“In the absence of certainty, bullshit blooms.”

David Wondrich doesn’t get around to stating this mixographical truism until page 292 of IMBIBE!, but the statement could well have served as a seven-word pitch to potential publishers, citing the need for such a volume.

In his magazine pieces and online articles (which now seem to have vanished into the digital wilderness over at Esquire.com), as well as in his previous two books dedicated to the craft of mixology, Wondrich has demonstrated his deftness as a writer and his authority as a researcher while tossing off short histories, anecdotes and observations about spirits, cocktails and the people who love them. Now, with IMBIBE!, the former English professor blows the roof off the joint, ranging unimpeded by tight word counts or the short-sighted demands of editors while exploring the sporting (read: drinking) world of the 19th and early 20th centuries, especially the times of “Professor” Jerry Thomas and his predecessors, contemporaries and successors.

While Thomas – the author of How to Mix Drinks, or the Bon-Vivant’s Companion, first published in 1862 – has long been celebrated as a Founding Father of mixology, the truth of the matter is his legacy is a hard one to warm up to. While groundbreaking in their era, many of the drinks in Thomas’ book lost their novelty many generations ago. But as Wondrich explains in his introduction, spending time with Thomas’ venerable recipes has a way of opening one’s eyes to the world as experienced by our shaker-slinging ancestors:

…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.

[…]

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.

Wondrich pieces together not only the (scant) known details about Thomas’ life, but reaches back further, into the Colonial punchbowl and the Polk-era tavern, illuminating other masters of the craft such as Willard (whose first, or last, name is lost to history), the “first celebrity bartender”; and William Pitcher, “the Greek-spouting deity of the Tremont House bar in Boston.” He also looks into the future to bartenders of Thomas’s time and beyond, mixologists such as Harry Johnson and “The Only William” Schmidt. And while relatively little is known about Thomas himself, Wondrich fills in the gaps in Thomas’s biography by describing the life of the sporting fraternity—a member of which Thomas was in good standing:

[The sporting fraternity] didn’t look at sports the way you or I might. While it might maintain a general, conversational sort of interest in all species of contests of man against man, man against beast, beast against beast or anything against the clock, when it came right down to it there were only two sports that really counted, and you didn’t actually play either of them. You watched them from a safe distance, limiting your participation to the realm of speculative finance. The Turf and the Ring.

In this milieu, Thomas was a key player, and his career as a bartender was touched by what Wondrich terms the three ages of mixology, ranging from the birth of the republic to the onset of Prohibition: the Archaic (typified by drinks such as punches and flips, fortified with robust wines and spirits, sweetened with sugar cut from loaves and fleshed out with baskets of eggs and buckets of cream); the Baroque (which began around the time of Thomas’s circa 1830 birth, and was typified by iced drinks such as cobblers and cocktails – heavy on the brandy and Holland gin – prepared in shakers and bar glasses and served with the aid of strainers); and the Classic (beginning around 1885, coinciding with a profusion of glassware and bar tools, and marked by the growing use of vermouth and fruit juices in cocktails, which were increasingly mixed with spirits such as whiskey and dry gin).

But while a survey of the drinks of past eras can be enjoyed from an academic angle, this is mixology, an interactive form of art best appreciated by those with open gullets and unquenchable thirsts. After spending the first 48 pages re-creating the mid-19th century world Thomas inhabited, along with the evolutionary path the drinks followed, Wondrich chalks up his cue with a short but immensely valuable survey of spirits and bar tools, then runs the table for the rest of the book, working methodically through chapters on punches; “the children of punch;” egg drinks; toddies, slings & juleps; and, ultimately, cocktails (a couple of chapters on current drinks and bitters & syrups are tacked on for good measure).

It’s in this latter section of the book where Wondrich really cuts loose. Several of the old standard sources are here – Harry Johnson, check; Jacques Straub, check; George Kappeler, check – but relying on old cocktail manuals would be way too easy, and inefficient, for what Wondrich has in mind. From the Steward & Barkeeper’s Manual from 1869, through the Brooklyn Daily Eagle to the Police Gazette to obscure 19th century plays and novels – The Adventures of Harry Franco, anyone? – Wondrich reaches for any and all sources that may offer a whiff of information regarding the time, manner and style in which a particular drink may have been prepared. Through it all, he weaves in stories and anecdotes related to the drinks – such as the use of a Whiskey Skin to blind a bartender in 1855 as part of a dispute between the assailant, Pargene, and the bar owner, “Bill the Butcher” Poole (if you’ve read Asbury’s Gangs of New York — no, the movie doesn’t count (though Daniel Day Lewis rocks as the Butcher) — or Luc Sante’s Low Life, the name should ring a big, scary bell) – that reveal the world of the barroom in the hard-drinking 1800s.

That world was big and brutal, and a few drinks were certainly needed to give it a little luster. While a bowl of punch or a glass of port might suffice for citizens of the old country, America was a fast-growing and fast-moving place, and time and effect were things to be considered when moistening the clay in Thomas’ time. Here, Wondrich explains how the cocktail epitomizes America, both historically and in the modern day:

It’s quick, direct, and vigorous. It’s flashy and a little bit vulgar. It induces an unreflective overconfidence. It’s democratic, forcing the finest liquors to rub elbows with ingredients of far more humble stamp. It’s profligate with natural resources (think of all the electricity generated to make ice that gets used for ten seconds and discarded). In short, it rocks.

But if the Cocktail is American, it’s American in the same way as the hot dog (that is, the Frankfurter), the hamburger (the Hamburger steak), and the ice-cream cone (with its rolled gaufrette). As a nation, we have a knack for taking underperforming elements of other peoples’ cultures, streamlining them, supercharging them, and letting ‘em rip – from nobody to superstar, with a trail of sparks and a hell of a noise along the way. That’s how the Cocktail did it, anyway.

After making the archaic world of punches, cobblers, fizzes and egg drinks a bit more user-friendly for the modern-day reader, Wondrich rolls up his sleeves and addresses the cocktail, using the recipes from Thomas’ landmark book as guides, while elaborating on the themes using drinks from Thomas’ contemporaries and successors. Starting with the plain gin (or brandy, or whiskey, etc.) cocktail and stepping through successive levels (improved cocktail, old fashioned cocktail), then really starting to roam with drinks such as the Morning Glory Cocktail, the Widow’s Kiss, the Daiquiri and the Metropole, Wondrich creates a flavor history of the cocktail’s golden years. In the process, he not only paints a background for each drink but cites the historic recipe and the source, along with updated measurements, notes on ingredients, and suggestions for preparing the drink using contemporary spirits and tools. In this way, Wondrich manages to translate the sometimes maddeningly vague or complicated recipes found in vintage bar manuals, and render them not only useful, but interesting, for modern-day mixologists.

Then, there’s the bullshit factor. As Wondrich notes in one of the book’s appendices (while discussing the origin of the word “cocktail,” a bullshit-laden subject if ever there was one), it’s tempting to try to nail down a place, date and rationale for the naming of the cocktail (not to mention the creation and naming of every drink in the canon), but for the most part we’re talking about stuff that happened in bars. While some of the explanations expounded by well-intentioned aficionados certainly sound reasonable in the misty glow of a Manhattan or two, much of what gets cast about as fact or common knowledge is totally bunk. “It’s funny how we’re willing to kick common sense out the door when it comes to thinking about the past,” Wondrich writes, dismissing the theory that cocktails were named for some archaic practice of garnishing a drink with a rooster’s tail-feather. “How would you react if someone stuck a feather yoinked from a bird’s ass in your drink? Precisely.”

Fortunately, Wondrich’s bullshit detector is well-calibrated, and when coupled with a post-doc’s capacity to research a topic until it calls you “daddy,” the result is a near bullet-proof volume that explores its topic in more depth and detail than any other book on mixography I can call to mind (one of the closest is another recent book, Jeff Berry’s Sippin’ Safari, which required years of interviews and primary-source research in order to chronicle and understand the mid-century Polynesian phenomenon).

If you’ve skipped over all my blather to see if I actually have a point, I do, and it’s this: buy the damn book. It’s a good read; the recipes are user-friendly; and it’s going to redefine the way cocktail fans and booze geeks talk about what we talk about in much the same way that books such as William Grimes’ Straight Up or on the Rocks, Ted Haigh’s Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, and – of course – Wondrich’s Esquire Drinks have guided our ongoing conversation. I’d like to tell Mr. Wondrich myself how much I value this new book, but my preternatural shyness dictates that every time I run into him I wind up fumbling with my notebook while making vague pronouncements about the weather. So David, if you’re procrastinating on a deadline and wind up slumming about the boozy blogosphere: Thanks for your hard work. IMBIBE! provides the much-needed certainty to mulch down the blossoming bullshit.

[IMBIBE! will will be available November 6, according to Amazon, though apparently nobody told Powells, which has already been shipping volumes out.]

Tags: Books by Paul
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As Michael pointed out this weekend, Imbibe magazine has now passed the one-year milestone. That’s a big deal, folks — around 60 percent of new magazines fail in their first year (and I’ve seen other figures that peg that closer to 90 percent), so Imbibe is really bucking the trend. Having been a contributor to the magazine for almost every issue, it’s been really exciting for me to hear people talk about it and to see it mentioned in online forums, and to know that it’s really getting some traction among people who give a damn about what goes in their glass. If you haven’t yet, please subscribe, and for those industry types out there — c’mon, people, I know you’re reading this, I see your domain names flashing past — buy a freaking ad, already.

This month’s issue contains a salvo from Dr. Cocktail on what’s possibly my favorite summer cooler, the gin rickey, and a step-by-step from Robert Hess on how to make his house bitters (which I’ve got to try again sometime, having somehow screwed up my last batch through a measurement misinterpretation). It also has a profile I wrote of Jeff “Beachbum” Berry, the reigning king of the tiki bar and the author of three tomes of tiki drinks and cuisine, Grog Log, Intoxica! and Taboo Table. I’d been looking forward to working on this article for quite a while, not only because of the wonderful experience I had interviewing Jeff in New Orleans last summer during Tales of the Cocktail, but also because his new book, Sippin’ Safari, is coming out in June, and I had the chance to take a peek at a few of the chapters.

From my reading of these sample chapters, Sippin’ Safari promises to take the extensive research Jeff has done for books such as Grog Log, and present it in a longer-form, much more detailed package. For people who like to know a little bit about the history behind their drinks and the people who first created them, this book fits the bill in spades. And since secrecy about recipes was held to such importance among the owners and bartenders at the old tiki bars, Jeff didn’t have much printed material to work with — instead, he had to rely more on extensive interviews with bartenders, gradually working to gain their trust so they’d share the old stories and, most intriguingly, the old recipes. Of the 67 recipes in Sippin’ Safari, 46 have never before been printed, and from the few I saw and put together myself, they include some of the very best drinks to have come out of the old Polynesian palaces from the 1930s onward.

Sippin’ Safari comes out in June; you can pre-order your copy from the publisher. I can’t wait to read the full book once it’s released.

Imbibe’s one-year anniversary and a new book from the Bum — that’s a lot to celebrate at one time.

Tags: Books, General by Paul
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I’ve gnashed my teeth before about the escalating prices of vintage cocktail manuals on eBay and online bookstores, but even books currently in print can take a toll, in terms of both finances and time. Case in point: Ted Haigh’s modern classic, Vintage Spirits & Forgotten Cocktails.

Granted, the price tag is only $15.99 (cheaper if you buy it at Amazon or another big bookseller), which is certainly reasonable. But you have to take the other costs into consideration: in the two years that I’ve owned the book, Doc’s recipes and entreaties about ingredients have led me to drop no small amount of cash on bottles of Parfait Amour, apricot brandy and Lillet blanc; prompted numerous experiments with pomegranate juice in pursuit of the one, true grenadine; made it so I can’t venture into a grocery store without swinging down the jams and syrups aisle in search of the elusive Smucker’s raspberry syrup, Doc’s recommended brand; and created a low, keening longing for the unattainable Swedish Punsch, a desire that only became more acute after Murray managed to obtain a couple of bottles at Zig Zag last summer and proceeded to make me fall head over heels for Haigh’s eponymous cocktail.

Two years later, I’m still shelling it out. Latest purchase: a bottle of Rose’s Kola Tonic. As with the Parfait Amour, Haigh calls for Kola Tonic in exactly one of the cocktails in his book; of course, you’ll never find anything smaller than a 750 ml bottle, so now I’m the proud owner of 3/4 of a liter (minus a 1/2 ounce) of this weird, kind-of-but-not-entirely cola-tasting syrup, which I had to have shipped from Los Angeles.

Mixed in a Filmograph Cocktail, the syrup creates a flavor that’s hard to pin down. I’d like to say it compares to the deep, funky roundness of a good cola, but that’s not quite it; the aroma of cola is there, but in flavor, the brandy and especially the lemon juice shove it aside. It’s not unpleasant, just a bit odd. Next round, I’ll try racheting back the lemon juice a bit, so the acidity will stop getting in the tonic’s way.

While my inner cheapskate makes me groan about the expense, the Kola Tonic really is quite a bargain (less than $20, including shipping), as compared to other cocktail ingredients. Now if I could just find the damn Swedish Punsch….

Filmograph Cocktail

• 2 ounces brandy
• 3/4 ounce fresh lemon juice
• 1/2 ounce Kola Tonic

Shake with ice and strain into chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a lemon wedge.

Tags: Books, Brandy, Drinks by Paul
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These are heady days for drinkophiles (beverage believers? libation lovers? whatever–). Today’s proverbial cups runneth over with more and better types of custom-roasted coffees, premium teas, microbrewed beers, fine wines, artisan-distilled spirits and, of course, culinary cocktails than perhaps at any other time in our history. But while there’s a growing number of books, magazines, newspaper columns and websites (including, of course, blogs) delving into every aspect of this abundance, a quick survey of my local bookstore shows very little crossover between the cooking and food sections, the few exceptions being the obligatory wine-pairing guides and the maddeningly vague and mostly useless catchall category of “entertaining” books.

That has now changed.

In July, while attending Tales of the Cocktail, I had the pleasure of sitting in on a seminar titled “Pairing Food with Cocktails,” with a panel that included cocktail luminaries Robert Hess, Ryan Magarian and Audrey Saunders, along with a couple with whom I was not familiar: Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page, authors of several volumes that transcend the “cookbooks” label (read my writeup here). Not quite three months later, Andrew and Karen have released their latest book, What to Drink with What you Eat, a comprehensive guide to pairing foods with most anything you can pour into a glass. With this useful, rigorously researched book, Dornenberg and Page have more thoroughly and efficiently linked the food and drink categories than has any other volume you’re likely to find on the shelf.

Ever the cynic, I was prepared to be disappointed when I first opened WTDWWYE, expecting yet another bland guide to pairing chicken with chardonnay and beef with pinot noir, with beer and especially spirits left confined to the beverage ghetto, included only as an afterthought or used in downscale pairings such as Budweiser with hot dogs or margaritas with tacos. As is often the case, I was wrong — Dornenberg and Page have placed a special emphasis on creating a work impressive in scale and comprehensive in scope, seeking input from dozens of seasoned culinary professionals to design pairings for foods ranging from grilled salmon to Kit Kat bars and beverages spanning the spectrum from oolong tea and lemonade to Cotes du Rhone and Armagnac.

Introductory chapters cover the basics of sensory enjoyment, a primer to pairings and shopping suggestions, and closing chapters feature pairing menus from prestigious restaurants such as Chanterelle in New York and Frontera Grill in Chicago, and “desert island” lists of food and drink from an array of sommeliers, bar directors and chefs. But the guts of the book are what make WTDWWYE so valuable: two extensive sections — one arranged alphabetically by food, the other by drink — with thorough breakdowns of preparations or varieties with listings of different pairings, including bolded recommendations for especially potent matches. Halibut tonight? Grab a bottle of chablis or white burgundy; if you’re grilling it, sauvignon blanc works well, but if you’re going the roasted route, a pinot noir might be what you need. Or maybe at this time of year, you’ve got a bottle of hard cider you’re ready to use; match that with a few oysters, a pork dish or maybe just a few tastes of brie and pont l’eveque. Subcategories are given thorough attention: sake merits eleven breakout categories, from the medium-bodied daiginjo to the sweet kijoshu, and for a dish such as steak, pairing recommendations are provided for 32 different cuts and preparations.

Being a spirits and cocktails geek, I found some satisfaction in the book — I’m looking forward to trying out the pairing of Asian spring rolls with gin-based drinks — and while I’d like to have seen some attention to vermouth (a chilled glass of French dry Noilly Prat is fantastic with raw oysters, or vermouth-steamed mussels with garlic and shallots) and maybe a bit more breakout for different whiskies, I think the authors did a remarkable job in including spirits, cocktails, beers and other beverages in a world typically dominated by wine. What to Drink with What you Eat is going to see a lot of use in my house.

Check out the book’s website here. Or, to purchase, follow the handy link:

Tags: Books by Paul
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A couple of months ago, I wrote about an essay at Lost Magazine by a writer named Wayne Curtis, about a cocktail very dear to my heart, the El Presidente (or should that just be “El Presidente?” I never remember the protocol). Well, Curtis has a book coming out next week entitled And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails, and, thanks to the review copy I received in the mail, I’m proud to have gotten a jump on everyone else in digging into the latest volume of booze-oriented scholarship.

Almost everyone, anyway. The New York Times beat me to the punch a week or so ago, with Jonathan Miles’ writeup in the “Shaken and Stirred” column of a visit to Pegu Club, where Audrey Saunders mixed him a bombo, one of the 10 cocktails alluded to in the title (Miles’ verdict: the bombo is a bust). Plus, the blurbs on the back cover are from Ted Haigh, Dale DeGroff and Jeff “Beachbum” Berry, so that puts me another rung down the ladder of the first-to-reads. But I’m still glad to have a copy of the book in hand, if for no other reason than it gives me bragging rights that I’ve been in the first wave of cocktail geeks to dig into the finest narrative overview of spirits and cocktails since William Grimes’ Straight Up or On the Rocks: The Story of the American Cocktail.

Though Curtis doesn’t aim for the whole shebang, like Grimes did — instead, as the title implies, this book is all about rum. As Curtis writes in the introduction,

Rum is the history of America in a glass. It was invented by New World colonists for New World colonists. In the early colonies, it was a vital part of the economic and cultural life of the cities and villages alike, and it soon became an actor in the political life.

[…]

Rum embodies America’s laissez-faire attitude: It is whatever it wants to be. There have never been strict guidelines for making it. There’s no international oversight board, and its taste and production varies widely, leaving the market to sort out favorites. If sugarcane or its by-products are involved in the distillation process, you can call it rum. Rum is the melting pot of spirits — the only liquor available in clear, amber, or black variations.

Curtis is no romantic about his subject; while, later in the book, he covers the rise of premium rums, he suffers no illusions about the original quality of the New World’s native spirit. This is made clear beginning in chapter one, where Curtis points out that “Distillation concentrates and intensifies the subtle tastes found in the original low-alcohol product. Brandy has thus been called the distilled essence of wine, and whiskey the distilled essence of beer. And rum? It is […] the distilled essence of industrial waste.”

And a Bottle of Rum covers rum’s rough early days, when it helped bolster burgeoning economies in Jamaica and, especially, Barbados (among the terms for intoxication printed by Benjamin Franklin are “crump-footed,” “staggerish” and “Been to Barbados”), fortified British sailors and pirates (Blackbeard favored tumblers of a cocktail made with flaming rum and gunpowder), became part of the infamous (and somewhat mythical, as Curtis explains) triangle trade of rum and slaves, and appeared prominently on the bill of fare for virtually every inn and tavern in the young American republic. Curtis also points out oddities in the modern history of rum — for example, how one of today’s top-selling rums is named after the Welsh-born privateer Henry Morgan, whose MO with wealthy captives included the victims

[being] stretched on the rack, or [having] flaming sticks tied between their fingers, or a cord twisted around their heads so tightly that their eyeballs popped like grapes from their skins. […] Some had their feet burned off while still alive; others were said to be suspended by their testicles and battered with sticks until a violent anatomical separation ensued.

Think about that the next time you’re tempted to order a Captain and cola.

Curtis also covers rum’s versatility as a mixing liquor — no wonder, given the industrial harshness of the spirit’s early ancestor — and covers pre-Jerry Thomas concoctions such as grog, punch and flip, as well as the sling, the mimbo, the afore-mentioned bombo (rum, molasses, water and nutmeg), cherry bounce, bilberry dram, syllabub, switchel, sampson and calibogus. Further on, he tackles the daiquiri and the legacy of El Floridita, Hemingway’s endless thirst for frozen rum drinks (house record at El Floridita: 16 daiquiris in one sitting), the debate over the Bacardi cocktail that continues to this day (just venture over to the Drinkboy forum for proof), and the rise of rum and coke, mojitos, and the whole tiki experience. And, as should be expected from any comprehensive overview of a particular spirit, Curtis also tosses in a final chapter containing the recipes for 30 rum-based cocktails.

If I’m glossing over a lot of things, it’s because I’m still not quite halfway through the book — it’s been another busy week — but so enamored am I of Curtis’ approach to rum that I wanted to make sure I got a post up about this book before I leave town on Wednesday, and will be focusing (and, hopefully, posting) on other things.

So, click away — head on over to Amazon or Powells and advance order a copy of And a Bottle of Rum, and while you’re at it, stop by Wayne’s blog, Republic of Rum, where he chronicles his continuing adventures with this native spirit. Don’t make me send Captain Morgan after you…..

Tags: Books, Rum by Paul
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