Generally, I focus on classic or “vintage” cocktails from the 1920s and 1930s, culled from various bartending guides published during those years, or from more recent volumes mining more obscure sources of that period. But for the next few posts, I’m going to highlight a few selections from Robert Simonson’s new book, The Old-Fashioned. Within, he…
Another from Ted Haigh’s Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, this is one of a pair of drinks (the other being for the ladies, the Knickerbocker a la Madame) that date from 1862, courtesy of Jerry Thomas. Given its early appearance and its ingredients and general flavor profile, this has to be one of the earliest proto-Tiki…
Ok, maybe Scotch cocktails aren’t all that rare, because here’s another one from the Savoy Cocktail Book. This is essentially a minor variation on the Rob Roy, which is really a minor variation on the Manhattan. This is also, apart from the vermouth, akin to an old-fashioned, i.e. whiskey with bitters and sugar. And hey, it’s…
Like the Spencer, the Barnum (Was Right), and the Paradise, the Pendennis Cocktail is another drink built on a 2:1 gin to apricot brandy ratio. Rather than lemon or orange juice, however, this one uses lime juice for its sour component – which turns out to be a very good thing indeed. The drink is…
I’ve been hankering to pick up a bottle of genever for a while now, and finally pulled the trigger yesterday. Genever is a Dutch spirit (the word is Dutch for “juniper”), and you can probably figure out both from its name and its translation that it is a precursor to gin. While it was the…
The Trilby cocktail, which possibly takes its name from the same source as the fedora-like hat, George du Maurier’s 1894 novel of the same name (by way of a London stage adaptation)…man, this sentence has become too complex. Anyway. There are a lot of recipes for this thing, going back to about 1900 (further evidence…
Pink Gin is a very common cocktail that shows up in just about every vintage cocktail book you can find. The recipe is usually just gin and one or two dashes of bitters, with Angostura usually but not always specified. So it’s obviously a very simple drink, and it’s probably going to taste mostly like…
The missus and I made a big double batch of gumbo yesterday (recipe courtesy of the remarkable Jimmy Bannos of Chicago’s Heaven on Seven), and what goes better with gumbo than a Hurricane? Nothing, that’s what. The Hurricane, as you might know, is a New Orleans drink, and was invented at Pat O’Brien’s, a venerable…
Yesterday was World Whisky Day. So, considering this drink caught my eye a few days earlier as I was thumbing through my copy of 1941’s Here’s How, I now had the perfect excuse to make it. Cobblers were a common, and in fact extremely popular, form of beverage in the first, say, 3/4 of the 19th…
Another blogger did a piece on the Mary Pickford recently, and called it a proto-tiki drink. Despite its rum-and-pineapple juice base, I’ve never thought of it in this way, although I certainly do place many other classic Prohibition-era cocktails in that category. I think, for me, the presence of maraschino in the Mary Pickford gives…
propercocktails 