How is it that mixing drinks became the primary province of those who identify as male? It’s not unlike barbecuing. Take the men who are the sort to shirk all kitchen duties and push them out the back door. Once outside, they are transformed into grill masters, the ultimate authorities on the preparation of burgers, dogs, steaks, kebabs, and whatnot.
The same thing happens at the home bar, for the most part. Men who would be baffled by the most basic of culinary recipes become somehow master mixers once they’ve got their hands on the cocktail cart. This is an attitude encouraged by well over a century of cocktail books, which tend to be written with men in mind. Why is there such irredentist sexism in the library of drink?
In part, I think it is because bartender’s guides of the 1800s were, by and large, publications serving the professional, and in those days, the professional behind the mahogany was almost sure to be a man. And so the cocktail books of the day, and most of those to come for the better part of a century, have been made with males in mind.
Women of course knew how to make drinks. It’s just that the information, if not exactly hidden, was left under mufti wrapper. No one could object to the little woman working up delicacies in her kitchen from recipes provided in the family cookbook. Take Mary F. Henderson’s 1883 book Practical Cooking and Dinner Giving. The subtitle: “A treatise containing practical instructions in cooking, in the combination and serving of dishes; and in the fashionable modes of entertaining at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.” Well, the fashionable modes of entertaining included cocktails. And so, discretely placed in the back of the book, behind the sections on “How to Serve Fruits” and “Food for Infants with Weak Digestive Organs” is the blandly headlined “Beverages.” There are recipes for punch, for Tom and Jerry, for mint juleps, Roman punch, and more.
Come Prohibition, cocktail books proliferated to aid those who, not eager to get caught up in a raid, turned to making drinks at home. Several of these guides were written for women, such as Virginia Elliott’s Quiet Drinking and Alma Whitaker’s Bacchus Behave! The Lost Art of Polite Drinking. As the titles suggest, the books for the ladies placed an emphasis on decorum.
Books with men in mind were quite the opposite — decorum be damned. A classic of the idiom is Ted Saucier’s 1951 Bottoms Up, a book with a double entendre title suggesting that tossing back enough cocktails will lead fetching young women to adopt pinup poses. Just what such poses are is on display throughout the book, as it promises “illustrations by eleven of America’s most distinguished artists.” More accurately, the illustrations were by eleven of America’s most distinguished artists willing to draw naughty pictures of young women who seem to have misplaced their blouses.
To say that the artists contributing to Bottoms Up are distinguished is not entirely a stretch, if by artist one means illustrator. One will look in vain for nudie drawings by Rothko or Pollock, but you will find works by the likes of John Falter, who was better known for wholesome Saturday Evening Post cover paintings. This can lead to a certain aesthetic dissonance. The first plate in the book features a hastily drawn dishabille damsel quaffing a cocktail. And of all things, she was drawn by James Montgomery Flagg, the artist most famous for his World War I recruiting poster featuring Uncle Sam, stern of visage and pointy of finger, with the slogan “I Want You!”
As comic as the Hefnerian style may be, there is a cocktail manual and cookbook that more perfectly captures the approach of men to mixing drinks: Wolf in Chef’s Clothing, a guide for making food and drink that assumes men are too stupid to read a recipe. Instead, the recipes are all drawn out for the oafs. Even something as simple as scotch on the rocks gets the treatment: A bottle with the word “scotch” is drawn pouring liquid into a glass with ice cubes.
If that’s the kind of instruction one needs behind the bar, best not to dull one’s thinking with drink.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
