Duties of a Bartender (1884)

George Winter’s short book How to Mix Drinks: Bar Keepers’ Handbook was published in New York around 1884. It leans heavily on the work of the celebrated bartender, Jerry Thomas, who died just a year later in the same city. It was Winter, though, I thought of on a recent evening in Kansas City. After downing my first Boulevard (a local favorite) at a bar, I ordered a second. The bartender popped the cap off the second bottle and, while I was momentarily distracted in the business of shaking loose an ardent admirer, he poured the ale into the same glass. Hm. Tacky. Not send-it-back tacky — and I probably would not have cared in a dive — but it was an amateur’s mistake in a fairly swanky place.

Winter’s book came to mind for its ruminations on the duties of a bartender. “Under no circumstances,” he wrote, “should a stained or dripping glass be handed out to a customer or used in mixing a drink…” It's a maxim as true in 2014 as it was in the years before Wilhem II was crowned Emperor of Germany and king of Prussia.

Here’s the rest of Winter's

Duties of a Bartender

Probably in no other branch of business is the person in charge brought so constantly in contact with people of every class and disposition, as is the bartender, and he should therefore be an intelligent man and a good judge of human nature. He should be at all times polite and attentive to customers, and present a neat and cheerful appearance, having a pleasant look and word for each one who favors him with his custom.

It is the great aim of a successful bartender to make as many friends and to control as much trade as possible, and the surest way of doing this is to pay the closest attention to the wants of patrons and making such an impression upon the mind of the customer, through furnishing a good article of the liquor called for, as well as serving in such a gentlemanly and artistic manner, as that he will remember the place, call again himself and recommend it to his friends.

A bartender, like an actor, should never show that he is feeling unwell or in a bad humor, as it is calculated to make a bad impression on the patrons, who are to him what the public is to the actor. In short, he should sympathize with those who are not feeling well, appear jolly to those who are apparently light-hearted, and in general use good judgment in his conversation with all with whom he comes in contact while in the discharge of his duties.

With these few words on the general attributes of a good bartender, we will enter upon the details of his business. 

Glasses of all the various kinds should be arranged on the bench so that they will be handy when wanted. When a man steps up to the bar the bartender should at once present himself before him, and, producing a glass of ice water upon the counter, ask the customer in a polite and pleasant tone of voice what kind of liquor he wishes.

All mixed drinks should be made in full view of the purchaser, and such skill and dexterity should be used in handling the bottles, glasses, etc., as will gain the admiration of the customer and establish the bartender as an expert in his profession.

Under no circumstances should a stained or dripping glass be handed out to a customer or used in mixing a drink, and it is always advisable to have a number of glasses about two-thirds filled with water and ice on the bench ready for use at any time, but the customer should not be expected to pour out the water from a pitcher as is sometimes done.

My New Book: Drugstore Whiskey, Pharmacy Gin

You've heard of bathtub gin, sure. Everyone has. The stuff has become shorthand for the legendary horrors of Prohibition-era drinking. But what was it? No, for real: what was that stuff — and was it always a horror? Where did it come from? Where did it go?

A peek inside.
Kornschärfe: It schärfes the Korn.

Though it may seem as if the action has slowed around here, the truth is that behind the scenes at the Whiskey Forge has been hectic as I've been writing for various magazines, traveling, giving talks around the country, and getting elbow-deep in several book projects. This morning, I woke to a tweet from Bitters author Brad Thomas Parsons congratulating me on the announcements for one of those books.

Here's the deal: I have a contract with Countryman Press, a branch of W.W. Norton, for a new book tentatively called Drugstore Whiskey, Pharmacy Gin that will hit the shelves in 2015. Eater reports "Veteran booze writer and author Matthew Rowley is at it again, this time turning his attentions to the recipes of the Prohibition bootleggers." Publishers Marketplace gives a little more:

Author and historian Matthew Rowley (Moonshine!, 2007) continues his exploration of illicit alcohol and cocktail culture in Drugstore Whiskey, Pharmacy Gin: Making It and Faking It with 200 Secret Booze Recipes from the Height of Prohibition. Using high-resolution images from a secret 1920’s manuscript, Rowley examines the traditions, ingredients, and cultural context of Prohibition bootlegging with extensive annotations and over 200 recipes. Sold to Ann Treistman at Countryman Press by Lisa Ekus of The Lisa Ekus Group. Publication Fall 2015.

If you've come to any of my talks over the last six months or so, you already know a bit about this since I've been using some of the material when kicking around notions of Prohibition-era urban moonshine. Years ago, I was given a gift: a 1920's manuscript hidden within what looked like a book of poetry. It wasn't. Rather, the book held page after page of handwritten recipes — in English, German, and occasional Latin — for gins, genevers, absinthes, whiskeys, rums, brandies, and dozens of spirits and cordials, essences and extracts, all tied to New York City at the height of Prohibition. Some recipes are for genuine articles. Others hail from an earlier era, a time when traditional beverages relied on herbs and spices for their flavors. Still others depend on 19th century advances in applied chemistry simply to fake some spirits and "enhance" others.

It'll be cool. Even most bartenders hip to vintage drinks haven't seen anything quite like this.

Tabasco Sauce in the Applejack

All but the most degenerate boozers reach for some drinks before others. Nothing wrong with having our favorites, although the punctilious zealotry of the martini and mint julep crowds can get overbearing. Throw all the juices, syrups, tinctures, spices, and whatnot at the modern bartender's command into the equation and folks can get downright obsessive about what works in their cups and what doesn't. "Any guy who'd put rye in a mint julep and crush the leaves," wrote opinionated Kentucky bullshitter Irvin S. Cobb, "would put scorpions in a baby's bed." Exaggeration. Probably. Who knows? Cobb lied like it was his job. Because it was his job. But scorpions, though? Best to keep that old corn guzzler away from babies and not chance it.

Hot sauce is where I usually put on the brakes when it comes to cocktails. All things being equal, a dose of cayenne, chipotle, or tabasco peppers in the glass will generally make me pass. The heat's no problem. In fact, we bust out homemade hot sauces for weekend breakfasts and weeknight dinners often.  On a hot day, a round or three of micheladas hits the spot. When the temptation to mix chiles and liquor occasionally does strike, it's liable to take the guise of a Snapper, that vastly superior Bloody Mary cousin that replaces vodka with gin. We've used Cholula to good effect in a Caesar-type concoction titrated with the barest volume of absinthe. A sangrita with blanco tequila is not the worst option for daytime drinking. The common element? Tomato. Paired with and tempered by tomato, hot sauce might — just might — bring a drink together, but otherwise in most drinks the stuff is just gimmicky, an exercise in machismo, in how much heat one can handle. 

Or it's a prank. 

Back in Philadelphia, cheesemonger friends collected the oily drippings from fifty- and hundred-pound aging provolone cheeses in eight-ounce plastic tubs. After weeks or even months, they'd label the cloudy, yellowish — and pungent — accumulation Prank Juice. At some point, some jackass who needed taking down a peg was going to swallow that nightmare fluid. 

Hot sauce in so many drinks is kin to that South Philly prank juice. And the joke is old, old, old. From 1904 to 1908, cartoonist H.C. Greening penned a comic that featured Uncle George Washington Bings, Esquire, a literary descendant of cannonball-riding Baron Münchhausen and forefather of 1960's blowhard Commander McBragg. In the strips, Bings was a small-town braggart, forever telling tall tales about his exploits around the world. The Los Angeles Herald ran a six panel strip in 1905 which Bings belittles a fire-eater to villagers sitting around a bar's pot-bellied stove. "Why," he claims, "I could make that bluff look like a December frost." As he warms up to some choice braggadocio, the mischievous bartender dashes hot sauce in his applejack.

His reaction? Just about what you'd expect from anyone who'd been given a well-deserved dose of prank juice.

Too small? Click it!

Goes well with:

• Allan Holtz's thumbnail on Greening and Uncle George Washington Bings in Stripper's Guide.
• Clam Squeezin's, Absinthe, and the Bloody Fairy Cocktail — that Cholula thing I mentioned.
• Applejack in the church lemonade? Sure, why not?
• More apples. I wrote a piece on American apple spirits (including applejack, cider royal/cider oil, apple-based absinthe, and more) for Distiller magazine last Summer. Here it is.
• More properly meant for mixing with pulled and chopped pork, the North Carolina barbecue sauce we make around here is not much more than vinegar and ground chiles. Nevertheless, it's great on eggs, red beans, and even the occasional gumbo. You're on your own if you put it in drinks. Here's the complete recipe. 
• Historically, saloonkeepers and bootleggers might add hot chiles to alcohol to give the liquids a kick or bite and mask the taste of poorly made or adulterated beverages such as the swipes of 19th century Hawaii.

Hot Bagels (with Ham)

We enjoy a many excellent things here in Southern California. Our bagels, regrettably, are too soft, too airy, too...bland. They should be chewy, savory, just a little tacky to the tooth. When I stumbled across a digitized version of Hot Bagels this morning, I was reminded of everything I miss about well-made bagels from back East; making by hand, simmering in scalding water, and tearing into a hot, fresh one with my teeth. Really. You doesn't just daintily nip off the part you want; that part needs to be pulled apart with a strong bite and a firm grip. 

The bulk of the old 16mm film  from the Brooklyn Public Library shows bagels being made in Brooklyn.  In it, bagel — enthusiast is too tame a word. Obsessive? Yes, bagel obsessive Marty Rosenblatt can hardly contain his excitement to order a dozen. Ham isn't often found in bagel shops, but here Rosenblatt lays it on thick:

Hiya, Freddie baby, give me a dozen...my life's blood! Without bagels, what is a day? Yeah, make it a dozen assorted. Dat's it, give me the garlic, the sesame, the onion; give me them all baby, that's it! They're still handmade eh? Hot bagels! Wait a second, let me PAY yah! Here you are, kid. 

Goes well with:

• Everything Bagel from the Brooklyn Public Library.
• The BBQ Films of Joe York

Cider Week 2012

I don't go for bullshit holidays. Nobody in my house has time for No Socks Day, National High Five Day, or Absinthe Drip Day. That's not to say I always wear socks or would snub anyone who was kind enough to offer me an absinthe drip. It's just that devoting a whole day for made-up, marketing-driven advertising and awareness campaigns is, well, bullshit.

A whole week for cider, though? That's a different story.

Next month's Cider Week gets a preview at New York's Astor Center with Cider Salon tomorrow evening, September 18. The event — with over a dozen producers offering their hard ciders — is a benefit for Glynwood’s Apple Project and Cider Week NY. Details for the salon are here, but if one day is too short a notice, check out the rest of the schedule for October 12-21, 2012.

Goes well with:

• Where one finds hard cider, apple spirits can't be far away. America's current apple spirits scene is a lot more lively than applejack. From absinthe to cider royal, check out what today's distillers are doing with apples.
• It's not fermented, but boiled cider is a great old-fashioned syrup to have around. The recipe is: apple cider. Oh, and cooking. Here's how. 
• Once you've made a batch of boiled cider, slip it some rum and brandy for a tiki Halloween punch.

Bitters Tasting Table in the Meadow

As you build your cabinet of cocktail bitters — or, at any rate, put together a handful of stalwarts you want always to have on hand — keep in mind that any proper liquor store will carry common brands such as Angostura, Regan's No. 6 orange bitters, and possibly Peychaud's, that old New Orleans favorite essential to a Sazerac. Here and there, stores may also carry Fee Brothers bitters or tiny, single-shot, paper-wrapped bottles of Underberg, digestif bitters from Germany that are so good after a heavy meal (or a stein too may of beer). Truly well stocked stores with robust selections may offer modern bitters from Bittermens, Adam Elmegirab, Berg & Hauck, The Bitter End, and more.

These are the stores to patronize.

Go on; taste. And again. And again.

San Diego is not awash in an ocean of bitters, so I keep my cabinet stocked with commercial stuff through a combination of combing local stores and mail-order sources as well as doing lots of pre-travel research on which bartenders, bars, and bar supply houses to hit when I'm on the road. When I'm in Portland, Oregon or Manhattan, for instance, I make a point of dropping by The Meadow. Owned by Salted author Mark Bitterman, The Meadow offers fresh flowers, salts, chocolates, and bitters. When I was in the Manhattan store recently, my obsessions over the last two caused a shameful amount of money to flow from my pocket to Bitterman's register.

Most of the brands were familiar or even old hat to me, but the flood of new labels over the last five years has caused even bitters geeks to fall behind in the latest offerings, bottlings, iterations, and experimental batches. The Meadow's way around shoppers' potential unfamiliarity with brands is to offer a tasting table where one bottle of every bitters in stock is open. Drinkers who want to compare brands of celery, old fashioned, orange, or other bitters are welcome to do so.

The Meadow isn't the only place to offer tasting bottles, but it does have one of the largest range of bitters to smell and taste on site. In the Manhattan store, 50-60 open bitters bottles stood ready for walk-ins to sample. Local bartenders get a professional discount; visiting writers do not.

Now, if only there were a way to sample them through the mail...

Meanwhile, most of the stock is for sale online here.

The Meadow — New York 
523 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
212.645.4633

The Meadow — Portland 
3731 N. Mississippi Avenue
Portland, OR 97227
Tel: 503.288.4633

Toll free for both stores: 1.888.388.4633
http://www.atthemeadow.com

Goes well with:

• Bitter Disappointment from Japan, in which a much-anticipated package from San Francisco barman Neyah White arrives smelling so good. Wait...why does it smell at all?
• My take on Brad Thomson Parsons' 2011 book Bitters: A Spirited History of a Classic Cure-All, with Cocktails, Recipes, and Formulas. In a nutshell: good, but not as good as it might've been with better editing.
• Pink lemonade; you can buy pink powder in a canister...or you can empinken your drinkin' like a grownup with aromatic bitters. Also, check out "Cocktail" Bill Boothby's getting in his digs at temperance charlatans making vats of the stuff for circuses, fairs, and churches in another look at pink lemonade. He's as subtle as a whack upside the noggin with a loggerhead, but Boothby's insinuation that saloons were far better and safer places to drink than church fairs wasn't far off the mark — at least as far as some saloons and some churches were concerned.

Just Some Ice Cubes, My Good Man — White Whiskey at the '21' Club

Next week, I'll be in Northern California and, come July, be back in New Orleans for a talk on brandy with Paul Clarke at Tales of the Cocktail. But between NorCal and NOLA, there's New York City, where I haven't stepped foot in years. Of course, there won't be time to do even a quarter of what I'd like, but that's the way these things go.

I am, however, already pulling together a punch list for where to drink, where to eat, and of the distillers, bartenders, chefs, and cheesemongers with whom I want to reconnect. In all likelihood, I won't eat at '21' Club, but I did pull The '21' Cookbook from the shelf when I recalled that bar book collector Brian Rea used to work there.

Flipping through the drinks section (so nice to find drinks in their proper place at the front of a book rather than tacked on, as if in disgrace, at the end), I found an old Gene Ahern illustration. Ahern was a 20th century cartoonist whose comics at times took bizarre turns (Robert Crumb, among others, took inspiration from his work). In this undated panel, Ahern pays tribute to Mac — presumably Colonel Maxwell "Mac" Kriendler — with a little spot of unaged tabletop corn whiskey.

Unaged? Shoot, it's practically instant. Sure, the illustration is tongue-in-cheek, but who would've guessed, mid-century, that raw whiskey would one day earn enough of a mantle of respect that fancy bars across the country would carry "legal" moonshine without the slightest hint of irony?

Michael Lomonaco and Donna Forsman (1995)
The '21' Cookbook
400 pages (hardback)
Broadway
ISBN: 0385475705
$35.00

Goes well with:

• Even the Ten Dollar Whore Sneered at Me, an anecdote about just how far white whiskeys have come in a few short years. 
• Legal Moonshine? You've Been Conned. I've said it before and I'm sticking to my guns: If laws permitted the manufacture of moonshine, it would cease to exist.

Kenny Shopsin, "Orange Julius," and the Tennessee Caviar Scam

Years ago, I knew a guy who sold caviar: Ossetra, Sevruga, and Beluga, as well as plump red salmon eggs, Tennessee paddlefish eggs, whitefish roe, tiny grains of tobiko, and more. He even imported Scandinavian kelp-based pellets that, given dim light and enough aquavit, might come off as caviar-like. That inky kelp imposter notwithstanding, his fish roe was good, he cared about keeping it under the right conditions, and, when you recall that lightly salted fish eggs are a luxe dish in the first place, his prices were reasonable.

I learned a lot tasting his products. I learned that I prefer Ossetra to the more expensive Beluga; that salmon roe less than excellent is shudderingly vile; and that Southern paddlefish roe — while I wouldn't mistake it for the Caspian Sea article — is worth tracking down. I also learned that the contents of his carefully packed tins were not always what the invoices declared.

Oh, if you were a regular, you’d get what you ordered as long as he had it in stock. Most people did, in fact, get what they ordered. The owner of a football team who regularly had big tins of Beluga shipped to him certainly got the real deal. But if the Caviar Guy was out of something and he thought he could get away with it…well, the Sevruga sometimes shipped out with a definite Tennessee accent.

I hadn’t thought of that asshole in months.

But the memory of him and his various cons washed over me when I was reading Kenny Shopsin’s book Eat Me. Shopsin, the Greenwich Village cook and subject of the documentary I Like Killing Flies, writes about Morris, a purveyor from whom he used to buy turkeys:

One day Morris was bragging to me that he had been on that corner for fifty years. Way back in the ‘40’s, he said, chicken was really rare. When he couldn’t get it, he used to take veal cutlets and sell them as chicken cutlets. He said nobody ever noticed the difference. I don’t know how he expected to inspire trust in me by telling me he sold veal for chicken. He was telling me the story to show how times had changed, but what I got from it was that he was a liar and a crook.

I had seen I Like Killing Flies a few months ago, but the strength of that passage right there is what made me buy the book. It told me that Shopsin didn’t just understand the extent of the sneaks, cons, cheats, and shorts endemic to the restaurant business, but that, like him or not, and despite his protestations to the contrary, he was one of the good guys.

His own restaurant, Shopsin’s, was a New York institution for decades. It's since closed and he's moved on to a new, smaller location on Essex Street. While I knew it existed at the original spot, I always got distracted when I was in New York and never visited. Pity. The menu was about 900 items long and the dishes were, well, not classics since so many bore Shopsin’s own imprint on what they should be, but they were familiar — pancakes and French toast, but also Mac and Cheese Pancakes and Bread Pudding French Toast. Not just ho cakes, but Slutty Cakes as well. One mugshot lineup of griddle cakes in the book includes varieties such as chocolate peanut butter, coconut, cinnamon raisin, oatmeal, cranberry orange, brown sugar banana, bacon, chorizo corn, and a few more. Shopsin is particularly good at running with a basic concept.

The recipes are strong on breakfast foods — or, at least, the sorts of things I like to eat for breakfast. But there are plenty of salads (“I think a lot of salad eaters are dishonest people — people who eat for reasons other than sating their true desires.”), soups (“I put something like forty soups on the menu all at once, and from there I kept adding them, one at a time or ten at a time.”), and sandwiches (“In addition to sliced roast beef, turkey, shit like that, I also had pork loins, smoked ham, bacon, Canadian bacon. You could get roasted chicken, grilled chicken, fried chicken, red onions, grilled onions, fried onions, fresh tomatoes, roasted tomatoes, sun-dried tomatoes, fried green tomatoes.”).

Shopsin’s writing is vulgar, opinionated…and sounds a lot like me in my own kitchen.

Here’s his take on an orange drink I myself had seen when I was a kid, but was never allowed to have:

“Orange Julius”

When I was a kid, Orange Julius was strictly a California thing. I didn’t discover it until late in life, and then I fell completely in love with it and had to have it at my restaurant…Legally speaking, I am probably not allowed to call this an Orange Julius because the name must be copyrighted or some crap like that, which is why I put the name in quotation marks. I could have called it an Orange Julius-ish. Or maybe I can get away with it if I just say that this is my idea of what an Orange Julius is. The truth is that mine is different from the original. It’s better because we squeeze the orange juice fresh.”

1 cup fresh orange juice

1 tablespoon powdered egg whites

½ cup powdered sugar

2 cups crushed ice (or 3 cups ice cubes)

Put the orange juice, egg whites, and sugar in a blender and blend quickly to combine the ingredients. Add the ice and blend until the ice is finely crushed and the drink is frothy. Do not overblend, or the ice will begin to melt and the drink will start to flatten.

Kenny Shopsin and Carolynn Carreño (2008)

Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin

Knopf

ISBN: 0307264939

$24.95