as can be readily ascertained by a few minutes spent with a couple of Old-Fashioned glasses and some ice water, it was damned difficult to do well, and damned messy to do poorly. It was also too gentle to work with every kind of drink: eggs and fruit need to be hit with some kinetic energy before they’ll blend properly, and it was inadvisable to toss the drinks too hard. Writing in 1848, pioneering lowlife reporter George Foster provided the first record of the bartenders’ solution, and the next major addition to their kit, when he described a man behind the busy bar of a New York oyster cellar who, “with his shirt-sleeves rolled up and his face in a fiery glow, seems to be pulling long ribbons of julep out of a tin cup.” This cup—it could be made of cupronickel, brass, or tin (plated or unplated) or even of solid silver (stainless steel didn’t appear on the scene until the eve of Prohibition)—would be just big enough to fit over the mouth of the mixing glass, allowing it to be jammed onto it. With the ice cooling the air trapped inside, a vacuum is formed, in theory keeping the hybrid contraption from leaking without the need for any mechanical assistance and allowing the contents to be shaken with considerable violence (not that you’d know that by the way most bartenders use it today).

This “shaker,” as it came to be known, went by several names. Bartending as a profession has never had a governing authority, and it’s in rather trivial matters like this that the lack is most keenly felt. In 1862, Jerry Thomas noted that “every well ordered bar has a tin egg-nogg ‘shaker,’ which is a great aid in mixing this beverage.” In 1868, though, we find George Augustus Sala writing about “a young officer in the Blues” who owned “a pair of ‘cocktail-shakers, ’” which he defined as “a brace of tall silver mugs in which the ingredients of the beverage known as a ‘cocktail’ . . . are mixed, shaken together, and then scientifically discharged.” But here, it seems, the British were going their own way, both in the use of two metal cups and in what they were being called: In America, the metal shaker appears to have always been used singly, in conjunction with the mixing glass, and it wasn’t until the twentieth century that it had “Cocktail” spliced onto its name, never to be torn asunder. By then, the Brits were calling their two-cup apparatus, with rather more justification, a “Cobbler shaker” (Cobblers contain slices of citrus that need the extra mixing force; Cocktails do not) or, for reasons that have entirely eluded my or anyone else’s research, a “Boston shaker.” Bartenders being a perverse race, this last is of course the name that has stuck, although now it refers to the American-style metal-and-glass version, rather than the British all-metal one. It’s all enough to make you want to take the pledge—in which case, you’ll have to call it a “lemonade shaker,” another name that was often attached to the apparatus.

Whatever it was called, bartenders took to using this classic bit of American improvisation more and more, not just when they needed that extra oomph: It was simple, it didn’t leak (much), it was cheap, and the parts were infinitely interchangeable. It was often used in conjunction with another piece of gear that came into use roughly at the same time. In the early days of iced drinks, the practice was to leave the ice in the drink and give the drinker a straw (another marvel of the age as far as European travelers were concerned). Not every tippler liked that, particularly if he was going to throw back his portion and get on with his business. Accordingly, as we see in some of Jerry Thomas’s 1862 Cocktail recipes, barkeepers began straining the drinks off the ice. (This must have been a fairly recent innovation, as iced Cocktails had only caught on the decade before.)

As with the shaker, here the bartender improvised. One method for holding back the ice, still in use, was to break the seal between the mixing glass and the shaker, hold the apparatus sideways over the glass and let the liquid trickle out. But this only worked if you were using the shaker, and many bartenders persisted in the two-glass method for Cocktails. For this, some bright spark whose name is lost to history made the discovery that a piece of silverware known as a “caster spoon” or “sugar sifter”—a spoon with a wide, scalloped bowl with little holes punched in it, used to sift sugar over a bowl of berries—could also be used to hold the ice in the mixing glass while letting the liquid trickle out. By the 1860s, special bar versions were being made, with handles bent just so to fit them into the glass. This came to be called a “Julep strainer,” not because you strain a Julep, but because for a time in the 1860s and ’70s some bars would put them in the drink itself and the customer would drink through them (they were even manufactured in sizes small enough to fit into a whiskey glass). Eventually, the old, scalloped models were replaced by one with a larger, oval bowl, which fit the glass better but didn’t look nearly as nice.

The earliest mention of anyone chilling the glass the drink is strained into—necessary if you’re not shaking it in the glass in which it will be served—comes in 1883 from a Kansas City bartender, who described a procedure involving “putting out a whiskey glass full of ice water, setting an empty glass on top of it, and then turning the water from one to the other.” For what it’s worth, ten years later a Brooklyn bartender could still describe chilling the glass as one of the arcana of the bartender’s art, practiced only by thirty-third-degree adepts.

It wasn’t just the tools and the techniques that got more elaborate; the drinks themselves did, too. Fancy garnishes of berries and artfully cut pieces of fruit; imported French syrups and Dutch and Italian liqueurs for sweetening; various kinds of bitters (in the early days, there was just one in general use); aristocratic wines and long-aged spirits—the colors on the barkeeper’s palette multiplied exponentially. The language even created a term for those who could master all of this: “mixologist.” In France, it takes an academy of intellectuals to modify the language. In America, all it takes is a guy with an idea. The term first appeared in the
Knickerbocker Magazine
in 1856, in a humor piece by Charles G. Leland—see the Philadelphia Fish-House Punch in Chapter 3—whose narrator overhears a Sport in the hotel-room next door referring to the bartender as a “mixologist of tipulars” and “tipicular fixings”; Leland’s coinage caught on, first humorously and then,
faute de mieux
, as a way of referring to a bartender who was, as the
Washington Post
later phrased it, “especially proficient at putting odds and ends of firewater together.” (Other terms that were floated and sank include Chicago’s “cocktail architect” and “drinkist.”) By the 1870s, saloon-keepers were using it in their advertising, with only a hint of a smile.