Ever since America invented the cocktail, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it has evolved: from sweet to dry; hot to icy; stirred to shaken—a morning eye-opener to a conclusion to the day's activities.
Originally the name of a few specific drinks, the word "cocktail" soon became the generic name for almost any mixed drink. No one knows exactly why drinks came to be called cocktails, but there are many theories. In taverns, a cock is a tap; the dregs from the tap were called its tail, so some say the name signified the last dregs of a tavern tap. Others tell of a beautiful Revolutionary era barmaid who decorated drinks with cock's feathers and called them cocktails. The word might have originated with a medicinal chicken soup–like drink the English made from a cock boiled with ale, sack (wine from the Canary Islands), dates, and raisins. Thought to cure consumption, it was called cock-water or cock-ale. Another possibility is that since people generally started their day with a drink, the cocktail was named after the cock's wakeup call. Breakfast drinking was common, even among children, for centuries in Europe and continued in America from colonial times until the early mid-nineteenth century when the temperance movement gained strength. Beer soup was especially popular.
The most prosaic, and likely, theory is based on the fact that mixed, or nonthoroughbred, horses were called cocktails because their tails were clipped and stuck up like roosters' tails. Over time, the word "cocktail" came to stand for any mixture: mixed drinks, food mixtures such as fruit cocktails, and pharmaceutical combinations.
The first known definition of a cocktail appeared in an 1806 Hudson, New York, publication called the Balance and Columbian Repository. It defined a cocktail as "a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters." By the late twentieth century, a typical dictionary definition changed the meaning of the word to "any of various short mixed drinks, consisting typically of gin, whiskey, rum, vodka or brandy, with different admixtures, as vermouth, fruit juices or flavorings, sometimes sweetened."
The definition changed because drinks changed. A late-nineteenth-century martini was made with equal parts gin and sweet vermouth, plus sugar syrup and orange bitters. A late-twentieth-century martini was made with vodka, not gin, and a few drops of dry, not sweet, vermouth, and no bitters and sugar syrup.
The First Mixed Drinks
Originally, spirits were taken for medicinal purposes. Called aqua vitae, or the water of life, they were thought to improve health and promote longevity. Monks and apothecaries made potions from spirits mixed with herbs, spices, and fruits. They prescribed them for the pox and the plague, and even rubbed them on stiff joints. By the seventeenth century, Europeans were drinking the concoctions for pleasure as well as for pain relief.
When settlers came to North America, they brought a taste for spirited drinks with them. They made punch with rum, tea, sugar, water, and lemon juice. They drank flips made with beer, rum, molasses or sugar, and eggs or cream, all mixed together and heated with a red-hot poker. Possets combined hot milk and spirits. Slings were made of gin or other spirits, water, sugar, and lemon and served either hot or cold.
In 1862 preeminent bartender Jerry Thomas published How to Mix Drinks, or The Bon-Vivant's Companion, America's first mixed drink primer. Thomas wrote, "The 'Cocktail' is a modern invention, and is generally used on fishing and other sporting parties, although some patients [author's italics] insist that it is good in the morning as a tonic." He called just nine of his two hundred–plus recipes "cocktails," but within a few years the term became ubiquitous.
The Party Begins
The Gilded Age was the golden era of the cocktail. At the turn of the twentieth century, affluent Americans frequented elegant hotels, bars, and restaurants; champagne cocktails were among their favorite drinks.
Talented bartenders knew how to make hundreds of cocktails—from the Adonis to the Zaza—and came up with new ones at will. They created and named drinks for regular patrons, news events, cities, and celebrities, and mixed them with great flair. Jerry Thomas was famous for his "Blue Blazer," a mixture of whiskey and boiling water, which he set ablaze and tossed back and forth between two silver-plated mugs. He said it looked like a "stream of liquid fire."
Cocktail shakers were invented in the late 1860s, and since ice was more available than it had been previously, the proper way to ice a drink became important. Drink manuals specified that some drinks be shaken, others mixed in a glass and stirred with a fork rather than a spoon.
In London, hotels and restaurants opened American bars and served American cocktails. They even hired American bartenders, especially after Prohibition went into effect in the United States in 1920.
America's party did not end with Prohibition—in fact, some might argue that drinking intensified during this era, with drunkenness becoming more common-place—but it did go underground, and the cocktail changed. Bartenders disguised the harsh taste of bootleg liquor by adding cream to drinks. Gin became the spirit of choice because it was easy to make faux gin by mixing juniper oil into alcohol. It was more difficult to replicate the taste of whiskey. Many people opted to drink in the privacy of their own homes, and cocktail sets—tray, shaker, and glasses—became popular wedding presents.
After Prohibition, which was repealed in 1933, most of the creamy cocktails disappeared, and trendsetters began ordering their martinis dry. However, in the 1933 "Repeal Edition" of the Cocktail Book, a dry martini was two-thirds gin, one-third French vermouth, and two dashes of bitters.
Just the Basics
During World War II, the cocktail repertoire shrank. People turned to basic drinks such as highballs, martinis, and Manhattans. In the 1950s Americans frequented cocktail lounges, threw cocktail parties, and women wore cocktail dresses. They ate bite-sized cocktail snacks and carried on brief, snappy cocktail-party conversations. Bartenders were not expected to know how to make hundreds of drinks, but they were expected to make ever-drier martinis.
Vodka, so little known in America that it was once sold as "white whiskey," began its rise in popularity. Gradually, it took the place of gin in the standard martini and eventually became the best-selling spirit in America.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, trendy young people drank white wine or smoked marijuana instead of drinking spirits. Cocktails were for old folks. Sales of brown liquors, such as whiskey, plummeted. However, cocktails began showing signs of life during the 1980s. The martini became hip again, and bartenders created dozens of variations on the theme. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, new cocktails—cosmopolitans, chocolate martinis, black icebergs—signal the beginning of yet another era in the evolution of the cocktail.
A Drink By Any Other Name
The names of cocktails are often as inventive as the recipes. Here are a few intriguing examples.
- Cocktails named for animals: Bird, Chanticleer, Goat's Delight, Hop Frog, Hop Toad, Grasshopper, Prairie Hen, Mississippi Mule, Rattlesnake, Sherry Chicken, Yellow Parrot.
- Cocktails named for people: Bobby Burns, Charlie Lindbergh, Gene Tunney, Jack Kearns, Mamie Taylor, Mary Pickford, Phoebe Snow, Rhett Butler Slush, Rob Roy, Rudolph Nureyev, Tom and Jerry, Tom Collins, Will Rogers.
- Cocktails named for places: Big Apple, Brazil, Bronx, Brooklyn, Champs Elysées, Chicago, Cuba Libre, Fifth Avenue, Havana, Hawaiian, Manhattan, Martha's Vineyard, Richmond, Ward Eight.
- Cocktails named for occupations: Bishop, Chorus Lady, Commodore, Crook, Diplomat, Doctor G., Grenadier, Huntsman, Judge, Journalist, Kentucky Colonel, Merry Widow, President, Presidente Seco.
- Old school cocktails: Annapolis Fizz, Columbia, Cornell, Eton Blazer, Harvard, Old Etonian, Oxford Grad, Princeton, Yale.
- Royal cocktails: Count Stroganoff, Duchess, Duke, King Cole, Prince Edward, Prince's Smile, Queen, Queen Charlotte, Queen Elizabeth.
- Cocktail contradictions: Church Parade, Presbyterian, Prohibition, Puritan, Reform.
Bibliography
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Craddock, Harry. The Savoy Cocktail Book. London: Constable, 1933.
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Dias Blue, Anthony. The Complete Book of Mixed Drinks. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.
Edmunds, Lowell. Martini Straight Up: The Classic AmericanCocktail. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
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Grimes, William. Straight Up or on the Rocks: A Cultural History of American Drink. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
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Lender, Mark Edward, and James Kirby Martin. Drinking inAmerica: A History. New York: Free Press; London: Macmillan, 1987.
Mariani, John F. The Dictionary of American Food and Drink. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1983.
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Mr. Boston Official Bartender's Guide. New York: Warner Books, 1988.
Paget, R. L. The Cocktail Book: A Sideboard Manual for Gentlemen. Boston: Page, 1913.
Paget, R. L. The Cocktail Book: A Sideboard Manual for Gentlemen. Repeal edition. Boston: Page, 1933.
Quinzio, Jeri. "In Favor of Flavor." The Massachusetts BeveragePrice Journal (August 1995): 4–8.
Quinzio, Jeri. "Toasting Vodka's Success." The MassachusettsBeverage Price Journal (August 1996): 7–8.
Thomas, Jerry. How to Mix Drinks, or The Bon-Vivant's Companion. New York: Dick and Fitzgerald, 1862.
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Wilson, C. Anne. Food and Drink in Britain: From the Stone Age to the Nineteenth Century. Chicago, Ill.: Academy Chicago, 1991.
—Jeri Quinzio
