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Author's Foreword
When Prohibition placed its stranglehold on our nation,
it doomed for more than thirteen years the real art and eti
quette of drinking.
Books, articles, advertising and broadcasting concerning
liquor, and all formulas for mixing drinks once popular in all
branches of society, were placed under Federal ban.
From the hands of law-abiding experts the hquor business
passed into the hands of novicesfrom the underworld.
The speakeasy and night club came along to replace the
legitimate dispensaries and to sell surreptitiously hquors and
needled beers of most questionable origins.
Concoctions were served under titles never before known
to the drinking world. Mostof these drinks were abominable,
mixed by men who did not know even the rudiments of the
art. They will pass into the oblivion whence their inventors
sprang. Gone is their influence over the drinking habits of a
nation which, before the World War,was headed for temper
ance and which was plunged by Prohibition not only into
intemperance,butinto vicious excesses.
America today must unlearn all the follies she was taught
in the name of Bacchus and must learn aU over again what
she has unlearned.
My design, therefore, is not to encourage drunkenness—
we have had plenty of that during the heyday of boot
legging—but to guide drinkers of the new day back into the
safer channels of the old days;to make possible the safe home
mixing of delectable beverages;to promote temperate rather
than inordinate drinking;to help host and hostess with their
problems of whatto serve,when to serve and how to serve the
now legal liquid refreshments of a re-emancipated America.
And, as toasts always are in demand,I have compiled a
carefully selected potpourri of those which long have been