Ensslin, Hugo Richard (1878–1929), was a German-American bartender whose 1916 book Recipes for Mixed Drinks is one of the most important of its kind from the years just before Prohibition. After early training in Wurttemberg as a painter and a photographer during which he displayed a good deal of promise, Ensslin left Germany for New York at sixteen. He worked there as a cashier for some years and then spent some time in Ohio and back in Germany. Somewhere along the way he learned to tend bar. By the early 1910s, he was settled back in New York and behind the bar of the Hotel Wallick, in Times Square, where he remained at least until Prohibition. In 1925, he followed the manager of the Wallick to Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, where he managed the restaurant of the Hotel Sterling. He shot himself in 1929, either due to ill health or over a failed relationship (contemporary accounts differ).
Recipes for Mixed Drinks, which received an expanded second edition in 1917, is a rare book; it was not a popular success in its day, nor was its author one of New York’s celebrated bartenders. It is nonetheless an important one: it contains the earliest recipes for a number of drinks that went on to enjoy long careers, including the Aviation, the Blue Moon, and the September Morn, and it details better than any other book precisely what was customarily drunk along New York’s cocktail route, the most extensive and sophisticated in the world. See Aviation Cocktail; Blue Moon; and cocktail route. It also served as one of the chief sources for Harry Craddock, who plundered it wholesale for his 1930 Savoy Cocktail Book. See Craddock, Harry. Indeed, many of his most memorable drinks, from the Phoebe Snow to the Raymond Hitchcocktail, were originally Ensslin’s—or, it must be conceded, were first published by Ensslin: with no personal reminiscence of his bartending or mixology available, we cannot say whether the drinks peculiar to his book were actually created by him.
Ensslin, Hugo. Recipes for Mixed Drinks. New York: Mud Puddle, 1916.
“‘Hugo’ Kills Self.” Wilkes-Barre Evening News, January 2, 1929, 1.
By: David Wondrich