Old Acquaintance, Unforgot
Jeffery Lindenmuth tells how one man's vintage book collection is informing today's global cocktail renaissance.
Jeffery Lindenmuth
Posted: May 5, 2009
Fans of heirloom vegetables are often drawn to forgotten varieties for their distinctive flavors, their endearing short-lived commercial success, even the occasional quirkiness of their color and size. The appeal is much the same for heritage cocktail buffs, people who like drinks plucked from the pages of yellowed texts, shaken with ice, and poured anew. Call these heirloom cocktails.
Heirloom cocktail fans even have their own equivalent of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the bomb-proof fortification that safely harbors the world's treasury of seeds deep within a mountain in the Arctic Circle: You'll find it on West 21st Street in Manhattan. Here, Greg Boehm, owner of Mud Puddle Books, has assembled a cache of over 1,200 vintage cocktail books where top bartenders are encouraged to pore, and pour, through the rich cocktail lexicon.
Boehm first became interested in cocktails when his family, former owners of Sterling Publishing, worked on several books with famous London barman Salvatore Calabrese. "I'd spent two weeks working in London and sitting at his bar in the Lanesborough in the late 1990s," Boehm recalls. When I got back to the U.S., I was frustrated that we didn't have the depth of cocktail culture that existed there." Immediately he purchased How to Mix Drinks, How to Serve; The Bartender's Guide by Paul E. Lowe (1904) and The Home Bartender's Guide and Song Book by Charlie Rowe and Jim Schwenck (1930), thus sowing the seeds for America's greatest archive of cocktail texts.
In recent years, the ingredients these drinks require have once more become available, which helps explain preeminent mixologists' escalating interest in cocktail books. And in the books' escalating prices. Small importing companies like Haus Alpenz are reintroducing the lost spirits called upon for many heirloom cocktails: crème de violette, Falernum, pimento dram (marketed as allspice), and Old Tom gin, a sweetened, yet intense, style of gin that appeared in the earliest incarnations of the Martini. Absinthe, widely used in small dashes in heirloom drinks, is legal for the first time in a century. Lucas Bols has brought a classic Dutch-style genever (gin) to the market, and Plymouth has introduced their Sloe Gin, made with wild sloe berries, to the United States. As for the soaring prices of rare cocktail texts, "When extraordinarily rare books are available, the prices can be ridiculous—up to $5,000," laments Boehm.
Since many of the books have outlived their copyright, Boehm had a brainstorm inspired by a facsimile reprint he'd created of The Field Book of American Wildflowers, a gem published back in 1902. He would do the same for cocktails. The result is a collection of seven faithful facsimiles now making a discernible impact in bars around the world. And at an affordable price. Formerly elusive volumes like Bartender's Manual by Harry Johnson (1900), Recipes of American and Other Iced Drinks by Charlie Paul (1895), and The Mixicologist by C.F. Lawlor (1895), can now be had in their original form for less than $30, as opposed to thousands.
Like wind-scattered milkweed, each of the first print runs of 1,500 have seeded themselves in bars in Brooklyn and Budapest, London and Lyons, Prague, Helsinki, and Seattle, according to Boehm's mailing list. Among the first to buy was Chantal Tseng, head bartender at the Tabard Inn, an independent hotel and bar in Washington, D.C. Tseng's interest in vintage cocktails was piqued when she consulted a dusty vintage bar guide she'd found behind the bar—the rather rare and valuable The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks by David Augustus Embury (1948). "No one had touched the book in years. I tried to look up a recipe and was shocked that I didn't know a single recipe in it. He had a Kangaroo Cocktail, which was essentially a vodka Martini. And he had lots of opinions," says Tseng. He preferred his Martinis 7 to 1, very dry with olives, but protested the vermouth rinse and spray as not a Martini. In lamenting the evolution of the Grasshopper from pousse cafe to cocktail, he dismissed the latter as "strictly vile."
Heirloom cocktails stand beside contemporary ones on Tabard Inn's drinks list. Tseng recently wrested and revived the Chrysanthemum from Harry Craddock's The Savoy Cocktail Book (1930), a drink that combines two parts French vermouth with one part Bénédictine and three dashes of absinthe, shaken and strained with a squeeze of orange peel on top. "I have never seen this drink in another source, and it's typical of how vermouth, and also Sherry, were very important in old cocktails," explains Tseng.
Tabard also offers the Artillery Cocktail from the same source, a wet Martini with 2:1 gin to sweet vermouth, and the Brooklynite from Trader Vic's Bartender's Guide (1947), composed of two ounces Jamaica rum, one-half ounce lime juice, one-half ounce honey, a dash of Angostura bitters, then shaken with cracked ice.
Erik Lorincz, mixologist at The Connaught Bar in The Connaught hotel in London, says he searched for years for a copy of Johnson's Bartender's Manual before finding Mud Puddle's facsimile reprint. "It's a perfect guide on how to open a bar, deal with guests and employees, how to handle ice and ingredients. And it includes plenty of cocktail recipes. I'm trying to bring back not just drinks, but the rules used behind the bar many years ago."
Re-creating heirloom drinks can serve as a jumping-off point for modern hybrids. Lorincz takes inspiration from Johnson's Morning Glory Fizz for his Morning Sour, made with dark rum, absinthe, lemon juice, egg white, licorice syrup, and Angostura bitters. In addition to fizzes, Lorincz says punch bowls and "blazers," drinks set afire while poured from cup to cup in a dramatic mixing display, are other heirloom cocktail species staging a revival in London.
Upon opening PDT, a cocktail-centric modern-day speakeasy annexed to Crif Dogs in New York City's East Village, general manager Jim Meehan included on his list the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club Cocktail from Crosby Gaige's Cocktail Guide and Ladies' Companion (1941), made by shaking three parts Barbados rum, one part lime juice, one-half part Falernum, and a dash of Cointreau with ice and straining into a cocktail glass. "As a bartender, I'm a salesperson. And in sales there is a story to be told about what you're selling. I look for the story in these drinks," says Meehan.
Meehan is a regular in Boehm's office, sorting through the chronological collection for forgotten cocktails and their history. But reviving a cocktail is not always as simple as lifting a recipe. "It's problematic to take drinks from 100 years ago and try to mix them the same, because the ingredients have changed," notes Meehan. In re-creating the Astoria Cocktail, from The Old Waldorf-Astoria Bar Book by A.S. Crockett (1934), Meehan decided that the 2:1 dry vermouth to gin with orange bitters did not account for the sweetness in the Old Tom gin of the day. Replacing the dry vermouth with the slightly sweeter Martini Bianco proved satisfactory.
Michael Lomonaco, executive chef/partner of Porter House New York, purchased the complete suite of seven vintage Mud Puddle Books to add to his cookbook collection. "My wife works in publishing, and we're both into books. What is great about these is the accurate reproduction. They fit in your pocket, and you sense they are exactly the kind of thing a bartender would have kept behind the bar," beams Lomonaco. Boehm chooses to scan and reproduce the pages of the books, complete with errors and the characteristic misalignments of metal type, rather than have them reset on a modern desktop.
With a cocktail program rooted in "clubby classics," Lomonaco refers to these texts to bring authenticity to the cocktail list, researching drinks made with rye whisky or creating true Rock and Rye, using rock sugar. "As a chef, it's interesting to see some of the arcane spices and ingredients that were in use," he says. "I'm hoping to develop not just cocktails but foods that pair with cocktails."
John Burton, who houses a collection of vintage books for student use at his Bartending School of Santa Rosa in California, has seen interest in heirloom cocktails spread to include the mixologists who made them. In his recent book Imbibe! David Wondrich chronicled the life of "Professor" Jerry Thomas, bartender/author of the first cocktail book in 1862. And Burton believes West Coast mixologists have found a similar hero in San Francisco bartender William T. "Cocktail Bill" Boothby, whose first book was published in 1891. "Everyone is on to Jerry Thomas, but the West Coast and other cities also have this history," insists Burton, who delights in the Mud Puddle reprints. "Many of the old books are on acid paper; and the more you handle them, the more they crumble. They are in a risky state, but I think Greg has picked the right books to begin with. This is a great service for the profession of bartending."
For info: Mud Puddle Books, t 212-647-9168; f 212-647-9173; info@mudpuddlebooks.com; www.cocktailkingdom.com.
