Katie Stryjewski - Cocktails, Mocktails, and Garnishes from the Garden: Recipes for Beautiful Beverages with a Botanical Twist

An imprint of Mango Publishing

Coral Gables

Copyright 2020 by Katie Stryjewski.
Published by Yellow Pear Press, a division of Mango Media Inc.

Cover Design: Elina Diaz
Cover Photo/illustration: Katie Stryjewski
Layout & Design: Elina Diaz

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Cocktails, Mocktails, and Garnishes from the Garden: Recipes for Beautiful Beverages with a Botanical Twist

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication number: 2020950843
ISBN: (print) 978-1-64250-496-5 , (ebook) 978-1-64250-497-2
BISAC category code: CKB006000, COOKING / Beverages / Alcoholic / Bartending & Cocktails

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

For me, cocktails have always been a little bit magical. For years, they seemed like mysterious concoctions of strange and exotic ingredients, and bartenders were mystical alchemists who knew the secrets of their preparation. Even as I learned how to make them myself and that mystique faded, they never lost their magic. A cocktail makes special occasions more special, makes guests feel welcome, and stimulates the best conversation between friends. Classic recipes and historic spirits connect us to the past in a concrete and tangible way. Cocktails ar e special.

I actually remember the exact evening, in fact the exact drink , that made me fall in love with craft cocktails. It was 2009, and I found out that I had been awarded a fellowship for graduate school. My husband and I planned a big night out to celebrate. We went to a fancy cocktail bar for drinks, something we couldnt afford to do regularly. Based on the menus description, I chose an Aviation, which I now know is a classic cocktail made with gin, lemon juice, maraschino liqueur, and crme de violette. It arrived in an appropriately fancy glass, a lavender drink with a brandied cherry sitting at its center. Id never had crme de violette or maraschino liqueur before. They were like nothing Id ever tasted. All the components of the drink came together into a perfect, harmonic whole. I was converted.

Because we couldnt afford to go out for drinks often, I decided to try to learn to make good cocktails at home. The Aviation led me toward other classics like the Old Fashioned, Tom Collins, and Pegu Club, as well as to blogs that posted new recipes from local bars. Thanks to those bloggers, I could go out and have a drink I loved, and then find out what was in it and add those things to my bar. My collection of bottles and recipes sl owly grew.

I started my own blog, Garnish, in 2015. Since I was trying to learn about spirits and cocktails from scratch, and since I was finding other blogs so helpful in the process, I thought it could be interesting to document the process and try to put the information out there for other people to find. I began working my way through different ingredients and classic cocktails, posting recipes and photos and researching the history of each drink. I found it fascinatingoften more fascinating than my actual graduate school research! Nothing makes a cocktail more enjoyable than understanding how it connects you to the past.

To really understand the concept of craft cocktails, you have to start in the 1800s. Todays trends have their roots in this period, and theres an effort to emulate and venerate it in many waysas is evidenced by the current stereotype of the suspender-clad, bearded bartender.

Prior to the nineteenth century, it wasnt the fashion to order individual cocktails. Instead, drinkers would order a bowl of punch to share at their own table that a bartender would mix up behind the scenes. This changed in the early days of the United States. In colonial times, people didnt just drink at taverns in the eveningthey consumed alcohol with sugar and bitters at all times of the day, often for its purported health benefits. These individual health tonics evolved into the cocktails we know and love today. And with them, an entire culture of bars and bartending arose, a distinctly American innovation. Much of what we know about this period comes from a famous and flamboyant bartender named Jerry Thomas, who wrote a bartenders guide called How to Mix Drinks or The Bon Vivants Companion in 1862. It contains the first known printed recipes for ma ny drinks.

Jerry Thomas ushered in a golden era of cocktails, when many recipes that are now classics were first created and served. This lasted until Prohibition, which drove Americas cocktail culture underground. Though this is now romanticized by modern speakeasies and a love for Prohibition-era style, the craft cocktail never really recovered. The rest of the twentieth century was a time of vodka, pre-packaged mixers, and chain restaurant bars. Its an era that is often referred to as the cocktails dark ages.

But like the medieval dark ages, this one was followed by a renaissance. In the 80s and 90s, big names like Dale DeGroff, David Wondrich, and Jeff Berry began reading about, writing about, and serving classic cocktails. By the early 2000s, iconic bars like Milk & Honey, Flatiron Lounge, and Pegu Club were hand-carving ice and filling coupe glasses with pre-Prohibition drinks and innovative new recipes. Craft cocktails were in vogue again, and their popularity has only increa sed since.

The digital age and the rise of social media have also had an effect on the cocktail world. While a well-presented drink was always a goal of these craft cocktail bars, the ubiquity of the cellphone camera and the popularity of Facebook and Instagram have driven this to a new extreme. Like the transition from shared punch to single-serving cocktails, it marks a change in the way we view drinking. In a way, its a movement toward an even more individualistic mindsetevery drink needs to be unique and reflect a personal aesthetic. But I prefer to see it as a regression back to something more communal, a virtual punch bowl around which we can a ll gather.