To go along with Movie Nights, I have another new excuse to drag my associates to the northern climes of Inwood. Several months ago there was an article in the New York Times Magazine about a man who might be called a cocktail archeologist, who likes to make cocktails that were commonly consumed in decades past, going back to about the Civil War era, when I think you could say the modern cocktail came to prominence. As a necessary part of this job he also collects old booze bottles, because many of the ingredients for these cocktails are not common anymore. This might come as a surprise to my friends, among whom I am known for how unenthusiastically I submit to drinking and going to bars, but in describing some of the drinks he likes, such as the "Corpse Reviver" and "Milk Punch," the article made them sound utterly delicious and I really wanted to try some of them. The article also mentioned that he catalogued the recipes of these cocktails on a website called cocktaildb.com. I promptly forgot about it, and 5 months later I was on the case.
CocktailDB is pretty cool and you can find the recipes for the two drinks I mentioned there and many more. As a database it's a lot more prescriptivist than the multitude of other cocktail sites like webtender.com; you won't find 5 different recipes for the Mudslide. In fact you won't find any at all. I realized pretty quickly when digging into the work of Ted Haigh, a.k.a. Dr. Cocktail, that as in just about any field, the cocktail connoisseurs don't so much go for the newfangled stuff, in this case drinks that will get you drunk by having as much alcohol content as possible, but at the same time disguise its taste so that the drink is still palatable. So the move from drinks based on juniper-flavored Gin to almost flavorless Vodka is not well thought of. Overly sweet drinks are also the subject of much indignation. Anyway, the problem with CocktailDB is that it doesn't tell you anything about the history of the drinks. There's no way to tell the truly olde-fashioned drinks from the "Old Fashioned" itself. This was much of my interest in the subject. I found out to get the full story I'd have to buy this book, in which Dr. Cocktail discusses 80 drinks that have pretty much died out, and that he thinks really deserve to come back the way the Mojito has.
I'm generally loathe to pay for content that has been intentionally withheld from the internet by an internet guy, but in this case I made an exception. I wasn't disappointed; the book has what I was looking for, a lot of interesting information on both cocktails and ingredients. There are some drinks about which it doesn't say much, and some cases in which Haigh has altered the traditional recipe to suit his tastes, but overall it's pretty damn cool. I made up my mind to gather the necessary ingredients for about 10 of the drinks in the book, try them out and tweak my choices based on a desire for a good variety, and then have a gathering at which anyone can "order" from my "menu" of drinks. I figure as with some of my other endeavors that even knowing next to nothing about mixology, I should be able to follow the recipes carefully and produce a tasty result.
Thus commenced a period of going to liquor stores a lot and making a lot of odd selections that prompted confused looks from the cashiers as they examined dusty bottles I had found somewhere in the back. Again, it might surprise those who know me as someone who goes to great lengths to avoid paying full retail price for a can or 20oz bottle of Coke, that I would spend as much as $30 on bottles of booze just to be able to make one drink that I've never even tried before. But I was already going against my nature in so many ways for this project, one more time couldn't do much harm. The local store, PJ Liquor Warehouse, had a pretty impressive amount of the stuff I needed, but I had to make one special trip to Sherry Lehman on the East Side, where I got Applejack, Parfait Amour, and Maraschino Liqueur. At present I've obtained about 16 bottles, apart from the basic stuff, for a repertoire of 8 cocktails, with a couple more awaiting some hard-to-find ingredients. I've tried 5 of them and made one other for a friend, who despite being a martini drinker, shared my impression that these drinks tend to be shockingly strong, but enjoyable nonetheless for the complex flavors.
This turned out to be a fortuitous time for this project. Mr. Haigh is pretty serious about trying to revive these drinks, and it may actually happen. A bar just opened on Houston Street called the Pegu Club, named for one of the drinks in the book, which itself was named for a British Officer's club in Rangoon circa 1920s, where it was invented. The bar serves its namesake and many other forgotten cocktails like the Corpse Reviver and the Aviation, and more familiar fare. Here is an eGullet thread about the bar, in which the owner/manager/head bartender Audrey Saunders responds quickly to a post commenting mildly about some bad vibes from a server by asking for details and saying she would address it with the staff immediately. I haven't yet gone to the bar to try these drinks as made by the experts and see how mine compare, and at $12 a cocktail it's not for the faint of wallet, though I'm told that's a bargain for the quality one gets.
For those interested in the subject, I'd highly recommend checking out the Drinkboy Message Boards and the Fine Spirits and Cocktails section of the eGullet Forums. Several of the biggest names in the field, including Dr. Cocktail, post at each.
