Free Imbibe! by David Wondrich

Porter glasses. There should also be a great variety of Fancy Glassware, to be used in decorating the shelves behind the counter.
     
    This list is actually fairly conservative: it omits the so-called small bar-glass, glosses over the knotty issue of the absinthe glass (there were two kinds available, each adapted to a different way of serving the verdant elixir; a first-class bar would have both), and skimps on the small goods required for the various cordials and Pousse-Cafés in style at the time. Of course, only a few bars would carry such a freight of glass. If, on the one hand (as the New York Tribune opined in 1908), “the array of gleaming, highly-polished glassware displayed and used in the hotels and cafés in Manhattan is unexcelled anywhere in the world,” it’s equally true that there were plenty of joints on that very same island that had no problem making do with beer mugs and whiskey glasses and would treat the order of a Pousse-Café as an invitation to physical violence. 3
    It wasn’t just the tools that changed; the spirits did, too. With a savage yank from a pesky insect known as phylloxera, brandy was dragged out of the spotlight, which it had so long occupied as the premiere mixing and sipping spirit, to be replaced by American whiskey in the mixing glass and Scotch whisky in the clubroom. At the same time, dry gin drove out the lightly sweet styles that had previously prevailed, just as the dry Bacardi rum from Cuba chased out the heavier rums from St. Croix and Jamaica. Imported liqueurs multiplied behind the bar, and even such exotica as Russian vodka began popping up in the occasional mixture (mezcal and tequila, however, although drunk in some quantity in the Southwest, don’t appear to have cracked the mixologist’s armamentarium until the 1920s). Even the mixers changed: vermouth, known (if not savored) in the United States since the 1830s, suddenly appeared in a dizzying variety of Cocktails, mixed with every spirit known to commerce. The definition of a Cocktail stretched to include ingredients like lemon juice, orange juice, pineapple juice, and the faddish and pink-making grenadine. By 1920, just about every technique and major ingredient known to modern mixology was in play (okay, there wasn’t a lot of flavored vodka, but they made up for it by selling artificial sour mix and cellulose cocktail cherries). Only now, with the introduction of so-called molecular mixology, with its foams, gels, infusions and vapors, are we beginning to break new ground. But that’s (thankfully) beyond the scope of this book.

II. HOW TO DO IT NOW
    As you’ve no doubt gathered by this point, accurately reproducing pre-Prohibition drinks is a tricky business. It only gets worse when you start digging into the actual recipes, which are far more inconsistent than my thumbnail history of mixology suggests. Even when everyone else is shaking their drinks, you can always find some crossgrained son of toil who will grumble that they’re all doing it wrong and you really have to stir it. Bartenders are an individualistic lot, and always have been.
    Happily, reproducing these drinks deliciously isn’t nearly so hard, and while bull’s-eye accuracy is elusive, you can at least get the vast majority of ’em into the black, and often enough a good deal closer than that. What follows are some general suggestions and observations for making them work as smoothly and easily as possible; I’ll discuss exceptions and other specifics under the individual drinks.
     
    BAR GEAR
     
    Let’s begin with the basic tools and how to use them. You can haunt eBay for Julep strainers and old-style barspoons and such if you’re so inclined, but they’re certainly not necessary for making the drinks in this book come out well. One of the defining characteristics of American mixology is its inherent resistance to change, and the modern bartender’s kit isn’t all that different from what his predecessor would have been using a