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II. CONSTITUTIVE AND DERIVATIVE
T
HE cocktail, as many generations have known it,
is a distinctively American drink. Its name, its
formulas and its influence as well, have been spread by
traveling Americans to every corner of the globe. Or else
Britons, bound for some distant part of an empire on
which the sun is always setting, learned a recipe in an
American bar and made the barman at the club in their
remote destination experiment until he had achieved some–
thing like the flavors of the mixture whose tastes and ef–
fects they longed to experience again.
At home-in London, or wherever he dwelt in his tight
little island-the Englishman as a rule did not succumb
easily to the innovation. For many years the fact that the
cocktail was an American drink was sufficient to condemn
it in his eyes. The Britisher stuck to his Sherry or his
Scotch or Brandy-and-Soda. So that the spread of the
cocktail in anything like its pristine purity, so to speak,
was due in greatest measure to peripatetic Yankees, some
of whom never found any strange place liveable, or even
bearable, unless or until they could get their cocktails
when they wanted them.
Not· until the present century was ending its second
decade was it possible anywhere in the London the com–
piler of this volume knew-and that was considerable–
to buy a genuine cocktail made in the American way.
In
Paris, yes. The French, making early discovery that profit
lurked in catering to thirsts hostile to claret or Burgundy,
IO