Imbibe! (8 page)

 

 

The artistic mixologists of the Golden Fifties and Bloody Sixties were working at a pitch that couldn’t last. As the nation grew in size, population, wealth, and industrial heft, the sporting milieu that produced men like Jerry Thomas and nurtured them in their craft began sliding into decline. Ironically, this served to liberate the Cocktail from some of its louche connotations, as the kind of upper-crust gents who would previously have confined themselves to wine learned to drink Manhattans and such—a new, lighter, and simpler breed of Cocktail. The theatrics that characterized Baroque Age mixology came to seem embarrassingly gaudy. Rather than display maximum effort and enjoyment in their work, the new-school bartenders of the Gay Nineties cultivated economy of gesture, deploying the spoon rather than the shaker wherever possible.

At the same time, the elegantly simple shaker-glass-strainer combination fell victim to the American thirst for progress. Sure, it worked fine, if subject to the occasional glitch (with heavy use, the mixing-tins tended to erode or crack at the place where they met the glass and get gunky with verdigris, and the strainers didn’t always fit the glass perfectly). But from the 1870s on, there were numerous attempts to improve things. The first one to stick was patented in 1884 by one Edward Hauck, of Brooklyn, New York. This is, more or less, the same three-piece shaker we know today, with a mixing tin, a metal cap with a strainer in the middle of it, and another cap on top of that. (A Chicago man had patented a similar three-piece shaker in 1877, but it had a complicated air vent and didn’t catch on; then as now, for bar gear simpler is better.) It’s uncertain how many actual bartenders used these “combination shakers.” The parts were harder to keep track of in a busy bar, and ice tended to block up the strainer and slow the straining process. But some did, anyway, particularly in Britain.

The strainer, too, got an upgrade, although not until 1889: That’s when a Connecticut man by the name of Lindley came up with the bright idea of threading a spring around the edge of the thing, thus enabling it to fit into any size glass. This received its current name, the “Hawthorne strainer,” three years later, when the Manning-Bowman company of Connecticut put out a slightly improved version, which had a row of little holes around the edge forming the word “Hawthorne”. (It took another fifteen years for the device to sprout ears to hold it over the top of the mixing tin, thus assuming its present-day form.)

There were other technical innovations—fancy new lemon-squeezers, metal jiggers to replace the sherry-glasses that had been previously used to measure out drinks (the standard nip-waisted double cone was patented in 1892 by Cornelius Dungan of Chicago), bartop hot-water dispensers, champagne-taps that screwed right through the cork, thus allowing the stuff to be dispensed one squirt at a time, and so forth. All of these worked to simplify and streamline the mixologist’s art (when, that is, they worked at all); to open it up to general participation.

The one area the Classic Age surpassed the Baroque in elaborateness is in the profusion of glassware. As the nineteenth century wore on and the mixologist’s art gained in complexity, he required more and more types of glasses into which to deposit his creations. Willard at the City Hotel probably made do with only four or five different kinds of glasses—small tumblers, large tumblers, small and large wineglasses, perhaps a few cordial glasses, and something for hot drinks. By the end of the century, that would have been woefully inadequate. In 1884, New York’s G. Winter Brewing Co. published a little bartender’s guide, containing a list of the glassware required for a first-rate saloon:

 

This list is actually fairly conservative: it omits the so-called small bar-glass, glosses over the knotty issue of the absinthe glass (there were two kinds available, each adapted to a different way of serving the verdant elixir; a first-class bar would have both), and skimps on the small goods required for the various cordials and Pousse-Cafés in style at the time. Of course, only a few bars would carry such a freight of glass. If, on the one hand (as the
New York Tribune
opined in 1908), “the array of gleaming, highly-polished glassware displayed and used in the hotels and cafés in Manhattan is unexcelled anywhere in the world,” it’s equally true that there were plenty of joints on that very same island that had no problem making do with beer mugs and whiskey glasses and would treat the order of a Pousse-Café as an invitation to physical violence.
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It wasn’t just the tools that changed; the spirits did, too. With a savage yank from a pesky insect known as phylloxera, brandy was dragged out of the spotlight, which it had so long occupied as the premiere mixing and sipping spirit, to be replaced by American whiskey in the mixing glass and Scotch whisky in the clubroom. At the same time, dry gin drove out the lightly sweet styles that had previously prevailed, just as the dry Bacardi rum from Cuba chased out the heavier rums from St. Croix and Jamaica. Imported liqueurs multiplied behind the bar, and even such exotica as Russian vodka began popping up in the occasional mixture (mezcal and tequila, however, although drunk in some quantity in the Southwest, don’t appear to have cracked the mixologist’s armamentarium until the 1920s). Even the mixers changed: vermouth, known (if not savored) in the United States since the 1830s, suddenly appeared in a dizzying variety of Cocktails, mixed with every spirit known to commerce. The definition of a Cocktail stretched to include ingredients like lemon juice, orange juice, pineapple juice, and the faddish and pink-making grenadine. By 1920, just about every technique and major ingredient known to modern mixology was in play (okay, there wasn’t a lot of flavored vodka, but they made up for it by selling artificial sour mix and cellulose cocktail cherries). Only now, with the introduction of so-called molecular mixology, with its foams, gels, infusions and vapors, are we beginning to break new ground. But that’s (thankfully) beyond the scope of this book.

As you’ve no doubt gathered by this point, accurately reproducing pre-Prohibition drinks is a tricky business. It only gets worse when you start digging into the actual recipes, which are far more inconsistent than my thumbnail history of mixology suggests. Even when everyone else is shaking their drinks, you can always find some crossgrained son of toil who will grumble that they’re all doing it wrong and you really have to stir it. Bartenders are an individualistic lot, and always have been.

Happily, reproducing these drinks deliciously isn’t nearly so hard, and while bull’s-eye accuracy is elusive, you can at least get the vast majority of ’em into the black, and often enough a good deal closer than that. What follows are some general suggestions and observations for making them work as smoothly and easily as possible; I’ll discuss exceptions and other specifics under the individual drinks.

 

 

Let’s begin with the basic tools and how to use them. You can haunt eBay for Julep strainers and old-style barspoons and such if you’re so inclined, but they’re certainly not necessary for making the drinks in this book come out well. One of the defining characteristics of American mixology is its inherent resistance to change, and the modern bartender’s kit isn’t all that different from what his predecessor would have been using a hundred years ago.

If you want to go Baroque and “toss the foaming Cocktail” (as they used to say) from glass to glass, please let me know if you fig-ure
out how it’s done; after considerable practice, I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s some kind of trick involved, and I don’t know what that trick is. One thing’s for sure: The guys who knew how to do it weren’t about to let it get into print; while spectators’ accounts of it abound, I have yet to find one penned by a practitioner. Otherwise, it’s the mixing glass and shaker, both of which are readily available and easy to use.

To shake a drink, simply combine all the ingredients in the glass (that way you can see if you’re missing anything), bung in the ice—I’ll discuss that below—and cover it with the shaker. Then give the upturned bottom of the shaker a tap with your fist to seat it and shake it vigorously up and down like a piston with the metal part on the bottom so that if—heaven forfend!—the seal should break, the mess will end up on you rather than your guests. To break the seal, hold the shaker in your weak hand, with your fingers overlapping the join between the parts. Then take your other hand, point your fingers up to the ceiling, and with the heel of your hand sharply tap the spot on the mixing tin where the rim of the glass touches it inside. If the seal doesn’t break, rotate the glass a quarter-turn and try again. Repeat as necessary. Since the drink will be left in the mixing tin, you’ll have to strain it out with a Hawthorne strainer, which is designed to fit over the tin.

To stir a drink (or “mix” it, as some mixologists called it), proceed as before except rather than fitting a shaker over the mix-ing
glass you’ll be sliding a spoon into it and whirling it around. The key here is to expend as little energy as possible, and at all costs avoid vigorously thrashing everything about. (Very unbartenderly.) This is much easier if you use fine ice, discussed below. In any case, you’ll want to stir a good ten or fifteen seconds and then strain the drink out with the spoon-shaped Julep strainer, which is sized (or should be, anyway) to fit right into the mixing glass. To be authentic, leave the barspoon in the glass while you strain.

When to shake and when to stir? Modern orthodoxy dictates that one should shake any drink with fruit juices, dairy products, or eggs and stir ones that contain only spirits, wines, and the like. This is based partly on the fact that these last ingredients are harder to mix and partly on the fact that shaking clouds up liquids by beating thousands of tiny bubbles into them. If you don’t mind your Martinis, Manhattans, and Improved Brandy Cocktails cloudy, go ahead and shake them; many an old-time mixologist did. Conversely, though, I don’t recommend stirring a Ramos Gin Fizz; no amount of agitating with a spoon will make it come out right. You can probably stir a Whiskey Sour or a Daiquiri though, should you feel strongly about it, without causing permanent injury to its recipient.

If you’re making drinks from the toddy-stick era, simply use its modern descendent, the muddler—which is nothing more than a thick hardwood dowel with a flat knob on one end and a rounded bit to serve as a handle on the other. Like Americans themselves, this might be a little stouter than its ancestors, but it still works pretty much the same.

 

This brings us to the question of ingredients in general, and in specific sugar, which was, with a handful of exceptions (see the Apple Toddy, the Crushed Raspberry Fizz, and the Clover Club), the only thing the toddy-stick or muddler was used to crush. While a visit to any tony grocer’s shop will turn up a surprising array of sugars for sale, none of them are a precise equivalent for what was available in the nineteenth century, particularly in the earlier years. Our loaf sugar comes in crumbly little cubes, rather than the dense, resistant loaves that it once did, and our white sugar is too dazzling white, relying on production methods not known to the ancients of mixology. On the other hand, our raw sugar, the nearest step down the scale, is too brown. Given a choice, I’ll use the raw sugar—either a Demerara or a turbinado, such as the supermarket-friendly Sugar in the Raw brand. To make this easily soluble, though, it must first be pulverized in a food processor. If that’s too much trouble, superfine sugar will work just fine, although it will convey a little less depth of flavor.