Читать книгу Gilded Age Cocktails - Cecelia Tichi - Страница 7

Although numerous guides to the Golden Age of Cocktails were produced by the era’s celebrated mixologists, a particularly invaluable forerunner must be singled out here: Albert S. Crockett’s The Old Waldorf-Astoria Bar Book (1931, 1934) is a veritable atlas of pre-Prohibition cocktails by name and ingredients. Though Crockett’s Klondike and Hawaii cocktails call for identical ingredients (and may be something of a geographic joke), the richness of Crockett’s Peacocks on Parade, his memoir of the Gilded Age, gives one confidence in the accuracy of the Bar book. Many of the drinks he chronicles have drifted away, but a few familiar names endure to this day, with ingredients long since adapted to modern tastes. Crockett’s historic recipes, including the Manhattan and Martini cocktails, indicate that Gilded Age imbibers both quenched their thirst and satisfied a “sweet tooth.”

A social observer of the Gilded Age, Crockett lived through those years and, like others of the era, wrote its story at first hand. His dictionary of drinks is foundational here, and his “Glossary” flavors these pages.