I don't intend to veer from wine to cocktail, but I thought that after my last story, I owed you this other visual contribution on the cocktail scene.
I don't know if all of you have already watched a bartender performing cocktail-shaker juggling, but that is a very enjoyable experience : you're already high and happy sipping a drink and this guy suddenly shows up in the stroboscope light behind the bar performing incredible acrobatics, tossing full bottles in the air and catching them who-knows-how without loosing a drop, all this with harmony and ease. And at the end of that they manage to pour the right proportions for their cocktail. This type of performance is called flair bartending and it is a fixture in the cocktail bars or events. And guess who is the first documented flair bartender ? it was Jerry Thomas, the author of the cocktail recipe book (How to Mix Drinks) published in the mid-19th century...
I shot these picture in Paris during a private [corporate] event and these bartenders here were so skilled in their art, j'étais bluffé like we say in French...
This book gathers many unique cocktail recipes, it is an irreplaceable tool to experience first hand what cocktail amateurs drank 150 years ago or more. As this book was obviously intended for hundreds of passionate yearning-to-be mixologists, it reminds us that demanding, happy and imaginative drinkers are not a new phenomenon in the Civilization and that we must do our part, keep the Heritage alive and have fun...
This small preface is at the same time wise, joyful, and full of precautionary sentences so as not to upset the puritan-minded of its time. This is a healthy read for today, and overall, has the situation really changed regarding the happy drinkers versus the dry enforcers ? The puritans are still around, the only thing is that they've shifted to other, unexpected countries.
Remember, these words were written circa 1860, and there's a feel like it was yesterday...
In all ages of the world, and in all countries, men have indulged in « social drinks ». They have always possessed themselves of some popular beverage apart from water and those of the breakfast and tea table. Wether it is judicious that mankind should continue to indulge in such things, or wether it would be wiser to abstain from all enjoyments of that character, it is not our province to decide. We leave that question to the moral philosopher. We simply contend that a relish for “social drinks” is universal; that those drinks exist in greater variety in the United States than in any other country in the world; and that he, therefore, who proposes to impart to these drink not only the most palatable but the most wholesome characteristics on which they may be made susceptible, is a genuine public benefactor. That is exactly our object in introducing this little volume to the public. We do not propose to persuade any man to drink, for instance, a punch, or a julep, or a cocktail, who has never happened to make the acquaintance of those refreshing articles under circumstances calculated to induce more intimate relations; but we do propose to instruct those whose “intimate relations” in question render them somewhat fastidious, in the daintiest fashions thereunto pertaining.
We very well remember seeing one day in London, in the rear of the Bank of England, a small drinking saloon that had been set up by a peripatetic American, at the door of which was placed a board covered with the unique titles of the American mixed drinks supposed to be prepared within that limited establishment. The "Connecticut eye-openers" and "Alabama fog-cutters", together with the "lightning smashes" and the "thunderbolt-cocktails" created a profound sensation in the crowd assembled to peruse the Nectarian bill of fare, if they did not produce custom. It struck us, then, that a list of all the social drinks__the composite beverages, if we may call them so__of America, would really be one of the curiosities of jovial literature; and that if it was combined with a catalogue of the mixture common to other nations, and made practically useful by the addition of a concise description of the various processes for "brewing" each, it would be a "blessing to mankind". There would be no excuse for imbibing, with such a book at hand, the villainous compounds" of bar-keeping Goths and Vandals, who know no more of the amenities of bon vivant existence than a Hottentot can know of the bouquet of Champagne.
"There's philosophy", says Father Tom in the drama, "even in a jug of punch". We claim the credit of "philosophy teaching by example", then, to no ordinary extent in the composition of this volume; for our index exhibits the title of eighty-six different kinds of punches, together with a universe of cobblers, juleps, bitters, cups, slings, shrubs &c, each and all of which the reader is carefully educated how to concoct in the choicest manner. For the perfection of this education, the name, alone of Jerry Thomas is a sufficient guarantee. He has travelled Europe and America in search of all that is recondite in this branch of the spirit art. He has been the Jupiter Olympus of the bar at the Metropolitan Hotel in this city. He was the presiding deity at the Planter's House, St. Louis. He has been the proprietor of one of the most recherché saloons in New Orleans as well as in New York. His very name is synonymous in the lexicon of mixed drinks, with all that is rare and original. To the "Wine Press", edited by F. S. Cozzens, Esq., we are indebted for the composition of several valuable punches, and among them we may particulize the celebrated "Nuremburgh", and the equally famous "Philadelphia Fish House" punch. The rest we owe to the inspiration of Jerry Thomas himself, and as he is as inexorable as the Medes and Persians in his principle that no excellent drink can be made out of any thing but excellent materia's, we conceive that we are safe in asserting that whatever may be prepared after his instructions will be able to speak eloquently for itself. "Good wine needs no bush", Shakespeare tells us and over one of Jerry's mixtures eulogy is quite as redundant.
I love the term jovial literature, as well as the idea of this book as a blessing to mankind, this man would have made a great web writer nowadays...
Also, isn't there a sentence more appropriate today when we think to real wines than this "no excellent drink can be made out of any thing but excellent materia's"...
You couldn't be more factual!!!
Posted by: chris greatwich | November 04, 2011 at 12:59 PM