Imbibe! (27 page)

The prince was a pup. A gay dog. A letch. A lush. A charming—if stout—son of a bitch, said bitch being Queen Victoria, he watched decade after decade roll by with her grasping the reins of power for dear life and nothing for him to do in the official line but wave to the nice folks. So he did what anybody else would have: He got grumpy and he got loose. Mistresses and mischief ensued. He spent a lot of time at the table, the theater, and the club. Somewhere along there, he learned how to make a pretty fair variation on the Improved Whiskey Cocktail—in fact, one of the sportiest on record. If his circumstances had been different, Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, would’ve made a hell of a bartender.

The particular sportiness of the prince’s brainchild lies in the addition of champagne. This Gilded Age refinement appears to date from the 1880s, when any saloon with pretensions to quality was splashing the bubbly about pretty liberally into anything from a Brandy Punch to a Manhattan Cocktail. It helped that they had special equipment, like the “solid silver champagne case pendant from the ceiling over the bar” installed at the new Palace Exchange in Decatur, Illinois, in 1882. “This novel contrivance is an innovation in Decatur,” the local paper explains, “and will be used to ‘dash’ punches, sours, cocktails, and other fancy drinks.” Most bartenders made do with a “champagne tap,” a hollow-stemmed gimlet with a tap at the end that you screwed through the cork. The prince, he probably sabered the top off a magnum of Mumm and hosed it about with gayish abandon.

[The Prince of Wales]
is also credited with having composed an excellent “cocktail.” It consists of a little
[1½] oz]
rye whisky, crushed ice, a small square of pineapple, a dash of Angostura bitters, a piece of lemon peel, a few drops
[¼ tsp]
of Maraschino, a little
[1 oz]
champagne and powdered sugar to taste
[1 tsp]
. This“short drink”is often asked for at the clubs which he frequents.

SOURCE:
PRIVATE LIFE OF KING EDWARD VII
, BY A MEMBER OF THE ROYAL HOUSEHOLD (LONDON, 1901)

Everything new always turfs up a few people who liked the old way better. So no one should be surprised that when the plain Cocktail began gathering unto its bosom troubling dashes of curaçoa and absinthe and truly alarming splashes of vermouth, fruit juice, and orgeat syrup, there were those who cried bloody murder. (And to a degree I can see their point: In these days of Apple Pucker Martinis, my sympathies tend to lie with the purists.) For the drinker who resisted change, the 1870s must’ve been trying times. At some point, this resistance coalesced into a catchphrase. Just as the modern-day fogey has learned that the phrase “gin Martini, straight up” when uttered to a bartender will secure an approximation of a real Martini, his or her Gilded Age counterpart learned that saying “old-fashioned Whiskey [or Gin, or Brandy] Cocktail” would bring forth a drink made with a slug of good (hopefully) booze, lump sugar instead of syrup, ice in the glass, and none of that vulgar shaking and straining and garnishing.

It should come as no surprise that Chicago, that most broad-shouldered of cities, seems to have been one of the main centers of resistance. In fact, discounting an ambiguous newspaper squib from 1869, the earliest clear references to the “Old-Fashioned” way of making cocktails come from the pages of the
Chicago Tribune
. The first is from 1880, when Samuel Tilden, the Al Gore of his age, decided not to run for president again, prompting goal-oriented Democrats to toast his withdrawal with “Hot-whiskies . . . sour mashes and old-fashioned cocktails.” (Note that this busts the myth that the drink was invented at the Pendennis Club in Louisville; the club wasn’t founded until 1881.) Two years later, when the
Trib
quizzes a prominent local bartender about what the gents are drinking, he replies, “The old-fashioned cocktails [are] still in vogue; cocktails made of loaf-sugar and whisky . . . Rye whiskey [is] called for more than Bourbon.”

It wasn’t just a Chicago thing, though; the Old-Fashioned also appears in Lafcadio Hearn’s seminal 1885 New Orleans cookbook,
La Cuisine Creole
, albeit under the name “spoon cocktail” (the drink was generally served with a smaller version of the barspoon in it, for the customer to stir in any undissolved sugar). By 1895, the old-fashioned way was sufficiently popular for both Chris Lawlor, of the Burnet House hotel in Cincinnati, and George Kappeler, of New York’s Holland House, to include it in their books. Both recipes are nearly identical, describing an agriculturally simple drink, just spirits stirred up with sugar, bitters, and a little ice, with a bit of lemon peel for accent—in other words, a Cocktail straight out of the 1850s. In 1895, you can see why that might appeal; why people in the age of the automobile and the electric light might like a liquid look back to the days when the railroad was the latest thing; when Indians still paddled the Mississippi; when the best restaurants served roast bear and the passenger pigeon was a popular game bird; when barrooms were alive with “the merry raps of the toddy stick.” The Old-Fashioned was a drinker’s plea for a saner, quieter, slower life, one in which a gent could take a drink or two without fear that it would impair his ability to dodge a speeding streetcar or operate a rotary press.

But Americans are a restless people and seldom willing to let well enough alone. In the fullness of time, even the Old-Fashioned, whose very essence was its monolithic plainness, started getting the treatment. In New York, that treatment varied from having both lemon and orange peel slathered onto it and a chunk of pineapple tossed in to boot, as in Times Square bartender Hugo Ensslin’s 1916 recipe for an Old-Fashioned Gin Cocktail, to the same plus orange curaçao, to an all-out assault combining rye, Dubonnet, curaçao, absinthe, and so forth. Ensslin called that one an “Old-Fashioned Appetizer”; others might have disagreed on both counts.

Don Marquis, for one. In a series of essays the
New York Sun
writer—and creator of the immortal archy and mehitabel—published in the early days of Prohibition, he has his alter ego, the “Old Soak,” utter what amounts to the Old-Fashioned drinker’s manifesto: “In the old days when there was barrooms you would go into one . . . and say Ed, mix me one of the old-fashioned whiskey cocktails and don’t put too much orange and that kind of damned garbage into it, I want the kick.” What he would’ve made of the version you get today, with muddled orange slice and maraschino cherry and an ocean of seltzer, one shudders to think.

 

Dissolve a small lump
[½ tsp]
of sugar with a little
[½ tsp]
water in a whiskey-glass; add two dashes Angostura bitters, a small piece ice, a piece lemon-peel, one jigger
[2 oz]
whiskey. Mix with a small barspoon and serve,leaving spoon in the glass.

SOURCE: GEORGE J. KAPPELER,
MODERN AMERICAN DRINKS
(NEW YORK, 1895)

New Orleans’ own liquid lagniappe has a way of striking sophisticated tipplers from Basin Street to Bombay in just the exact right place they like to be struck. When William Sydney Porter, alias O. Henry—a man who knew all the cushions and angles when it came to drinks—rhapsodized in one of his stories about New Orleans and “[making] the acquaintance of drinks invented by the Creoles during the period of Louey Cans,” it was undoubtedly the Sazerac he had in mind. He often did, you see. In his last years, when he was living at the Caledonia Hotel on Twenty-sixth Street in Manhattan, according to the keeper of the “quiet little bar” down the street, “Sazerac cocktail was his favorite drink.” As if to prove it, Porter made a daily practice of dropping in for them “more or less regularly” from ten in the morning until midnight. This may help to explain his confusion regarding the chronology of Cocktails and Kings: The Sazerac, venerable as it may be, postdates the period of Louis Quinze by several generations. But the history of this drink is so intricate and entangled in myth that it requires a monograph of its own.

I know this because the untangling of it I was originally planning to include here had already reached some sixteen pages with no sign of wrapping up when my editor wisely suggested I take a different tack. So let me merely state for the record that the Sazerac was in no way the first Cocktail, as has been asserted time and again by its enthusiastic proponents. There is in fact no written record of it before the first decade of the twentieth century, which is perfectly understandable: When all is said and done, the Sazerac is merely a plain Whiskey (or Brandy—see Notes on Ingredients, page 188) Cocktail, made with Peychaud’s bitters and finished with a dash of absinthe. A generation earlier, you could have ordered the same thing in any bar in America that served mixed drinks. But once Evolved (page 202) and Vermouth Cocktails became all the rage (page 233), such simple, robust pleasures began to seem rather exotic and worthy of notice.

And so they have remained. Nowadays, just try ordering a Whiskey Cocktail with a dash of absinthe (or legal substitute). Not even in New York, the cradle of fancy drinking in America, can you count on obtaining such a thing. But walk into Tujague’s, the Napoleon House, just about any central New Orleans bar save the most egregious Lite beer and Hand-Grenade joint, and moments later you’re sipping a drink that’s remained unchanged since the 1880s. To paraphrase Norma Desmond, the Sazerac
is
big. It’s the other Cocktails that got small.

The recipe below is the first one in print for the modern, whiskey-based version of the drink. The famed Sazerac Bar on Royal Street was the drink’s cradle and headquarters until Prohibition shut it down. There’s a Walgreens on the site today. So it goes.

 

Frappé an old-fashioned flat bar-glass; then take a mixing glass and muddle half a cube
[½ tsp]
of sugar with a little water; add some ice, a jigger
[2 oz]
of good whiskey, two dashes of Peychaud bitters, and a piece of twisted lemon peel; stir well until cold, then throw the ice out of the bar-glass, dash several drops of Absinthe into the same, and rinse well with the Absinthe. Now strain the Cocktail into the frozen glass, and serve with ice water on the side.

SOURCE: WILLIAM (COCKTAIL) BOOTHBY, “SOME NEW UP-TO-NOW SEDUCTIVE AMERICAN COCKTAILS” (UNDATED SUPPLEMENT TO
THE WORLD’S DRINKS AND HOW TO MIX THEM
, 1908)