Imbibe! (29 page)

Unbeknownst to its consumer, many a Champagne Cocktail was actually a Jersey Cocktail. Much more French champagne was consumed in America than was shipped here from France, and the “apple-knockers” of New Jersey were more than ready to make up the deficit. In an age of “compound” or “artificial” beverages—we would say “adulterate,” “fraudulent,” or “recklessly toxic”—few were so voluminously and openly counterfeited as champagne. If you were lucky, you’d get good Garden State hard cider, pressurized with CO
₂
(preferably without too much residual carbonic acid) and bottled in a Frenchy-looking bottle. If you were unlucky . . . processed beet juice. Better to simply call a spade a spade and enjoy your cider for what it is.

The Jersey Cocktail doesn’t turn up often outside of bartenders’ guides, but in Thomas’s formulation it’s an honest, straightforward drink. Let that be its recommendation.

 

 

 

 

SOURCE: JERRY THOMAS, 1862

A favorite of mine for its mellow richness, the East India was, according to Harry Johnson, also “a great favorite with the English living in the different parts of East India” (for more on Mr. Johnson, see the Bijou Cocktail, page 256). In its composition nothing more than a particularly fancy Brandy Cocktail, the East India finds itself among the Evolved Cocktails chiefly by virtue of its name. If the Jersey Cocktail illustrates one of the most common and productive strategies for drink nomenclature, which is to simply name it after whence its most prominent ingredient hails (cf. the White Russian), the East India—alias the Bengal—illustrates another, which is to tag it with the name of wherever they’re drinking ’em.

Beyond Johnson’s statement, we have very little hard information about the East India. But there were American bars aplenty in the grand new hotels that dotted the Eastern reaches of Queen Victoria’s empire, and many an American bartender to tend them. Judging by the basic soundness of this formula, which first appears (with a slightly different—and inferior—formula) in Johnson’s 1882
New and Improved Bartender’s Manual
, the East India may well have been the work of one of these wandering Yankees.

 

 

FILL THE GLASS WITH SHAVED ICE
1 TEASPOONFUL OF CURAÇOA (RED)
1 TEASPOONFUL OF PINEAPPLE SYRUP
2 OR 3 DASHES OF BITTERS (BOKER’S GENUINE ONLY)
2 DASHES [¼ TSP] OF MARASCHINO
1 WINE GLASS FULL
[2 OZ]
OF BRANDY (MARTELL)

 

 

SOURCE: HARRY JOHNSON,
NEW AND IMPROVED BARTENDER’S MANUAL
, 1900 EDITION

Quoth the
Minneapolis Tribune
in early 1885: “The Japanese cocktail is [a] liquid attack of spinal meningitis. It is loaded with knock-kneed mental ceramics, and is apt to make a man throw stones at his grandfather.” It’s hard to think of a drink less worthy of such vitriol than the Japanese Cocktail. Perhaps the only drink in Jerry Thomas’s
How to Mix Drinks
actually invented by him, this suave and sweet social surfactant is many things, but a haven for “knock-kneed mental ceramics” isn’t one of them. Nor did it come from Japan. There’s nothing Japanese in it. In fact, as well as can be determined, the Japanese Cocktail is a fine example of yet another Cocktail-naming gambit, the commemorative Cocktail.

In June 1860, the first Japanese legation to the United States finished up their sensational tour with a few weeks in New York. A bunch of dignified, reserved, non-English-speaking Samurai, plus Tommy—well, Tateishi Onojirou Noriyuki, but nobody called him that. A young, frisky English speaker, Tommy was the legation’s legman—in both senses of the word: He had a decided interest in flirting with the ladies (and they with him).

If the American journalist who accompanied the legation on the long voyage home is to be believed, Tommy was interested in another American social custom as well, and in this his comrades joined him: “From breakfast to supper, they . . . [kept] the toddy-sticks going with much vivacity.” Their preferred poison? Cocktails. Small wonder: Their New York residence had been the Metropolitan Hotel, just a block away from Jerry Thomas’s “palace” bar at 622 Broadway. I can’t imagine that in their strolls around the neighborhood, they wouldn’t have stopped in to see the Professor for a quick one. And if you were Jerry Thomas, wouldn’t you come up with something special to mark the occasion?

The
Minneapolis Tribune
notwithstanding, the Japanese Cocktail remained in the current rotation, if not at the top of the list, until Prohibition, albeit often under the monickers “Mikado Cocktail” or “Chinese Cocktail” (let’s not go there).

 

 

1 TABLE-SPOONFUL OF ORGEAT SYRUP
½ TEASPOONFUL OF BOGART’S BITTERS
1 WINE-GLASS
[2 OZ]
OF BRANDY
1 OR 2 PIECES OF LEMON PEEL

 

SOURCE: JERRY THOMAS, 1862

As we have seen, much of the Cocktail’s development was intimately connected to the search for a better hangover cure. In an age before aspirin, Advil, or morphine, an age without Alka-Seltzer, Pepto-Bismol, or Starbucks’ bottled Frappucino, this quest was not an unreasonable one, particularly for the sports who were ordering champagne by the basket. When confronted by the “cold grey light of dawn” (a phrase coined by humorist George Ade for just this situation), the toper recognized it as “the great necessity of the age” (to quote the
Brooklyn Eagle
) that he should at once take some sort of “anti-fogmatic” (attested as early as 1808), “eye-opener” (1818), “bracer” (1829), “corpse reviver,” or “morning glory” (both 1862).

Which brings us to the Morning Glory Cocktail (which is to be distinguished from the Morning Glory Fizz). The plain Cocktail was clearly considered to be a pretty fair tonic—as well it should be, that function having been bred into it from the very beginning. But by the 1880s the original Cocktail was something like a hundred years old, and the antifogmatic arts had made some important advances. Perhaps a Cocktail could be produced to reflect this progress? That, at any rate, seems to be the consideration driving this formula, which first appeared in the 1887 rewrite of Thomas’s book. It’s got every key eye-opening ingredient, beginning with brandy and whiskey, running through bitters and absinthe, with a little curaçao to take the edge off and a healthy tot of soda or seltzer to provide hydration. Not surprisingly to one who has drunk of the Sazerac and the Improved Cocktail, which it closely resembles, it also tastes pretty fine.

 

 

TAKE 3 DASHES
[1 TSP]
OF GUM SYRUP
2 DASHES
[½ TSP]
OF CURAÇOA
2 DASHES OF BOKER’S BITTERS
1 DASH OF ABSINTHE
1 PONY
[1 OZ]
OF BRANDY
1 PONY
[1 OZ]
OF WHISKEY
1 PIECE OF LEMON PEEL, TWISTED TO EXPRESS THE OIL
2 SMALL PIECES OF ICE

 

 

SOURCE:
JERRY THOMAS’S BAR-TENDER’S GUIDE,
1887

Although absinthe was sold in New Orleans by 1837 and New York by 1843, it took a while for anyone to get around to making an actual according-to-Hoyle Cocktail out of it. In part, this is understandable. Absinthe was something that you dashed into Cocktails, not something you built a drink around. Eventually, though, someone saw the light,
et voila!
the Absinthe Cocktail. By the late 1870s, anyway, for the bartenders on Park Row, where New York’s newspapers kept their headquarters, making Absinthe Cocktails was “child’s play.”

Before long, though, American absinthe drinkers began to feel that the best thing about the Absinthe Cocktail was the absinthe itself, with the ice running a very close second and the anisette and the bitters lagging by several lengths. And thus the Absinthe Cocktail begat the Absinthe Frappé, which was simply ingredient
a
shaken up with lots of ice and strained into a Cocktail glass, which may or may not have been packed with shaved ice. These “clouded green ones” were regarded by the Sporting Fraternity as (what else) just the thing to ring for first thing in the morning when you had a “head the size of a birdcage” and a taste in your mouth “like a motorman’s glove” (as Clarence Louis Cullen of the
New York Sun
delineated the condition). Then, in 1904—ten years after the frappé starts turning up in sporting circles—Victor Herbert and Glen Macdonough included an ode to the Absinthe Frappé and its remarkable curative powers in their new show,
It Happened in Nordland
. With “Absinthe Frappé” spreading throughout the land in sheet music and recorded on Edison cylinder, suddenly the clouded green one found itself a white-hot drink, consumed by anyone, male or female, with pretensions to pretentiousness. This was akin to someone with an outstanding felony warrant going on
American Idol
. If absinthe had kept to its place among the sports and bohemians, it would have gone quietly to Prohibition with all the other spirits, and perhaps come out the other end with them as well. But given the stuff’s fearsome reputation, when the folks who live out where the bullfrogs croak saw their sons and daughters recreating on it, they took firm action. Absinthe was granted a special Prohibition all its own in 1912.

 

 

TAKE 2 DASHES
[½ TSP]
OF ANISETTE
1 DASH OF ANGOSTURA BITTERS
1 PONY-GLASS
[1 OZ]
OF ABSINTHE

Pour about one wine-glass
[2 oz]
of water into the tumbler in a small stream from the ice pitcher, or preferably from an absinthe glass. Shake up very thoroughly with ice, and strain into a claret glass.

SOURCE:
JERRY THOMAS’S BAR-TENDER’S GUIDE,
1887