The Book of Gin by Richard Barnett

Author:Richard Barnett [Barnett, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2012-11-20T05:00:00+00:00

And so we come to the cocktail—a drink, of course, but also a new kind of pleasure, a cultural icon, a global language, and a seemingly inexhaustible vehicle for myth-making and story-telling. Invented in the United States at the end of the eighteenth century, the cocktail in its very earliest incarnations seems to have been consumed as a pick-me-up before the rigors of the day. The name might derive from any one of half-a-dozen etymologies, but the current consensus is that it most likely comes from coquetel, a traditional wine-cup from Bordeaux, brought to the U.S. by soldiers under the Marquis de Lafayette, who served as a major-general in George Washington’s Continental Army between 1777 and 1781. The word began to appear in print in the first decade of the nineteenth century and, according to the mixologist and cocktail historian David Wonderich, the earliest reference came in the Farmer’s Cabinet for 28th April 1803:

Drank a glass of coctail [sic]—excellent for the head . . . Call’d at the Doct’s. found Burnham—he looked very wise—drank another glass of cocktail.

Three years later, on 6th May 1806, an editorial in the Balance and Colombian Repository, a New York newspaper, provided a satirical definition of this new beverage:

A stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar water, and bitters . . . it is supposed to be an excellent electioneering potion inasmuch as it renders the heart stout and bold, at the same time as it fuddles the head.

Patsy McDonough’s Bar-keeper’s Guide, published in 1883, summarized the character of the nineteenth-century cocktail:

The Cocktail is a very popular drink. It is most frequently called for in the morning and just before dinner; it is sometimes taken as an appetizer; it is a welcome companion on fishing excursions and travelers often go provided with it on a railway journey.

These quotations underscore a crucial point, visible in the writings of many early cocktail devotees. For much of the nineteenth century, the cocktail was not the name of a general class of mixed drinks, but a specific drink, containing spirit, bitters, some kind of flavoring or liqueur, and a simple syrup made from sugar and water. When the explorer Richard Burton—the first European to set eyes on Mecca—set out for America in May 1860, he revelled in the sheer variety of drinks he planned to encounter in the Land of the Free:

I’ll drink mint-juleps, brandy-smashes, whiskey-skies, gin-sling, cocktail, sherry cobblers, rum-salads, streaks of lightning, ­morning-glory . . . it’ll be the most interesting experiment. I want to see whether after a life of 3 or 4 months, I can drink and eat myself to the level of the aborigines.

During the American Civil War the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, writing from Willard’s Hotel, a renowned watering-hole in the Union capital of Washington, advised his readers to:

adopt the universal habit of the place, and call for a mint julep, a whiskey skin, a gin cock-tail, a brandy smash, or a glass of pure Old Rye, for the conviviality of Washington

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