Collins - Cocktails

In 1928, President-elect Herbert Hoover may still have been referring to Prohibition as a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose, but, by this time, the whole affair was already proving itself to be an abject fiasco. Despite all the efforts of the police, Customs officers and revenue officials, bootlegging had become big business, with organized crime heavily involved: in towns and cities throughout the U.S.A., illicit speakeasies had taken over from traditional bars and saloons (the name speakeasy probably comes from the security governing admission to the premises).

Once the drinkers were inside, the quality of the liquor, in the main, was nothing to write home about. To satisfy a nation that seemed to be growing thirstier by the minute and, at the same time, maximise their own profits the bootleggers were being driven to setting up hidden stills of their own to supplement the shiploads and truckloads of booze that they were smuggling into the country from abroad. Soon, they were producing gallon after gallon of their own disreputable versions of whisky, gin and rum: bathtub gin was one favourite, with coffin varnish, rotgutand moonshine being among the others. The one quality they all had in common was that, as raw spirits, they tasted truly dreadful. At their worst, they actually could be downright poisonous.

With bars across the country searching for ways of making what they were selling palatable, cocktails were quick to come into their own. Soon, they became all the rage and expert bartenders (or mixologists, as they became known in the U.S.A.) became living legends on the strength of the cocktail recipes they originated. From the U.S.A., the fashion spread to Europe. London, Paris, Nice, Venice

to keep up with the times, any place with the slightest claim to being in the swing of things had to follow the trend. Just as the bar of the St Regis Hotel became, for a time, the place for cocktails in New York, in London there was the American Bar at the Savoy and the Rivoli Bar at the Ritz. Paris and Venice each had their own Harrys Bar the former was one of Ernest Hemingways favourite watering-holes while out East, in the heart of colonial Singapore, there was the Long Bar at Raffles Hotel, birthplace of the immortal Singapore Sling.

Where cocktail bars led, the soon-to-be-as-popular notion of the cocktail party followed. This was espoused equally eagerly by the jazz-loving, cigarette-holder-flourishing, Charleston-dancing, cocktail-sinking Bright Young Things of the period. For it was the young that took to the cocktail habit the most keenly. The what-was-good-enough-for-father brigade might still stick to sherry as the traditional aperitif before dinner, but why serve boring old sherry when there was a host of wonderfully exotic alternatives to shake, mix and pour? After all, this was the generation that re-dubbed the Boer War the Bore War and turned Englands green and pleasant land into Englands green unpleasant land. For Noel Cowards Amanda and Elyot, there was nothing to beat sipping a champagne cocktail as the sun slowly set at fashionable Deauville, while, back in London, the inimitable Jeeves would be mixing the driest of Dry Martinis history, unfortunately, does not record the exact recipe as Bertie Woosters indispensable preprandial tincture before the latter departed to meet his fellow eggs, beans and crumpets at the immortal Drones Club.