Imbibe! (2 page)

As luck would have it,
Esquire
liked the historical essays I had fitted a few of the drinks out with enough to hire me to do them for all the drinks. A new one went up on the site each week. Suddenly, I was a mixographer. Being a good academic, my first response was that I was going to need a lot more books. Well, maybe that was my second response, after kissing my wife, Karen, and mixing us up a couple of celebratory Martinis (Beefeater and Noilly Prat, seven to one, olives, as I recall). In any case, the handful of vintage drink books Karen and I had accumulated over the years—Charles H. Baker, Jr., Patrick Gavin Duffy, Harry Craddock, a couple more—were going to need some serious reinforcements. The first book I bought? “Professor” Jerry Thomas’s, in the same 1928 Herbert Asbury edition Dale found (imagine my disappointment when I learned that Thomas’s title was awarded not by any academic institution but by the wags of the day, who gave it to anyone who could do anything requiring superior technical knowledge, be it tickling out syncopated melodies on the piano, dealing undetectably from the bottom of the deck, or constructing a perfect Sherry Cobbler).

Having read
Straight Up or On the Rocks
, William Grimes’s groundbreaking cocktail history, I knew that Thomas’s book was the first of its kind, and I was a firm believer in starting at the beginning.

Over the next three years, in the service of
Esquire
and soon various other publications, I mixed literally thousands of drinks of all classes and styles. But while I often used Jerry Thomas’s book as a sort of historical backstop, a place to trace a particular recipe back to, I rarely mixed any actual drinks from it. At first glance, the book’s telegraphically phrased recipes seemed either uninspiringly simple or dauntingly complex; deeply weird or old hat.

But again, things happen. At the end of 2002, now an ex-professor and happy to be so, I was introduced to a couple of people from the Slow Food movement at a friend’s birthday party. Since said party happened to be in a bar, I did what I do best in bars and began holding forth. Slow Food is all about preserving traditional foodways. Well, what’s more traditional and American than the fine art of mixing drinks? Hell, we invented it, back in Jerry Thomas’s days. In fact, somebody ought to hold a tribute to Ol’ Jerry, right here in New York where he worked; the grand memorial service he never had. And so on.

The last thing I expected was that they’d take me seriously—that’s not what bar talk is for. But since Shawn Kelley, Ana Jovancicevic, and Allen Katz, the people I was shooting my mouth off to, all happen to be organized, energetic, and competent, the next thing I knew the Professor was getting his tribute. And it wasn’t just a couple of folks meeting up at a bar somewhere. It was at the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel, no less, with seven of America’s top mixologists and me, all making the Professor’s drinks—Blue Blazers, Brandy Crustas, Tom & Jerries, a bunch more—and the great Terry Waldo playing ragtime on the piano. There was even the traditional free lunch, a spread of oysters and country ham and whatnot that wouldn’t have been at all out of place when the Oak Room was the hotel’s men’s bar, back in the sepiatone days before Prohibition. There was even a little souvenir booklet with all the recipes we made, lovingly designed by Ted “Dr. Cocktail” Haigh, who does that sort of thing for a living. For it, I decided to write a little bio of the Professor, which meant doing a little research. You hold in your hands what happens when I start to do a little research.

Originally, this book was going to be an update of Asbury’s edition—a new, more accurate biographical chapter and then all the recipes, with various historical and mixological notes attached. But the more I worked on it, and the more I learned about Thomas and the origins of his book, the more five initials kept popping up in my head.
W.W.J.T.D.: What Would Jerry Thomas Do?
Would he be content to trudge along like some electronic-age Bartleby, narrowly copying another’s work and keeping his thoughts on the matter mostly to himself? Or would he have gone for it, using the occasion as an excuse to tell everything he knew? The answer was obvious. I could be true to Jerry Thomas’s book, or true to Jerry Thomas. I chose the latter.

On the one hand, this means that you won’t find every recipe from Jerry Thomas’s book here. In fact, of the largest class of drinks in his book, the almost threescore recipes for bowls of Punch, you’ll find only two. A bowl of Punch is a wonderful, even sublime thing, but it was already obsolete as a bar drink by the time his book was published, and the vast majority of the recipes were old English ones foisted on him by his publisher. Rather than swell the book by the hundred-odd pages it would take to explain them, I’ve reserved them for another book. I’ve also cut back drastically on egg drinks and the things that are made by carefully layering liqueurs in tiny glasses. On the other hand, I’ve used the space thus cleared to supplement the Professor’s recipes with a goodly number of others from his contemporaries and immediate successors—popular, even important drinks that, I like to think, he would have included had he lived to do another edition of his book. (In all this, anyway, I’m doing no more than what he and his original publisher did: In 1876, they reprinted his book with a supplement containing new drinks, and in 1887, two years after his death, they put out a thorough update and revision, done by some unsung but expert bartender whose name has been lost to history.)

One last thing. This book took a long time to write, but what kept me going throughout was the sheer delight I got from testing the recipes. Time after time, what seemed plain on the page turned out to be subtle; what seemed baroque or fussy, rich and rewarding. But this is only proper. The average nineteenth-century drinker was accustomed to having his drinks—based not on a thin and anodyne tipple like vodka, but rather on something robust and flavorful, like cognac, rye whiskey, Holland gin, or brown sherry—made with fresh-squeezed juices, one of several different kinds of available bitters, hand-chipped ice, and a host of other touches that are today the mark of only the very best bars. In presenting the recipes I’ve done my best to lay bare these touches; to transmit the techniques and competencies the bartender relied on in practicing his craft; in making a few cents worth of whiskey, sugar, and frozen water into a glimpse of a better world.

In the January 1820 issue of the
Edinburgh Review
, the noted English wit Sydney Smith closed his review of Adam Seybert’s 804-page
Statistical Annals of the United States of America
with a flurry of questions calculated to let the air out of anyone whom Seybert’s monument to American enterprise might inspire with admiration for the new republic’s achievements. “Confining ourselves to our own country,” he asks, “and to the period that has elapsed since they had an independent existence . . . Where are their Foxes, their Burkes, their Sheridans . . . their Wilberforces?”—and a good twenty-one other celebrated names to boot, covering the full spectrum of human endeavor. It’s not just that the country lacks famous names, though; it’s everything:

 

Here’s the thing: Smith wasn’t entirely wrong. From our perspective, two very busy—and largely American—centuries down the road, it’s not easy to appreciate just how rudimentary American civilization was in its early years. Once you got more than a day’s ride in from the coast, where things were maintained to a thickly provincial, mail-order version of European standard, everything was salt pork and hominy, dirt and ignorance and inebriation, all punctuated by the
splat
of expectorated tobacco juice. Or so it seemed, anyway, to the European travelers who flooded the country.

Even an impartial observer (which Smith and most of the travelers were assuredly not) would have to concede literature—although Washington Irving’s 1809
Knickerbocker’s History of New York
had earned at least some amount of international notice—and drama, painting, and the plastic arts. And medicine, astronomy, and math. And manufacturing, heavy industry, light industry. Pretty much everything, in short, but raw materials, empty space and the sheer drive and feistiness needed to fill it.

But little did Sydney Smith realize that, even as he wrote, an American name was thrusting itself forward, and in an art in which Great Britain had long been preeminent. As often, this genius at first was not recognized: The earliest squint we have at him creating comes from Lieutenant the Honourable Frederick Fitzgerald De Roos, of the Royal Navy, who encountered him in 1826 and was not impressed. This was at the City Hotel, the best in New York at the time. “The entrance to the house,” the fussy lieutenant writes, “is constantly obstructed by crowds of people passing to and from the bar-room, where a person presides at a buffet formed upon the plan of a cage. This individual is engaged, ‘from morn to dewy eve,’ in preparing and issuing forth punch and spirits to strange-looking men, who come to the house to read the newspapers and talk politics.”

About that man in the cage (American hotels kept their bars right in the lobby, so they needed to be lockable when the desk clerk/barkeeper—the jobs were one and the same—was off duty, lest the guests help themselves): His name was Willard. Mr. Willard, if you were being formal. If he had a first name, nobody ever used it. If the lieutenant had been a little less stuck-up, he might have noticed that the “issuing forth” Willard was doing was something more than ladling Punch from a bowl and pouring drams. In fact, he was America’s first celebrity bartender; our “Napoleon of BarKeepers,” as he was called. As one patron recalled, “Willard was one of the first in the city to concoct fancy drinks, and he introduced the mint-julep as a bar drink,” frequently mixing them up three or four at a time while simultaneously using his photographic memory to greet long-absent guests by name, supply the whereabouts of others, and answer all and sundry questions clerks and bartenders are subject to.

Indeed, as the English traveler Charles Augustus Murray observed in 1839, “by common consent” Willard, whose name was familiar to every American, and to every foreigner who has visited the States during the last thirty years,” was “allowed to be the first master of [his] art in the known world.” There was probably no other American in any field about whom an Englishman would admit this, but then again, Murray had tried Willard’s Mint Juleps. As an Englishman, Murray knew whereof he spoke: For two hundred years, the English upper classes had maintained a reputation as the world’s most discriminating consumers of alcoholic beverages. Without their educated—and insatiable—demand, Bordeaux wines, champagne, cognac, vintage port, old sherry, Scotch whisky, and liqueur rum would never have developed beyond an embryonic stage; it was the English market that nourished and shaped them. Nor was the Milords’ expertise confined to straight goods alone: Punch, the nectareous and lethal concoction that for two hundred years represented the acme of the mixologist’s art, was for all intents and purposes an English creation, and those men who excelled in making it were rewarded with money and celebrity. But as Murray and indeed every other traveler who visited America and was cooled by a Mint Julep on a hot day or warmed by an Apple Toddy on a cold one was forced to admit, in this one art anyway, the old order was passing and a
novus ordo potationum
was coming into being.

Now, admittedly, mixed drinks are not paintings, sculptures, novels, or poems. They are disposable and, frankly, not a little bit disreputable, standing roughly in the same relation to the culinary arts that American motor sports do to automotive engineering or hot jazz to musical composition: they smack of improvisation and cheap effects and even the most august of them lack the cachet accorded to fine wines, old whiskies, and cognac brandies. They are easily abused; they can degrade lives and even destroy them. Even if appreciated in moderation, they are appreciated in surroundings that rarely lead to detached meditation on truth and beauty (if those are not the same thing) or constructive engagement with the great moral and social questions of the age. And yet neither are they contemptible. A proper drink at the right time—one mixed with care and skill and served in a true spirit of hospitality—is better than any other made thing at giving us the illusion, at least, that we’re getting what we want from life. A cat can gaze upon a king, as the proverb goes, and after a Dry Martini or a Sazerac Cocktail or two, we’re all cats.

But let’s leave such philosophical matters for when we meet over a drink and note that even the notorious Mrs. Trollope, who spent three and a half years in Tennessee, Virginia, and, mostly, the American “Porkopolis,” Cincinnati, and recorded her frank and decidedly unvarnished impressions of the country in her 1832
Domestic Manners of the Americans
, finally came around to admitting that here was something that Americans excelled in, and that it had merit. Indeed, she conceded in 1849, when it came to those Mint Juleps she had disingenuously held up in her book as an example of American boorishness, “it would, I truly believe, be utterly impossible for the art of man to administer anything so likely to restore them from the overwhelming effects of heat and fatigue.” And these were Whiskey Juleps, mind you—if someone had managed to slip one of the more epicurean Brandy ones under her nose, who can say? She might even have given Porkopolis another chance.