I’ve spent some timely lately digging through the 1930 NYC Dining Guide, an invaluable document for illuminating a time period whose dining mores are now pretty hard to envision, far removed as they are from our current views of what constitutes gourmandizing. An especially archaic section is the one detailing drink recipes, which hearkens back to the rosy days of the cocktail party era, when home bars were routinely well stocked enough to support the construction of everyone’s pet cocktails. Beyond this, the very concept of a dining guide with a drinks section (labeled “What to do Until the Taxi Comes”), serves as an important reminder of Prohibition-era restrictions. While media depicting this time period is rightly obsessed with detailing the cavalier party atmosphere of speakeasies, I imagine there was also a large segment of the populace that felt marginally or less than comfortable with flouting the law, and didn’t routinely frequent these subterranean dens of iniquity. Intended perhaps for this homebody set, the primary purpose of these concoctions is clearly to get readers loaded enough to be able to enjoy a dinner without further need of alcoholic sustenance, aside from a few clandestine nips from a hip flask perhaps. Browsing through this section, it’s clear that while some potions from this period have endured (classics like the Martini, the Sidecar, the Sour and the Old-Fashioned), most have not (trying asking your local barkeep for a Bide-a-Wee (Port Wine and Rye), a South American (gin, curaçao and bitters) or a Pink ‘Un (Bacardi, grenadine and absinthe). Pre-gaming before a party (albeit one that would include its fair share of legal alcohol) I whipped up a batch of sampler cocktails for some friends, although the fading sunlight and my apartment’s general inhospitably to photography made most of these pictures too hideous for public display. This means that, despite the shot at the top of this post (of the inimitable Orchid Verdi, surprisingly the finest of these drinks), we’ll have to get by on description. The aforementioned Orchid is an unlikely mixture of crème de menthe and grape juice, which despite its seeming strangeness turns the liquid an alluring color and actually tastes surprising great. Less inspiring was The Texan, which involved a mixture of gin, whipped egg whites, lemon juice and powered sugar that mostly turned into a big muddle. The Shock Absorber continued the egg white theme—a popular one in the general canon of bygone cocktails—tossing in rye and coffee over ice for good measure. This one was better, but still a bit drab. The Sonny Boy, perhaps the best named of the bunch, mixed gin, Cointreau and “Italian” and “French” vermouth (apparently a somewhat outmoded designation for Sweet and Dry versions). Drinkable, but not quite unusual to satisfy a crowd now used to quaffing bizarre old-fashioned blends. Last of all was the Bunny Hug, which seems to play off period slang “bunny,” for a hopelessly lost person, since consuming a few of these is likely to render you insensate. The drink involves one third gin, one third scotch and one-third absinthe, “after which, nothing matters,” the book claims. All in all these weren’t as successful as I might have hoped, although they did provide a good occasion for exercising a home bar long overloaded with seemingly useless mixers.
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