Imbibe! (34 page)

If the paternity of the Martinez rests on shaky ground, California’s contribution to the art and evolution of the Dry Martini is far more firmly anchored. “The Gibson,” wrote the
Oakland Tribune
in 1915, “is a blend peculiar to San Francisco. Since its introduction along the cocktail route in this town, it has become known over the two great divides, across the rivers and valleys and in the cavernous canyons of a metropolis just beyond Jersey City.” If, as San Francisco’s own Bill Boothby asserted, it was named after (and presumably championed by) Charles Dana Gibson, that couldn’t have hurt its distribution—Gibson was just about the most popular artist in America. On the other hand, it may very well have been named after San Francisco financier and Bohemian Club member Walter D. K. Gibson, whose family maintains that the club’s bartender made the drink under his instructions in 1898 or thereabouts. Whichever Gibson it was, the drink was nationwide by 1904.

None of the early mentions of the Gibson include the now-iconic pickled onion. I suspect that the onion was added in later years as an attribute by which to distinguish the Gibson from the Dry Martini, once the latter had sloughed off the dashes of bitters that had been the distinguishing mark between them.

 

A la Charles Dana Gibson, Bohemian Club, San Francisco Equal parts
[1½ oz each]
of French Vermouth and Coates Plymouth Gin, thoroughly chilled, is called a Gibson Cocktail. No decorations, bitters or citron fruit rind permissible in this famous appetizer.

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)

If there’s a Cocktail with whiskey and vermouth and one with gin and vermouth, could one with brandy and vermouth be far behind? The question is of course rhetorical. In 1884, the
London Telegraph
was already talking about American bartenders considering “a vermouth cocktail with a dash of brandy in it” to be “de rigeur, just before lunch.” And indeed, that same year O. H. Byron included a brandy-and-vermouth “Metropolitan Cocktail” in his
Modern Bartender’s Guide
. Unfortunately, he neglects to indicate precisely which Metropolitan it hailed from. At the time, there were various Metropolitan Clubs, Metropolitan Saloons, and Metropolitan Hotels scattered throughout the country, from the largest cities to the wildest mining camps.

Nor is there anything to be deduced from the author’s biography: Byron, alas, is a man of mystery. Extensive digging through newspaper archives, city directories, and census records has failed to reveal exactly who the hell he was. I don’t even know what city he worked in, let alone what establishment, if any: For all I know, “O. H. Byron” may be the Excelsior Publishing House of New York’s nom de plume for some lawyer’s clerk hired to scrape together a ream of drink recipes. But whoever collected them, the recipes—at least, the few that weren’t directly poached from Jerry Thomas—are well chosen. What’s more, considered closely they display an insider’s knowledge of what the boys were drinking in New York. The book provides, for instance, a recipe for the Amaranth Cocktail that tallies with the Cocktail attributed to the Amaranth Club (a Gotham theatrical club) in the
Galveston Daily News
in 1873 (see the Manhattan) and, more important, recipes for the Manhattan itself (tied for the first in print) and the Martinez (the first). All this is by way of lengthy preamble to suggesting that the most likely culprit for the Metropolitan Cocktail was probably Jerry Thomas’s old stand, the bar at the Metropolitan Hotel.

The Metropolitan Hotel closed in 1895, only a few years after the Considine brothers opened up the Metropole Hotel, at the quiet corner of Forty-second Street and Broadway. The Metropolitan had been favored by actors and politicians. The Metropole drew actors and politicians, too—though where the Metropolitan’s were touring thespians and congressmen, the Metropole’s were burlesque stars and ward-heelers. And there were a lot of pugilists, cardsharps, workers of the short con, organized gamblers, chorus girls, you name it. Small wonder: George Considine was a bookmaker, John R. was an ex-theatrical manager, and James P., who ran the café, was an amateur painter on the lam from an armed robbery rap in Ohio. O. Henry hung out there, of course, until he pissed off Jimmy by telling him he didn’t know how to paint cows (he was, after all, a Texan, and some things cannot pass unremarked).

The Metropole’s house Cocktail is to the Metropolitan’s as the one hotel was to the other: more or less the same ingredients, but stronger, spicier, and definitely flashier, yet not without style.

 

Two dashes gum-syrup
[½ tsp]
, two dashes Peyschaud
[sic]
bitters, one dash orange bitters, half a jigger
[1½ oz]
brandy, half a jigger
[1½ oz]
French vermouth, a mixing-glass half-full fine ice.Mix, strain into cocktail-glass, add a maraschino cherry.

SOURCE: GEORGE J. KAPPELER,
MODERN AMERICAN DRINKS
, 1895

In 1897, the
New York Herald
noted that “the Fifth-Avenue hotel has two new drinks this winter, the Star cocktail and the Rob Roy cocktail. . . .” We’ll get to the Star in a moment. As for the Rob Roy, which was probably already a couple of years old when the Fifth Avenue got to it, seeing as the Reginald DeKoven musical after which it was most likely named opened in 1895: “Of course, the Rob Roy is made of Scotch whisky. It is completed by vermouth and orange bitters.”

In the 1900s and ’10s, Scotch whiskey was all the rage. In the past, it had been imported in smallish quantities in its pure malt form and generally consumed hot (see the Hot Toddy, page 137). With the introduction of golf into America in the 1890s, there was a new interest in things Scottish. The whisky salesmen, real pioneers in the black arts of marketing, did not let this slip by them, and before you knew it Tommy Dewar and his ilk were sluicing the American provinces with liberal amounts of the new blended whiskies. Result: By 1900, the Scotch Highball was the most fashionable drink in America. Yet of the hundreds of Cocktails in Jaques Straub’s
Drinks
and Hugo Ensslin’s
Recipes for Mixed Drinks
—the two most comprehensive Cocktail books of the age—only a wee thirteen use Scotch, and the only one of them to gain any traction was the Rob Roy, which was the first of them all.

The fact is, Scotch is just plain tricky to mix with, and Italian vermouth happens to be one of the very few things with which it does get along. The Rob Roy was probably the result of sheer luck, of plugging Scotch into a now-standard formula and seeing what happened, but there’s nothing wrong with being lucky.

 

A little stronger than the vermouth
[i.e., Cocktail]
is this one, which is made warmer by half a jigger
[1½ oz]
of Scotch whiskey and the same amount of vermouth (Italian), with lemon peel and two dashes of bitters.

SOURCE:
THE BANQUET BOOK
, 1902

A further variation on the theme of brown liquor plus vermouth, the Star Cocktail enjoyed rather a vogue in the last years before Prohibition. It appears to have been a New York creation; at least, it was first attested to by George Kappeler, of the Holland House Hotel, in 1895 and soon after was being served at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. In its official history, the Manhattan Club claimed it as one of its own; it may be. Beyond that, and a brief mention in the
Philadelphia Inquirer
from early 1897, the archives are silent. Why was it called the Star? I don’t know. It is nonetheless an entirely palatable tipple.

 

Fill a mixing-glass half-full fine ice, add two dashes
[½ tsp]
gum-syrup, three dashes Peyschaud
[sic]
or Angostura bitters, one-half jigger
[1½ oz]
apple brandy, one-half jigger
[1½ oz]
Italian vermouth. Mix, strain into cocktail-glass, twist small piece lemon-peel on top.

SOURCE: GEORGE J. KAPPELER,
MODERN AMERICAN DRINKS
, 1895

This isn’t the place for a history of Saratoga Springs, nineteenth-century New York’s northern equivalent of the Hamptons, only with gambling. How pleasant it must have been to catch the morning steamboat and spend the day sipping cooling drinks from the bar and enjoying the breeze as the still largely agricultural Hudson Valley unspooled its vistas before you. A night on the water, and next morning you were there. Somehow, eighteen hours on a steamboat seems infinitely preferable to four hours on the Long Island Expressway.

Once there, the sport ran pretty high, especially later in the century. High-stakes table games courtesy of Jerry Thomas’s pal John Morrissey and Richard Canfield, two of the greatest gamblers America has ever known; horseracing on a first-class track; beautiful women; roguish men; mediocre dinners (you can’t have everything); ice cream; and potato chips—which were invented there. And, for them what wanted, there were Cocktails. As early as 1839, people were remarking on the “keen blades” who slept in in the mornings, antifogmatized immediately with a snort of cognac, smoked and lounged, lounged and smoked, emptied tumblers and popped corks. “At 6, four bottles of wine. Supper at 9. At 10, mint-julaps . . . At 11, cards and cocktails till 1.” Then things got ugly.

By the 1880s, the Cocktail class had more or less taken over the resort. As if to acknowledge this, there were two different Saratoga Cocktails in general circulation. One was basically a Fancy Brandy Cocktail with a squirt of champagne (alias a Chicago Cocktail). Then there’s this one, which splits the difference between a Manhattan and a Metropolitan. The fact that it could hold its own against the other—a Fancy Brandy Cocktail with a squirt of champagne being one of the most irresistible drinks going—is really saying something.

 

 

TAKE 2 DASHES ANGOSTURA BITTERS
1 PONY
[1 OZ]
OF BRANDY
1 PONY
[1 OZ]
OF WHISKEY
1 PONY
[1 OZ]
OF VERMOUTH

 

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