A carnival of technology

Back in 1786, some dude in Turin, a helper in a liquor store, decided that it’d be a good idea to take some perfectly good wine, moscato in his case, and add some wormwood and sugar and herbs and who knows what else. Vermouth was born. In 1813, Joseph Noilly set out to recreate at home the process that gave wines shipped by sea a fuller body and amber color, and thus dry, or French, vermouth was born. Oddly enough Joseph Noilly’s brand, Noilly Prat, and the most famous remaining Torino vermouth, Martini & Rossi, are today owned by the same company. Another oddity is that people today seem terrified of vermouth.

Perhaps there’s been a shift in our collective taste away from the bitter. I admit that I might share in this. One of the first cocktails I tried with an appreciable amount of vermouth was the first alphabetically on the IBA website, the Americano. Formerly the Milano-Torino, named for the origins of its sweet vermouth (Cinzano in the case of the original) and Campari bitters, Gaspare Campari renamed the drink to “Americano” because apparently early 20th century Americans dug it. I found the Americano to be a bit of a challenge. I used Martini & Rossi rather Cinzano, but I don’t think that would have made a difference. Campari is intensely, unabashedly bitter. It was interesting, and I can see how such a drink would serve well as a slow, careful apéritif, but I have a hard time believing that my brothers and sisters in corn whiskey and apple pie would have ordered more than one. Early 20th century tourists in Milan were probably crazy rich, though, so maybe it’s just that rich people like things that taste bad. I eventually came to terms with Campari and found that a splash of it in a glass of orange juice wasn’t so bad, but what really surprised me about this experience was that I was ok with the vermouth on its own. I view it kind of like gin with a base of wine instead of grain alcohol. It’s not something that I’d drink on its own, but it adds an interesting, and sometimes even sweet, flavor to cocktails.

Vermouth was used in a lot of pre-prohibition cocktails, most notably the Martini—gin and vermouth—and the Manhattan—rye, vermouth and bitters. Vermouth has been demonized in more recent years, with Churchill perhaps being the most famous opponent. Apocryphal quotes tell of him creating martinis consisting of a glass of gin and a wave of the glass over a bottle of vermouth, or even just a nod to a bottle of vermouth across the room or a wave in the general direction of France. That’s not a martini; it’s a glass of cold gin, and it didn’t make Churchill a cocktail hero; it just made him a drunk. Whether Churchill’s alleged martini recipes were true or not is unimportant; the modern martini mistakes “dry” to mean an absence of vermouth rather than the presence of dry vermouth, with perhaps the worst manifestation being just a cold glass of vodka, tasting like nothing in particular. The martini has become more of a glass used to serve fruity concoctions than a drink, and I think we need a return to vermouth. A dry martini used to be something full of flavors, a menagerie of herbs and botanicals in both the gin and the vermouth, a classy sipping drink rather than just a delivery system for tasteless alcohol.

With the manhattan vermouth is at least remembered, but there have been a couple of interesting changes over the course of history. The Old Waldorf-Astoria Bar Book describes a manhattan as follows:

• Dash of Orange Bitters
• One-half Italian Vermouth
• One-half Rye Whiskey (Stir)
• Serve with Maraschino Cherry

“Italian Vermouth” is sweet, red vermouth, which is still available today, and the current idea of the Maraschino cherries might not be the same as it was in 1900, but it’s just a garnish and doesn’t add much flavor, so that doesn’t matter. As for the other two ingredients, rye whiskey was badly hurt by Prohibition, almost disappearing in favor of bourbon. Bourbon or Canadian whiskey usually serves as the base of the drink nowadays. The orange bitters are also hard to find, and Angostura bitters are usually used instead.

According to Bob Skilink’s Beer & Food: An American History, American beer has had a history of sucking really bad. The colonists didn’t have access to good malts, and once the engines of agriculture and production advanced to the point that the drinks became palatable, the Volstead act shut everything down. The rise of microbrews, both by making their own beers and shaming larger breweries into creating better products, have since put us at the point where it’s easy to find an American beer able to stand up next to its German, English or Belgian cousins, but I don’t believe time has been as kind to the cocktail. America has always been pretty good at making a good distilled libation. While England was trying to figure out how to turn unaged spirits into cheap gin, America was perfecting ways to age liquor made from that ubiquitous New World grain, maize, and drinking the finest rum of the Caribbean. Pre-prohibition cocktails, an American invention, sought to create drinks that complemented rather than covered the tastes of their base liquors. Sure, the goal of some of the forgotten recipes was to disguise the taste of bathtub gin, but pre-prohibition American inventions like the old fashioned, the manhattan and the martini attempted to use the tastes of their spirits as an ingredient rather than an alcohol delivery system to be hidden. Basically what I’m saying is that the drunks at the turn of the 20th century had some class, and we’d do well to relearn their lessons.

Rye is easy enough to obtain for a manhattan. There are several companies that still produce rye whiskey. My favorite among the ones that I’ve tried is Old Overholt, now a subsidiary of Jim Beam but otherwise a company that claims a (non-contiguous, at least officially) history of over 150 years beginning in 1810. Michael Jackson (the drinker, not the singer) gave it a good score though wished it was brave enough to be more of a rye. Weighing in at a respectable 23 Bodines it makes an appropriate mixer. Orange bitters, on the other hand, have joined my list of things I’d like to obtain to make old-timey cocktails.

Said list is more or less now the following:

Orange bitters. This is basically a blend of orange peel and herbs, and there are still some made though I’ve never seen it in stores. Drinkboy has a recipe along with some links to manufacturers, though the one he recommends has prices in Euros which, thank to bad home loans or some crap like that, means expensive for me. Maybe I’ll buy some with that $25 Mastercard owes me for scamming me on currency conversion if I ever see it.

Peychaud bitters. This one shows up a lot in New Orleans cocktails. It’s still made, but I’ve never seen them, so it’s probably going to have to be another Internet order.

Gomme syrup. I’ve written about this before, and my conclusion was basically that I just need to buy some gum arabic and make my own, which doesn’t seem terribly difficult. I’ve not yet done this. I haven’t seen gomme syrup appear as much in the Waldorf-Astoria manual as the supposedly modern IBA recipes, but I would like to try it in a daiquiri, perhaps once the weather warms up again.

Old Tom gin. This is sort of a weird one. Supposedly in 16th century England there were some bars ahead of their time that had an early idea of a vending machine. On their outside walls they would install a pipe marked by a black cat, “Old Tom,” and thirsty travelers could drop a penny into a slot, hold their mouth under a pipe and, once the bartender noticed the rattling coin, receive a mouthful of a sweetened gin. Some theories hold that the sugar was there to cover up a really bad taste in the gin, but it still shows up in some recipes, most notably the Tom Collins, even though good gin should have been readily available by then. Internet says that there are a few Old Tom makers remaining, though how close their products are to what people drank on London street corners is unclear, and I’ve never seen any in Georgia. I’m not sure what to do here or if I should even care.

Sloe gin. This isn’t really a gin, but more of a brandy made from sloe plums. I haven’t really looked very hard for it, so it might be available in the store down the road for all I know.

Absinthe. This I have mixed feelings about. It’s unavailable because it’s illegal, and, as the favorite of several famous artists and writers, it has a lot of legend attached to it. I’m skeptical of the claims that the wormwood produces hallucinations; the descriptions of the experiences tend to land somewhere between those found with regular alcohol consumption or delirium tremens, and supposedly there wasn’t that much wormwood in the old stuff to begin with. There are a few ways to get around the laws, either by buying from shady European producers willing to ignore US postal regulations or from a few American distillers that have found ways to supposedly make authentic product while following the very edge of the law, but absinthe seems to appeal and be marketed more to people looking to recreate the depression of Poe than people looking for old-timey booze. I have had absinthe once that was imported, probably legally, by someone who had visited Hungary. I wasn’t impressed. I suspect that anisette would serve as a perfect equivalent in recipes, and, to be honest, I don’t like the taste of aniseed.

So that’s about where I stand with my booze experiments. The Christmas season suggests that I should try egg nog, but, though I don’t share the fear of raw eggs that seemed to come out of nowhere in the ’90s, I’m uneasy about mixing milk and liquor. I think I’ll stick with manhattans made with Angostura for now.