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national spirits
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the United States in the eighteenth century were
almost universally popular because of their immediate availability,
their integration to the islands trade in cane and molasses and their
suitability to cold climate, outdoor life and generally unheated
houses. Champagne became the favorite drink of the nineteenth cen–
tury Russian nobility because of its costliness and exotic nature, and
to lend it an authority lacking through natural fermentation it was
heavily fortified for ·the Russian market with cognacs and other
brandies. Madeira was atene time the universal wine among people
of manners and position in America because of its trade accessibility
to clipper shipping.
Similarly it is quite possible to trace a close parallel between the
trend of American life away from the countryside toward cities and
the rise in mixed drinks, imported beverages and a general alcoholic
sophistication. There are still American frontiers where a drink
means only one thing: Bourbon whisky, and the only chaser think–
able is beer or soda water, but these are fast vanishing. The once
wicked mixed drink is now almost universal, and in polite circum–
stance, where the object is to extend the pleasure and usefulness of
a drink over the longest possible social and conversational period,
the tall mixed drink flourishes luxuriantly. The lore
0£
keeping bar
has become ertormously complicated for, while the vast preponder–
ance of orders are for drinks which can be numbered on the ten '
fingers, a knowing barman must be able, instanter and without refer–
ence to other authority, to compound any of several hundred stimu–
lating arrangements, and even the conventional stand-bys, Martini
cocktails and Scotch highballs, are subject to little variations and
the perfections of individual taste and practice.
It is with the end in view of recording the preferences, practices
and prejudices of drinkers at the wonderful and legendary mahog–
any of the Stork Club that this book has been evolved. It is not the
xii: Stork Club Bar Book