The Sherry Cobbler —a simple mix of sherry, sugar, and citrus peels or slices, shaken or tossed with ice, poured into a tall glass, and garnished with fruit and berries in season and sipped through a straw—was one of the most popular mixed drinks of the nineteenth century and did more than any other to convert the world to taking its warm-weather drinks iced in the American style. The king of the cobbler family, the drink is first recorded in the summer of 1838, when Jane Ellice, a vivacious young Englishwoman traveling in New York State, included a recipe in her diary, pronouncing it “delicious & easy of composition.” By September of that year, the New York Star was writing about it as if it were too well known to require explanation. (The common claim that it appears with the cocktail and the julep in the 1809 first edition of Washington Irving’s Knickerbocker’s History of New York is erroneous; the drinks were not introduced until the 1848 revised edition.) See Cocktail and Julep. By 1839 its popularity had spread as far as New Orleans, at least, and before long it was known throughout the United States. Then Charles Dickens came to visit. Spending the first half of 1842 in America, Dickens had plenty of time to try American iced drinks. His American Notes for General Circulation, published in October of that year, contained many notices of them, and in particular the julep and the Sherry Cobbler, which he deemed “refreshments never to be thought of afterwards, in summer, by those who would preserve contented minds.” This endorsement, coupled with a rapturous description of the drink in his next novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, effectively alerted the world to the drink’s easy charms.
In 1843, a bar opened in the Strand, London, devoted to American iced drinks (which in practice meant the cobbler and the julep), with others soon following, not only in London but in Dublin, Liverpool, Paris, and even as far afield as Sydney, Australia. At first, the cobbler was restricted to the early adopters—the ones who thirsted for novelties and were willing to try the strange American practice of drinking through a straw. In 1867, however, there was an American bar at the widely attended Paris Universal Exposition. It went through five hundred bottles of sherry a day, all for cobblers. That was the watershed; after it, the cobbler was no longer a novelty. “It is an American invention,” as British drinks writer William Terrington wrote in 1869, “but [it] has become an universal favourite.”
In its homeland, in the meanwhile, the Sherry Cobbler remained a staple. As master bartender Harry Johnson observed in 1888, it was “without doubt the most popular beverage in the country, with ladies as well as with gentleman.” See Johnson, Harry. By then, however, the public taste was already beginning to shift, and within ten years the cobbler’s hot-weather primacy would be seriously challenged by a new generation of refreshing, spirits-based drinks, including the highball, the rickey, and various coolers. See highball; rickey; and cooler. When the decline came, it was precipitous: as one Chicago drinker noted in 1906, “I don’t know as I ever heard of a man ordering a cobbler these days.” When he tried, the bartender had to look it up. The imposition of Prohibition hammered in the final nail: sherry was uneconomical for the bootlegger and scofflaw drinkers tended to want their illicit beverages to be as strong as possible; there was little place for a gentle refresher such as the Sherry Cobbler. Even outside America, it fell into disfavor. By the 1960s, it was only found in bartenders’ guides, and only the more comprehensive ones at that. The cocktail renaissance has at least given it a little new life, but one cannot in all accuracy call it popular.
Recipe: Stir 10 ml sugar in 120 ml amontillado or oloroso sherry. Add cracked ice and either 2 long ribbons of lemon peel or 1 orange wheel cut in two. Shake well, pour unstrained into a Collins glass, garnish with orange wedge, and add a straw.See also cobbler.
“American Drinks.” New Orleans Daily Picayune, May 28, 1843, 2.
Dickens, Charles. American Notes for General Circulation. London: Chapman & Hall, 1842.
“Dickens’s Admirers Try Experiments.” Chicago Inter-ocean, April 15, 1906 7.
Godsell, Patricia, ed. The Diary of Jane Ellice. [Toronto]: Oberon, 1975.
Grimes, William. Straight Up or on the Rocks, 2nd ed. New York: North Point, 2001.
Johnson, Harry. New and Improved Illustrated Bartenders’ Manual. New York: 1888.
By: David Wondrich