Imbibe! (42 page)

The Watertown, New York, paper makes the curious statement, seconded in a brief reminiscence of Thomas published upon his death in the
New Orleans Picayune
, that on this voyage “His adventures in Rio Janeiro, Valparaiso and other places in South America were so peculiar that his account of them has been published in book form and widely circulated.” I’ve been unable to locate any trace of such a book, but with Jerry Thomas, you never know.

This organization, ostensibly a bunch of gourd-growing fanatics, met in the Barclay Street saloon for a while in 1878 and left their fetish-objects festooning the bar. According to the
Times
, Thomas was their leader, and had various grandiose plans for exhibitions, thrones made out of the things, and so on and so forth. The whole business seems fishy to me, but I can’t put my finger on the exact angle being worked, and in any case by 1879 we hear of it no more.

The canonical long-stemmed, conical Martini glass does not appear on the scene until the 1920s, although the engravings of Cruikshank are full of Victorian Londoners drinking gin and punch from short-stemmed, flaring affairs that bear some similarity, and the 1902 Albert Pick Company catalogue displays a conical Cocktail glass that gives one pause. For what it’s worth, Hollywood seemed at first to consider the iconic, streamlined version we use today to be a champagne glass—that’s how it appears, anyway, in Lewis Milestone’s 1928
The Racket
and Buster Keaton’s 1929
Spite Marriage
—in the latter, in a scene where people are also drinking Cocktails, out of the standard coupes. Both films were made by different studios, so we know it’s not some brain-bent set dresser’s mistake.

For the record, the precise variations acknowledged in Thomas’s book are: hot Apple Toddy, cold and hot Brandy Toddy, cold Whiskey Toddy, cold Gin Toddy, cold (and presumably hot) Brandy Sling, hot Whiskey Sling, and cold Gin Sling.

Irving’s book was indeed first published in 1809, but he frequently and extensively revised it and Cocktail was one of the things he shoehorned in later.

This is dated in pencil as “about 1895,” but this cannot be as it lists the “Zaza Cocktail,” christened after the Broadway play that opened in January 1899.

The Jerome part of the story probably comes from the fact that the Manhattan Club later occupied a house once owned by Leonard Jerome, Jennie’s father (the same building, in fact, that had housed the Turf Club; see Appendix III).

This incident must have occurred before November 1857, when Jacob Martin Van Winkle, the American who had set himself up as a “dealer in the American drinks, described as cock-tails, tiger’s-milk, bull’s-milk, brandy smashes & c.” in part of the King’s Head tavern in the Poultry (right around the corner from the Bank of England’s Threadneedle Street headquarters) was declared bankrupt; evidently those perusers never did screw their courage up enough to actually liquorate.

It may seem impossible to confuse gin and whiskey, but bear in mind that these drinks were mixed with a good deal of vermouth and bitters, which would help mask both color and flavor, and the malty, full-bodied gins in use in the 1880s were much closer to a young whiskey than the London dry gins in use now.