Baker, Charles Henry, Jr. (1895–1987), was an American writer who traveled around the world collecting recipes and experiences that became the foundation of his best-known works, The Gentleman’s Companion (1939) and The South American Gentleman’s Companion (1951). Part travelogues, part cookbooks, and part manuals for budding bon vivants, Baker’s Companions have inspired generations of bartenders and spirits professionals with tales of mixological adventure in exotic locales, written with the unbridled enthusiasm of the passionate amateur.
Born in Zellwood, Florida, to a family of wealthy Northeastern industrialists, Baker was educated at Trinity College in Connecticut and worked as a mechanical engineer for Norton Abrasives before moving to New York to pursue a life in letters. He was a tall, athletic, and handsome man, an avid sailor and fisherman, who often sported a pencil-thin mustache and bore a striking resemblance to the actor John Barrymore. In the 1920s, he worked as a freelance writer, a magazine editor, and an interior decorator before an unexpected inheritance allowed him to take an around-the-world cruise aboard the steamship Resolute in 1925.
On this journey, he made a discovery that would inform his life’s work, told here in his characteristic, charming prose: “All really interesting people—sportsmen, explorers, musicians, scientists, vagabonds, and writers—were vitally interested in good things to eat and drink,” and “this keen interest was not solely through gluttony, the spur of hunger or merely to sustain life, but in a spirit of high adventure … That was all we needed to start us on this pleasant madness of recipe collection.”
In this spirit, he went to work for the Hamburg American Line steamship company, and on the numerous cruises that followed he recorded recipes for food and cocktails that he encountered in exotic ports of call.
In 1932, he met a young heiress named Pauline Paulsen aboard the SS Resolute, and the couple were married when they arrived back in the States. They settled in Coconut Grove, Florida, at the house they christened Java Head, a manorial estate built to Baker’s own exotic design.
After the publication of The Gentleman’s Companion, Baker continued to chronicle his frequent travels, penning columns for Gourmet, Town & Country, and Esquire in the 1940s.
At the invitation of Pan-American Airlines, Baker took a multi-month junket to South America in 1946; the recipes he gathered there would become the basis of The South American Gentleman’s Companion.
Baker’s notable contributions to the cocktail canon include the Remember the Maine (“a Hazy Memory of a Night in Havana during the Unpleasantness of 1933, when Each Swallow Was Punctuated with Bombs Going off on the Prado”), the Colonial Cooler (an improvised Pimm’s Cup created by the officers of the Sandakan Club in British North Borneo, 1925), and the Death in the Gulf Stream (contributed by Baker’s friend Ernest Hemingway during a 1937 fishing trip in Key West).
Far more significant, however, is the contribution of his inimitable wit, romantic sensibility, and unfettered spirit to cocktail culture in general. In The South American Gentleman’s Companion, Baker describes the transformative effects of his Maracaibo Champagne Punch thus: “Feuding females actually beam on one another; tycoons unbend and remember when they made their first million; husbands forget the fretful pass of years; the petty-peckings, bills, taxes … even the waning hurly-burly of the marriage-bed, and lead their astonished brides of yesteryear out into the patio to sniff the frangipani blossoms or to inhale the intoxicating swoon of night-blooming jasmine.” Baker reminds his readers that a passion for cocktails can inspire adventure and that well-made drinks, in good company, have the potential to change lives.
Pimm’s Cup.Baker, Charles H., Jr. The Gentleman’s Companion, 2nd ed. New York: Crown, 1946.
Baker, Charles H., Jr. The South American Gentleman’s Companion, 2nd ed. New York: Cocktail Kingdom, 2014.
Fichtner, Margaria. “Gentleman’s Gentleman.” Miami Herald, March 18, 2002.
By: St. John Frizell