1946 cocktails

One of my Christmas presents was a 1946 edition (sixth printing) of Mr. Boston's DeLuxe Official Bartender's Guide. Oh what fun! The cocktail has greatly improved along with the tastes of most Americans. Most of the drinks in the book are way too sweet.

Of course we have to understand that a lot of these cocktails came about during Prohibition, and the booze was of questionable quality. To mask this, plenty of additives were needed. For instance, the martini was once a very heavily vermouthed creation, which makes sense when you consider the quality of bathtub gin. I imagine that I might even enjoy a vodkatini if it were doctored up with vermouth and bitters, as this book suggests doing to the noble gin.

The other reason that these drinks were so sticky is that they were being served with food that borders on the bizarre. The section on snacks is a veritable catalog of what Lileks calls "regrettable food." Of all of the recipes, only a couple look remotely edible. What is really amazing is how labor intensive all of this junk was, mostly due to overly fussy presentation. I suppose if I had to eat and pretend to enjoy these things, a few sloe gin fizzes would have been essential.

I have always been puzzled over the disdain that European cookbooks have for pre-dinner cocktails, since I have never found the pre-prandial martini to be a sufficient impairment to tasting the dish, but looking at what folks were drinking back then, I understand. Americans were novice drinkers for the most part, often indulging in grotesque excesses of syrupy booze.

I cannot imagine any chef complaining about diners drinking one or two well-prepared modern cocktails (and knowing the chefs that I do, the idea of them complaining at all about alcohol consumption is really pretty funny).

Speaking of overindulgence in liquor, I continue to be baffled by New Year's Eve. Watching folks stagger (or worse) around North Beach is incomprehensible. They really don't seem to be enjoying themselves, rather they drink to the loss of reason as some sort of obligation, although to what I will never know. After dinner, I went with Amalia's godfather and one of the priests who was concelebrating to Mass at the National Shrine of St. Francis of Assisi. After Mass we had espresso and a couple of hours of pleasant conversation. Unfortunately mass ended at midnight with the blessing of the city with the relic of St. Francis, and a couple of hours meant that I was walking to BART at the same time that the bars were letting out. It seemed like one of those moralizing etchings of a parade of fools. Do the Mormons encourage this sort of thing so they can paint all consumption of liquor with the same brush?

If my own experience with booze was this, I would probably join the Temperance Movement too.

Anyway, Mass was beatiful as usual, but walking through the flood of drunks in the rain made me envy Melanie and Amalia (who were too tired after dinner to join us at Mass). When I got home they were sound asleep in the warm house, while I was cold, wet and baffled by the behavior of presumably otherwise intelligent folks.

I was also a bit miffed by the rain, as part of my New Year's Eve tradition is sprinting up Telegraph hill after the blessing to watch the fireworks. I was discouraged by the weather and was thus deprived of my annual exercise. I guess I could have made the run after Mass on Sunday, but it is a painful sprint up a steep hill and without fireworks, it just seems futile (I only believe in running for very good reason). I suppose I will have to go swimming or something to make up for it this year. Or perhaps carrying Amalia around (at 33 pounds) is doing the trick.