How Prohibition Made the Modern Cocktail: From the Striped Pig to Jerry Thomas

This week my bear Barnaby ate a lemon of mine. It had cost me eleven cents at a Concord grocer's, and he spat the seeds out the window at me. The lemon is the hero of this piece. The villain is every dry-lipped legislature that ever tried to take a man's glass away. My sermon is a simple one: bad liquor makes for big mixers. When the law takes the glass, a man does not quit drinking. He gets clever. He hides the rotgut under sugar, lemon, bitters and ice, and he calls the result a fashion.

A Stimulating Liquor and a Horse With Ginger

Begin with the word. In May of 1806 a newspaper in Hudson, New York, The Balance and Columbian Repository, printed the first proper definition I know of. A reader asked what the devil a cock-tail was. The editor answered that it was a stimulating liquor made of spirits of any kind, sugar, water and bitters, and that it was fine for electioneering, because it emboldened the heart and stupefied the head. Sixty years on, that is still the best description of a Merrimack County voter I have heard.

As for the name, ask ten tavern-keepers and you will get eleven lies. I favour the filthiest. Horse-traders called a horse with a docked tail that stood up a cock-tail. A crooked dealer could make a tired nag look lively by figging it, which meant putting a peeled knob of ginger where the sun never shines on a horse. The beast cocked its tail like a regimental flag and fetched ten dollars more than it was worth. So the drink that perks a man up may be named for a horse with ginger in its arse. I have dined in Concord among guests who had plainly been prepared the same way.

The Striped Pig and the Town Agent

In 1838 Massachusetts passed the Fifteen Gallon Law, which forbade selling spirits in any amount less than fifteen gallons. The rich man filled his cellar, and the labouring man who wanted one honest glass on his way home from the mill was shut out. A dry law is a dentist who pulls the healthy tooth, leaves the rotten one, and sends a bill for the improvement.

The Yankee answer came at a militia muster in Dedham. A sharp fellow pitched a tent where, for a small fee, you could view a remarkable striped pig. It was a pig with stripes painted on it. On your way out he handed you a glass of spirits, free and gratis, because the law did not forbid giving it away. No man in Dedham could tell you what colour the pig was. The law was thrown out in 1840, and the striped pig has been the byword for every dodge since.

Then came Maine. In 1851 Neal Dow of Portland, a tanner with a face like a pickled beet, got the first statewide prohibition law passed, and half the North copied it. A dry law needs a back door, so each town could appoint an agent to sell spirits for medicinal and mechanical purposes only. Under such a law a man's health fails in direct proportion to how near he lives to the agent. In June of 1855 word got round that Dow had bought sixteen hundred dollars' worth of liquor for the city agency and kept it in his own name. A crowd came to see the temperance man's private stock. Dow called out the militia and ordered them to fire, and a man named John Robbins was killed in the street. That was the Portland Rum Riot. Dow bought the liquor, guarded the liquor and shot a man over the liquor, and I never heard of such devotion to a barrel outside my own still-house.

Worse Liquor, Cleverer Drinkers

Make good liquor a crime and good liquor goes away. The honest cider-brandy man is in jail or gone to Ohio, and in his place stands the rectifier. He buys raw high-wine by the barrel and doctors it, with burnt sugar so it looks aged and pepper or worse so it bites like whiskey, and he sells it as Old Monongahela. A man who drinks that straight is either brave or out of matches.

So the drinker drowns it. He adds sugar for the harshness, lemon for the stink, nutmeg for the deception and bitters for the conscience. Hostetter's Stomach Bitters, Drake's Plantation Bitters and a hundred more are sold in dry towns as medicine and are nearly as stout as whiskey. Bitters are medicine the way Barnaby is a lapdog. Then comes ice. Mr. Frederic Tudor of Boston, the Ice King, was called a lunatic for shipping New England pond ice, and he sent it as far as Calcutta. Thanks to him any city hotel in this Republic will shave ice for your drink, which Europe still thinks is next to sorcery. Mr. Dickens's Englishman in Martin Chuzzlewit nearly faints with joy over a sherry cobbler.

In 1862 Mr. Jerry Thomas of New York printed How to Mix Drinks, or The Bon-Vivant's Companion, which as far as I know is the first bar book printed in this country. Here is his Brandy Cocktail as near as I recall it. Take three or four dashes of gum syrup, two dashes of bitters, a wineglass of brandy and a dash or two of curacao. Fill the glass a third full of fine ice, stir it, strain it, and twist a piece of lemon peel over the top. That is the Hudson editor's sugar, bitters, spirits and water, with Tudor's ice and French orange liquor added.

A Temperance Spotter Meets Barnaby

Last fall a gentleman came up the Turnpike from Concord in a yellow peddler's wagon, calling himself a dealer in Peruvian Lemon Elixir. He was a temperance spotter come to buy a cocktail and swear to it before the justice. I took a page from Dedham. For a quarter he could view a remarkable black bear and receive a cup of complimentary tooth-rinse. I stamped his quarter G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. while he watched.

His elixir was mostly sugar syrup and lemon oil, and the jug had leaked all down his coat and through the seat of his pantaloons. Then the fool crept round to the still-house window to spy on my copper, and that window is where Barnaby lives. Barnaby took the coattails first, and the buttons popped like Fourth of July firecrackers. Next he took the pantaloons, drawers and one garter all together, and he licked the syrup off the man's white hindquarters. When he got to the bottom of the syrup he took a little nip to see if there was more, which left a pink patch the size of a saucer. The spotter ran a quarter mile down Route 28 past a Sunday-school picnic, wearing nothing below the waistcoat but his convictions. I stitched the bite with horsehair and charged him fifty cents.

Copper That Serves the Drink

Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister of the Fort Wilkins foundry knows the metal of the drinking trade. A barman at the Eagle Hotel in Concord tried Mr. Thomas's Blue Blazer, which is whiskey and boiling water set afire and poured flaming from mug to mug. He used cheap tinned-iron mugs. The tinning scorched, the lead-soldered seam opened, and the fire lit his side-whiskers. Silas raised him a pair of mugs from heavy copper, hammered seamless and lined with silver. He rolled the lips thick so no flame could creep over them and riveted on ash handles, with no solder near the fire.

When Silas was a boy, a militia company stood lemon punch overnight in an unlined copper wash-kettle, though his father warned them twice. By morning the punch was green, and half the company held the privy for a day and a night. In Silas's words: "Bare copper is a fine thing in a still where there's vapor. It is a poor thing for lemon to sit in." Anything sour must be lined with tin or silver. Under the dry law Silas also made a Barnstead deacon a hollow copper cane, painted black and holding near a pint. One Sunday it sloshed on the meeting-house steps, and the minister stopped in the middle of his prayer.

The Cocktail Is a Cover for a Bad Cut

Now to your own apparatus. A cocktail is a cover-up for a bad cut. Make your cuts honest and you can drink your spirit plain. I set the old method down here as history. Rye and corn are starch, and yeast cannot eat starch, so you add malted barley, about four parts cracked rye to one of malt. Hold the mash near a hundred and fifty degrees for an hour or more and keep stirring. Cool it to blood-warm, pitch the yeast and let it work for several days. Strip the wash once, fast, to get your low wines. Then run them again, slow and gentle, and make your cuts.

Throw out the foreshots every time, about the first half-gill for every five gallons of wash, and more if you are generous. The heads smell of the varnish shop. They carry wood spirit, which blinds a man and then kills him, and it smears into the run, so do not be greedy. Keep the hearts, which are clean, sweet and smell of the grain. The tails go oily and smell of wet dog, and that is the fusel oil. Set the tails aside for the next run. Fruit makes more wood spirit than grain, because the pectin breaks down into methanol, so the applejack man must cut his heads more cautiously. Bright copper does its sulfur work in the head, neck and worm. Never seal a still tight. Keep the condenser water cold for the whole run, never leave a running still near open flame, and use no lead anywhere.

Ash, Oak and Other Swamp Medicine

The blue flame proves nothing, for wood spirit burns pale blue as well. Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, asks whether hickory ash or red oak shavings in the thump keg will clean out bad heads. Ash is potash, a strong alkali. It makes the low wines slippery and bitter, and the wood spirit still comes off as before. Oak shavings will turn spirit the colour of tea within a day. That is not cleaning. It is costume. Old Hosea Pettengill sold two-day-old spirit as ten years old, which it was if you counted the age of the tree.

Every dry law in this Republic has made the liquor worse and the drinker cleverer. A man who makes his spirit right does not need to hide it under a lemon. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest and your fire low.