Читать книгу Gilded Age Cocktails - Cecelia Tichi - Страница 6

In the decades following the American Civil War, the nation was bursting with innovation—the 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 rooster’s 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 Lord’s 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 Poe’s 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 sense—the 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 Victoria’s 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 aside—ready 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, Society as I Have Found It, but his recipe for the champagne frappé, with its “little flakes of ice,” bowed to the possibilities of the cocktail.

If ice improved the experience, perhaps further enhancements lay ahead, and why not? Patrons “in their cups” soon lifted crystal stemware, glass tumblers, and stout barware filled with cocktails named for notable persons and places in their circuit. Dispensed in a stirrup cup on Kentucky Derby Day or ladled from a silver bowl on the first morning of the New Year, the julep and the “spiked” punch (and numerous kindred libations) marked the calendar for year-round celebration.

The flavorings and fruits in cocktails often hinted of the tropics or other exotic locales far from the mahogany bars where drinks were served. Bartenders and patrons owed much to the busy depots, coastal ports, and cargo ships that hummed with activity during the Gilded Age. In economic terms, overbuilt railroads brought on financial crises in the 1870s and 1890s, but the expansive rail network expedited shipments of oranges, lemons, and limes from Southern California and Florida to the cocktail bars in the wintry cities of the North. The docks of San Francisco and Los Angeles welcomed pineapples and sugar from Hawaii, and stevedores at work on East Coast ports unloaded bounteous fruit from the Caribbean. International shipping, what’s more, brought whiskeys and liqueurs from Scotland, Ireland, and the Continent. While the snow fell and icicles dangled outdoors, an Orange Blossom or a Santiago cocktail transported the imbiber to sunny, warm, distant climes.

The “iron horse” played another part in the rise of the cocktail. A half-century prior to the Gilded Age, the French traveler Alexis De Tocqueville had noted Americans’ mastery of “the art of joining.” A network of railroads now propelled a gregarious country into the busy industrial era of steam and steel. Annually, rail lines sped business groups and conventioneers from far-flung locales to central US cities for fellowship, for deals—and for drinks. A veteran bartender observed that “some men will drink . . . to show their diamonds and jewelry, their fancy clothes, and mainly their money,” but “most men will drink because it is ‘business.’”

A trove of souvenir menus from business and professional conventions across the country tells the tale. Medical societies and journalists imbibed as they gathered, as did athletic clubs, chambers of commerce, and reunions of military regiments. A head-spinning roster of imbibing cohorts included piano dealers, telegraphers, customs inspectors, bankers, carriage builders, pawn brokers, grocers, paper box manufacturers, postmasters, telegraphers, and countless others. The fraternal lodges (Elks, Moose, Lions, Masons) assembled, as did the Merchant Tailor’s National Protective Association of America, the Knights of Revelry, the salesforce of the Hildreth Tarnish Company, and the Washington University class of 1896.

For those who were used to drinking their whiskey straight, an “educated thirst” required schooling and the syllabus could be a challenge. Just as novice museumgoers learned to “touch” paintings and sculptures with their eyes instead of their hands, so the cocktail bar required on-site tutorials. George Boldt (b. 1851), manager of New York’s Waldorf, tried in vain to help patrons distinguish between liquors and liqueurs. Visitors from the “hinterlands” especially objected to brandy served in “glasses the size of thimbles”; as one legendarily brayed, “I am a he-man, I am, and when I drink liquor, I want plenty of it. Bring the bottle and a tall glass!” Refusing to see why “a fine old Napoleon, 1804, or Chartreuse or Benedictine” was to be sipped, not gulped, these customers eventually concocted highballs of the liqueurs, diluting the spirits with a quantity of ice and soda or other mixer, to the benefit of the proprietor’s “exchequer” and the dismay of the manager.

Like hard liquor, the cocktail was a masculine preserve until quite late in the Gilded Age, probably because a battery of strict etiquette books gave ladies no permission to consume such drinks. While ladies might routinely enjoy champagne and wines over several courses at a dinner party, and liqueurs and cigarettes at the conclusion of the meal, before the turn of the twentieth century no lady “bellied up to the bar,” raised her delicate calfskin boot to the brass rail below, and ordered a drink. When Boldt installed small cocktail tables and chairs in lieu of a bar in the Waldorf Hotel, the notion of ladies and gentlemen imbibing together at the cocktail hour might have flickered across his mind before he banished the scandalous thought and bowed to social convention, naming the new locale the Men’s Café.

Cocktails honoring men’s colleges and universities had no counterparts in the women’s colleges. In public places, a young lady was expected to request Appolinaris, the “Queen of Table Waters” (named for the patron saint of wine!). The young ladies of the “Seven Sisters” colleges enjoyed teatimes, but if any of them dared to nip from a young man’s silver flask at an outdoor sporting event they were mum on the practice. A few glimmers, however, suggest that cocktails were not altogether alien beverages for ladies, but served in private or in disguise. Around Madison Square, according to one chronicler of New York customs, “a famous confectionary store” provided cocktails to those “who knew the ropes.” The drinks, “brought from the bar of an adjacent hotel . . . were served in tea-cups.” (The high alcoholic content of women’s “medicinal” products was legendary.)

Private weekend house parties became the prime venue for mixed drinks in mixed company. Financier Pembroke Jones (b. 1858) and his wife, Sarah, were “famous” for the “high balls and mint Julips” served at their coastal home in Wilmington, North Carolina. After “several cocktails,” confessed social arbiter Henry Lehr (b. 1869), “I became strongly gay.” In New York, Colonel William d’Alton Mann (b. 1839), editor and publisher of the notorious Gilded Age scandal sheet Town Topics, hosted celebrated weekend parties from April to November at his country house upstate at Lake George. For the editors and their wives or girlfriends, who departed Grand Central Thursday afternoon on a reserved Pullman car for a weekend of outdoor festivities, the day began with Scotch and Sodas at breakfast. Thereafter, at the colonel’s summons on the half-hour (“Say, ducks, ain’t you dry?”), continuous cocktails were mixed and served by the colonel’s daughter, Emma. One must imagine her plying the cocktail shaker, the swizzle stick, the siphon, the crystal-clear ice, an array of polished glasses, and bottled elixirs without limit, a true mistress of the bar.

Ironically, the same technologies that supplied alcoholic spirits to Gilded Age imbibers emboldened their enemies. Newspapers that advertised new inventories of liquors, wines, and ale also provided outlets for the opinions and agitation of the proponents of temperance. The railroads that brought spirits and their consumers together also transported pro-Prohibition folks to meetings where beliefs hardened into strategies for public support and legislative action. Echoing the colonial denunciations of the “devil’s brew,” the Women’s Christian Temperance Society (WTCU) and the Anti-Saloon League mounted parallel campaigns, and politically powerful clergy joined the fight against the spirits blamed for wrecking the lives of individuals and entire families. The partisan split dividing the imbibing “wets” from the teetotaling “drys” widened, shaming convivial tipplers as sots bent on destroying the sanctity of the American home.

In January 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, banning the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors,” became the law of the land (until it was itself repealed by another constitutional amendment thirteen years later). The heyday of the sparkling glass of the Gilded Age was over and the era of “speakeasies,” “rum running,” and the “roaring twenties” had begun, heralding another chapter in the evolution of the cocktail.