Imbibe! (38 page)

 

Before this, there had been a slew of assorted Innkeeper’s, Cellarman’s, Publican’s, and Vintner’s Guides published, mostly in London, going back at least to William Augustus Smyth’s 1779
Publican’s Guide, or Key to the Distill House
. All contain much useful advice for the proprietor of a drinking establishment relating to the management of liquors and whatnot, but precious little about mixing drinks (unless you count adulterating gin as a branch of the mixological art)—a recipe or two for Punch, maybe a quick look at Purl and Flip, and that’s about it.

Then there was
Oxford Night Caps
, a little booklet published in Oxford in 1827 (and frequently thereafter) by one Richard Cooke, presumably for the edification of the students of the university. This, the first known book devoted entirely to the art of mixing drinks, provided a goodly number of recipes with comments on their history and execution, but with its lapses into Latin and verse (and even Latin verse) and its focus on complicated social drinks, it was aimed strictly at the bibulous amateur. Until Dick & Fitzgerald’s project, nobody had thought to fuse these; to produce a book of drink recipes for the use of the working bartender. (Cocktail history geeks will note that this copyright registration even predates the chimeric bartender’s guide that Harry Johnson alleged he published in San Francisco in 1860.)

We’ll never know exactly what prompted the firm’s principals, William Brisbane Dick (1827-1901) and Lawrence Rees Fitzgerald (ca.1825-1881), to attempt this new sort of book, but here’s how they explained it in the introduction to the volume as it finally appeared:

 

History has proved that William Dick, to whom we must probably assign the authorship of this (he was the artistic half of the duo and wrote or compiled many of the firm’s books himself) was correct in his instincts. There must have been some doubt at the time, though, since as far as we can tell this 1859 book never actually appeared: It was announced twice that summer in the
American Publisher’s Circular and Literary Gazette
, and then nothing. Not an advertisement, notice, casual reference, or, more important, a single surviving copy.

I won’t speculate as to why the book didn’t come out, but I think it’s indicative that neither the copyright notice nor the notices in the
American Publisher’s Circular
mention Jerry Thomas or indeed any other bartender. If the two young publishers recognized that the old craft of “brewing” drinks had developed to the point that it could use a guidebook, they apparently had not yet realized that it had also developed to the point that its arcana were beyond the amateur’s grasp. Perhaps that point was made to them, causing them to shelve the book.

Sometime during the next couple of years, one or both of the partners crossed paths with Jerry Thomas. This could have happened any one of a number of ways. Dick, in particular, was a likely vector of contact: Not only was he interested in art and specifically in prints (he, too, was a collector), his booklist reveals a professional interest in minstrelsy (Dick and Fitzgerald published several different volumes devoted to blackface songs and jokes) and games of chance (as “Trumps,” he edited for many years the standard American edition of Hoyle). However it happened, it seemed to have galvanized the firm into action and in June 1862
Harper’s Weekly
carried an ad for their new book:

 

Not only did it now have an actual name attached (this was far from the norm for how-to books of the day, which usually carried the publisher’s name but not the author’s), but the actual book itself—of which hundreds of copies survive—adds another change, in the form of a sporty subtitle: “The Bon-Vivant’s Companion.” In one form or another, this book would remain in print for some thirty-five years—and a lot more after that if you count the dozens of bartender’s guides that plagiarized it wholesale. As the
New York World
observed upon the Professor’s death, “the editions sold were very large. Unfortunately, though, “of this his family [and, we must assume, Thomas himself] got no percentage.” Not only was his book the first bartender’s guide, it was also the first of many successful ones that were written as work-for-hire, whereby the hard shaking and stirring of the poor author served to promote a book that only put money in another’s pocket. But I digress.

In keeping with Dick & Fitzgerald’s original 1859 conception of the book, this one was two books in one: the drinks guide published over Thomas’s name, which took up eighty-seven pages, and a translation of the far less revolutionary guide to the manufacture of obscure cordials (
Escubac d’Irelande,
anyone? Creme de Nymphe?), bitters, and so forth penned by Professor Christian Schmidt of Basle, Switzerland, which took up another 153 pages. Clearly, Dick & Fitzgerald were double-shotting their guns here: If bartenders—as is their wont now and probably was then, too—didn’t want to acknowledge that they had anything to learn about mixing drinks from some damn book, they might be convinced to pony up the rather hefty $1.50 the book cost (as much as twelve drinks) by Schultz’s clear and detailed instructions for making the fancy European syrups and liqueurs that were just coming into vogue. At least, that’s what they could tell the other bartenders.

But even in the part of the volume we’re concerned with, the one bearing Thomas’s name, Dick & Fitzgerald hedged their bets, as that sporty subtitle suggests. Though it contains far too many drinks and far too little fancy writing and pleasant digression to make it a true work of convivial literature as the contemporary reader would have understood it (the genre, a popular one in Victorian literature, stretched roughly from
Oxford Night Caps
on the utilitarian side to
The Pickwick Papers
on the ornamental), between the book’s subtitle and its invocations of “jovial literature” and the “amenities of
bon vivant
existence” in the preface,
How to Mix Drinks, or the Bon Vivant’s Companion
takes a stab at it, anyway. But it was not until 1928, when Herbert Asbury tacked a hasty edition of the book onto the biographical essay he had published the year before in Mencken’s
American Mercury
and put it out as
The Bon Vivant’s Companion
, that Jerry Thomas’s guide would find a place in the home. By then, almost a decade into Prohibition, Americans had grown used to taking mixology into their own hands. Before that, in America at least, they were content to leave it in the highly skilled ones of the white-coated professional—a fact that Dick & Fitzgerald effectively acknowledged by blazoning the book’s cover not with the actual title, but with their original one, “
Bar Tender’s Guide
” (thus occasioning a century and a half’s confusion about what to call it).

Whatever the book is called, as one reads through it, it rapidly becomes clear that more than one voice is speaking here. Mixed in with the terse, practical recipes for drinks whose production was the preponderance of the American bartender’s daily work; with the Juleps and Smashes, Cobblers, Cocktails, and glasses of Punch, there are an ungodly number of complicated foreign concoctions that would drive any bartender I’ve ever met into howling conniptions if ordered. But without further information, it’s difficult to say precisely which parts are Jeremiah P. Thomas and which are William B. Dick. For years, I considered the book’s breezy, informal recipe for Arrack Punch as an instance where the Professor’s voice spoke loudest, only to discover, while researching this book, that it was pinched from an earlier work of convivial literature. There are, however, some things in the book that reek of the sporting life. The instruction appended to the recipe for the Brandy Crusta, for instance: “Then smile,” it says. In sporting lingo, a drink was a “smile,” and to “smile” was to take one. The double entendre here is redolent of barroom wit.

If the book’s lack of a strong unitary voice is its weakness, it’s also its strength. Unlike the straight bartender’s guides that followed it, which were all function and American efficiency, this one encompasses both wings of the sporting life; the aristocratic English one and the egalitarian American one; it’s Tattersall’s and the Astor bar, Willard and the Prince Regent. It works for amateurs—indeed, the introduction claims as one of the motives for its creation that “there would be no excuse for imbibing, with such a book at hand, the ‘villainous compounds’ of bar-keeping Goths and Vandals, who know no more of the amenities of
bon vivant
existence than a Hottentot can know of the bouquet of champagne.”

But it also has a feature that, above and beyond its recipes, means that it works for professionals, and here, if anywhere, is the true greatness of the
Bar Tender’s Guide
, or whatever it is to be called: It’s divided into distinct, explicit categories. Punches are with Punches, Juleps with Juleps, Fixes with Fixes. This is the sign of a true bartender at work. Mixology works by pattern and variation, and with the drinks explicitly arranged like this, it’s easy to quickly grasp the essential features of each class. This seems obvious today, but none of the book’s antecedents did it, and neither did many of the guides that followed it, including influential ones like O. H. Byron’s and Harry Johnson’s. In this, Jerry Thomas—and it had to be Thomas who was responsible for the classification—was truly the father of mixology, of the rational study of the mixed drink.

While the reviewers didn’t exactly fall over themselves in their haste to evaluate Dick & Fitzgerald’s new book, the
Philadelphia Inquirer
, at least, recognized its worth: “There is something new under the sun, and something good to be shown,” it opined in July 1862. “Many drinks have been mixed since stimulants first came into vogue . . . but an elaborate treatise containing recipes for every nectar ever brewed is a good thing. . . . To anyone who wants to know how to prepare
any
summer drink, and Jerry’s number is literally
legion
, we can recommend this book as unique, carefully prepared and perfect of its kind.” The public seems to have agreed: Judging by the number of surviving copies, and by the fact that Dick & Fitzgerald raised the price to $2 and then $2.50, demand must have been quite strong.

After Thomas, for a few years there was silence from the other mixologists. Then, in 1867, Charles B. Campbell, an Englishman working in San Francisco, published his
American Bartender
. There’s only one known copy in existence now, which is a fair indicator of its success. Two years later, Jesse Haney & Co of New York, publisher of a series of how-to-books, put out a thoroughly workmanlike
Steward & Barkeeper’s Manual
. This one, sadly anonymous, seems to have done a little better anyway. In any case, both of these can be read as commentaries and corrections of Thomas’s book. Each contains a few drinks not found in his, but the bulk of their content shows how astute he was at collecting drinks. A handful of other guides followed in the 1870s, prompting Dick & Fitzgerald, with a clearer sense of the market, to publish a revised edition of their guide in 1876. Unburdened by Schultz’s work, this one was handier and cheaper (it was 75 cents, 50 cents in paperback), and it had a supplement containing a selection of the new drinks of the day, including the first appearance of the Fizz (or “Fiz”) and the Daisy. The cover was different, too: no longer was it the “Bon Vivant’s Companion”; now, it was simply “Jerry Thomas’s Bar-Tenders Guide.”

The next ten years saw a lot more competition, including the first bartender’s guides to offer the Manhattan and the Martinez. In 1887, two years after the Professor’s death, Dick & Fitzgerald responded with their final version of his book. Gone was the witty convivial and biographical preface, replaced by a piece of pabulum about it being an age of progress and there being no end to the making of drinks, and a lengthy set of “Hints and Rules for Bartenders”—precisely the sort of thing Jerry Thomas would have hated. How can you teach somebody to arc flaming whiskey over his head with a book? Bartenders are gentlemen, not servants. But whoever revised the book, it must be conceded that he did a thoroughly workmanlike job. The old recipes were dried out and tightened up; new, up-to-date ones were added; and many of the ornamental English things were banished to a section at the end of the book with the comment,

 

All true, and all good sense. But thus the old order passeth. By the turn of the century, Thomas’s guide appears to have been out of print, although there were scads of cheap bartender’s bibles that pirated his recipes in circulation.