To the usual lemon, water and sugar, Thomas added pieces of orange, raspberry or strawberry syrup, crushed ice, ample fruit garnishes and a dash of Port. Jerry Thomas’ recipe for plain lemonade, for example, does not skimp on creativity. Much like the non-alcoholic drinks of today, these formulas could get quite intricate. San Francisco bartender William Boothby’s 1891 book The World’s Drinks and How to Mix Them contained no fewer than 16 recipes for lemonade-though there were a few spiked ones among them. Nearly every cocktail book printed up until Prohibition’s arrival included a formula not just for basic lemonade, but also for orgeat lemonade, orangeade, limeade, ginger lemonade and egg lemonade (made with a whole egg think of it as a lemonade flip). Indeed, lemonade and its many variants appear to have been king of temperance drinks. The Knoxville report noted the presence of “lots of lemonades” in local bars. “As long as there have been cocktails, there have been mocktails. Moreover, temperance drinks seem to have been favored in the summer for their lighter qualities.) Have we not ginger ‘pop,’ ginger ale, Persian sherbet, milk, lemonade, saloop, coffee, chocolate, cocoa, toast-and-water, Spanish licorice water, molasses-and-water, and thin oatmeal gruel.” (Who, exactly, was ordering non-alcoholic drinks at bars is hard to say, but there are accounts of teetotaling men in the 1800s compelled to conduct business in bars. (Bartender and author Harry Johnson later called the latter “an excellent morning drink to regulate the bowels.”)Īcross the ocean, a writer at the Courier and Argus in Dundee, Scotland, was so overwhelmed by the vast selection that when confronted with a request from a temperance association for a new non-alcoholic drink, the reporter wailed in an article printed on April 7, 1884, “What! Are there not temperance drinks, as it is?. The 15-recipe chapter begins with a fruit-studded lemonade and ends with ginger wine, and, along the way, elucidates unusual numbers like the Drink for Dog Days, in which a bottle of soda water is poured over lemon ice, and the Soda Nectar, comprising lemon, water and sugar finished with a small amount of carbonate of soda, which caused it to foam up. Page through Jerry Thomas’ seminal 1862 volume, The Bar-Tender’s Guide, and you will eventually land on a short section by this name devoted to booze-less refreshments. “Temperance drinks” was the original nomenclature. Of course, nobody called them that in the 1800s (though the term “mocktail,” like “mixologist,” is much older than you might think, dating to 1916, according to Merriam-Webster). As long as there have been cocktails, there have been mocktails. With all the recent chatter about non-alcoholic cocktails-the breathless articles on the subject, the countless bar menu addenda, the raft of new spiritless spirits flooding the market and the attendant booze-free bottle shops-you’d think the idea was a novel one, a eureka notion that has gripped the bar world for only the first time.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |