Cecelia Tichi - Gilded Age Cocktails: History, Lore, and Recipes from Americas Golden Age

Cecelia Tichi

Washington Mews Books

An Imprint of

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

Washington Mews Books

An Imprint of

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

www.nyupress.org

2021 by New York University

All rights reserved

Illustrations by Julia Mills

Book designed and typeset by Charles B. Hames

References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Tichi, Cecelia, 1942 author.

Title: Gilded Age cocktails : history, lore, and recipes from Americas golden age / Cecelia Tichi.

Description: New York : New York University Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020029697 (print) | LCCN 2020029698 (ebook) | ISBN 9781479805259 (cloth) | ISBN 9781479805266 (ebook other) | ISBN 9781479805280 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: CocktailsUnited States. | United StatesSocial life and customs18651918.

Classification: LCC TX951 .T49 2020 (print) | LCC TX951 (ebook) | DDC 641.87/4dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020029697

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020029698

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Manufactured in the United States of America

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In the decades following the American Civil War, the nation was bursting with innovationthe telephone, the motorcar, electric lights, the airplane, and a host of other marvels. For the newly sophisticated palates eager for novelty at every turn, no invention was more ubiquitous among the affluent than the beverage soon to be heralded as the cocktail.

The word cocktail might summon thoughts of a roosters flaring feathers, but the term has no connection to a barnyard cock. It originated in the equestrian practice of distinguishing purebred horses from others whose bloodlines were mixed. The tails of non-Thoroughbred (mongrel) steeds were docked, or cocktailed, to distinguish them on sight from the superior Thoroughbreds. Before the word cocktails could head a menu of drinkables for the upper classes, the term needed a makeover, for the idea of a cocktail as something tainted or impure had made its way to the oases where distilled spirits reigned. In the early 1800s, the term cock-tail warned against a concoction that fuddles the head or was secretly diluted. Let the imbiber beware!

The celebrants of cocktails need also beware the admonitions that trailed drink from colonial times, for America had amassed a thick ledger of dire warnings against alcohol. In 1673, the pamphlet Wo to Drunkards, written by the eminent Puritan minister Increase Mather, inveighed against sinners in Zion, despoilers of the Lords chosen New World City upon a Hill. The clergyman, like most colonists, routinely slaked his thirst with beer, for brewing was known to be a hedge against ills from dodgy water, but pleasurable tippling for its own sake was proscribed. Nonetheless, a century later, during the American Revolution, soldiers of the Continental Army under General George Washington received a daily ration of rum that boosted morale and has been credited with reenlistments.

In the public mind, where sober practicality was the bulwark of American progress, the linkage of poetic inspiration with Dionysian revels complicated the issue of sobriety and creativity. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (b. 1807) lauded hard work in his poem The Village Blacksmith (and was forgiven for another verse rhyming Catawba wine with taste more divine). Nathaniel Hawthorne (b. 1804), for his part, followed his bestselling novels The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables with The Blithedale Romance and the pronouncement that human nature... has a naughty instinct that approves of wine... if not of stronger liquor. Hawthorne wished a blight upon vineyards of the rich, and lamented that the poor sought succor in the muddy medium of... liquor. But the literary ledger was irrevocably stained by the sodden Edgar Allan Poe (b. 1809) and his ilk, whose habits were thought to threaten the moral fiber of the new nation. Upon Poes death in 1849, the New York Herald ran an editorial vilifying this cadre of weak and helpless American writers, a vain and conceited lot, bereft of common sensethe basis of all usefulness and success in life. As a class, fumed the newspaper, they naturally take to the bottle.

By the later 1800s, the stuffy Victorian era had ebbed, finally, to herald the decades welcoming the cocktail. Queen Victorias son Prince Edward VII endowed the period with his name, and Edwardian became synonymous with the age of the bon vivant. Across the channel, France celebrated the Belle Epoque, and in the US, a young writer dubbing himself Mark Twain collaborated in 1873 with Charles Dudley Warner on a novel that defined the era: The Gilded Age. In the book, we see traveling businessmen carrying brandy flasks en route to a saloon. Gentlemen, advises the leader of the group, never take an inferior liquor.

For imbibing celebrants, the Gilded Age might also be known as the Golden Age of Cocktails. During the period from the 1870s to the 1910s, as rapid industrialization led to the accumulation of staggering wealth for the very few, then as now the doings of the rich and famous cast a long shadow on social tastes. While immigrants and workers had their own drinking patterns, the expanding census of affluent Americans took a lesson from the very rich, and coast to coast the mixed drink flourished at dinner parties and sporting events, luncheons and balls, on ocean liners and yachts, in barrooms, summer resorts, and hotels. The drinks ranged from mild concoctions such as the Florida cocktail, which combined iced orange juice and sweet Italian vermouth, to the potent signature brew of the copper mining regions of Montana, which called for port wine, brandy, and French vermouth. The designated cocktail hour of the Gilded Age varied according to desire or necessity. It might begin early in the day, when under the influence of the hangover one needed the hair of the dog that bit the preceding night, and continue unabated until, at last, the bottles were corked and set asideready for the following day.

Exactly how a cooled whiskey or gin drink began to inaugurate the cocktail era may never be known, but the fact is the engine of the new cocktail era was, quite simply, ice, which had been profitably harvested from US frozen lakes and rivers since the 1820s. Cut and warehoused in ice houses, the wintry crop was an indispensable coolant for perishable commodities shipped great distances by sea and rail. By the later 1800s, mechanization modernized ice production, and Mark Twain marveled that every Mississippi River town, including New Orleans, has her ice factory producing big blocks of ice, all crystal clear.

Whether in New Orleans, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Virginia City, Nevada, or elsewhere, someone found that a whiskey drink cooled with ice chips or cubes that chimed against the glass was not tainted, but pleasing and preferred. The social seigneur of Gilded Age etiquette, the Savannah-born Ward McAllister (b. 1827), sounds like a latter-day wine snob in his stuffy memoir,