mixography is a neologism for writing about mixed drinks. Hypothetically, it could date to the 1860s, when the term “mixology” first appeared, but there’s little evidence of its use prior to the 2000s. Regardless, writing has always been an integral part of mixology, just as it is integral to any lasting discipline. While various mixed drink traditions extend back into history, the circumstances that would collect “mixed drinks” as a distinct writing topic did not really come together until the nineteenth century. See mixology, the history of.
While punch recipes had appeared in print here and there in cookbooks and such since the seventeenth century, there was no move to compile and publish dedicated drink-recipe anthologies prior to the appearance of Oxford Night Caps in 1827. An unsigned booklet of recipes for punches and cups aimed at students at that university, it would enjoy numerous editions, the last in 1931. For its first thirty-odd years, however, it stood alone. In the 1860s, it was joined in Europe by a handful of other works: Henry Porter and George Roberts’s Cups and Their Customs (London, 1863), La véritable manière de faire le Punch by “Turenne” (Paris, 1866), Cooling Cups and Dainty Drinks, by the equally pseudonymous “William Terrington,” and the 1871 Gentleman’s Table Guide by Edward Ricket (a South London caterer) and one C. Thomas. Like Oxford Night Caps
On the other hand, the dissemination of mixed drinks in mid-nineteenth-century America—the single-serving variety in particular—happened within a commercial context: professionals made drinks, and the public consumed them (home bars would not really exist for generations). Professional bartenders and publicans shared information mainly through word of mouth and apprenticeship; literacy was not a given; rivalry and secrecy were frequently a factor. Information moved, but haltingly.
After Oxford Night Caps, the first major work of commercial literature that formally concerned mixed drinks was an actual book, Jerry Thomas’s 1862 How to Mix Drinks, published in New York. See Thomas, Jeremiah P. “Jerry”. Although dressed as a work of convivial literature for the home celebrant, the book was in fact aimed squarely at the trade, as most other American drink books for the remainder of the century would be. These trade books were quite expensive in their day, generally terse, and served a rapidly expanding industry (bars and restaurants) where, again, full literacy could not be taken for granted, at least not in English. The printing of these trade books was commonly paid for by including advertising from bar suppliers (some volumes were even directly commissioned by them as promotional tools) and, occasionally, early liquor brands. Some of the most successful trade books went on to multiple editions.
Jerry Thomas’s book is particularly important not just for being the first anthology in which many drink recipes appear in print but also for categorizing them with a thoughtful typology that would persist, stretched to the breaking point, to the present day. From the 1860s, drink-book publishing gradually expanded, as did the quantity and diversity of novel drink recipes to write about.
Harry Johnson’s 1882 Bartender’s Manual adds extensive essays on bar design, operation, and management. See Johnson, Harry. His was not the first work on bar management, but it was the first significant one in the cocktail context. Other standout books from the era that primarily document explosion of recipes in circulation include Leo Engel’s American and Other Drinks (London, 1878; Engel had worked for Thomas in New York), the pseudonymous O. H. Byron’s Modern Bartender’s Guide (New York, 1884), the posthumous editions of Jerry Thomas’s book updated by his publishers (New York, 1876 and 1887), William “Cocktail Bill” Boothby’s American Bartender (San Francisco, 1891), and George Kappeler’s Modern American Drinks (New York, 1895). But there were many others, and as a body they establish a pattern of stultifying redundancy, disregard for attribution, and broad plagiarism that characterizes the genre to this day. On the other hand, they were pragmatic, effective, and successfully built atop each other. See Boothby, William T. “Cocktail Bill”; and Engel, Leo.
The bulk of cocktail books were published in New York and London, because that’s where the publishing industries were concentrated—it is not unfair to say that mixography has had a persistent bias toward those cities. However, early and significant books were also published in Cincinnati, Chicago, San Francisco, and other cities around the United States. Moreover, “American drinks” and the “American-style bar” were swiftly disseminated internationally via the media, journeymen bartenders, and the American traveling class, who were all too happy to seek, enjoy, and promote cocktails abroad.
The late nineteenth century brought forth cocktail books in France, Germany, and Austria-Hungary. See Lefeuvre, Émile. Harry Johnson (a German immigrant) printed his own book in a bilingual edition in the 1880s and exported it back to Germany. Louis Fouquet’s Bariana (1896) in France both reflected and promoted the general interest there in the American cocktail culture streaming in from ocean liners. See Fouquet, Louis Émile. Meanwhile, the popular press—mainly newspapers—tracked the rise of cocktails and mixed drinks as a social fashion. Initially, bars, bartenders and the odd drink drew scattered mention here and there as part of the growing Belle Époque cosmopolitan fabric. The first major article on mixed drinks appeared, unattributed, in the New York Sun in 1873. “American Fancy Drinks,” as the piece was titled, was a detailed appreciation of American bartending, complete with recipes from some of New York’s top drinks mixers. It was widely reprinted and opened the door for a steady stream of such articles that would appear nationwide until Prohibition and beyond. From this point, mixed drinks became an increasingly normal part of society journalism, and the periodical record has produced a fragmented but invaluable picture of American drinking culture that the books cannot.
Moreover, some bartenders, such as William Schmidt, specifically cultivated their relationship with newspapermen. Schmidt’s own, unusually lavish book,
International mixography accelerated in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Frank Newman’s American Bar (Paris, 1900) went through multiple editions. Jorge Gasparo’s Guia practica del cantinero appeared out of Monterrey, Mexico in 1909. A book, Manual del cantinero o cocktelero perfecto (by E. Moreno, 1910), was printed in Havana, Mexico, and Buenos Aires, although John Escalante’s Manual del cantinero (Havana, 1915) is the first in a line of essential Cuban publications. Important American publications in this period include Applegreen’s Barkeeper’s Guide (1899), Louis’ Mixed Drinks (1906), Jack Grohusko’s Jack’s Manual (1909), Charley Mahoney’s Hoffman House Bartender’s Guide (1905), Jacques Straub’s Drinks (1914), Tom Bullock’s The Ideal Bartender (1917), and Hugo Ensslin’s Recipes for Mixed Drinks (1917). Mahoney’s book deserves special mention for its relatively extensive front matter concerning bar management at New York’s top bar of the era, while Straub’s book is an iconic, compact (unofficial) reference to the drinks of the Big Brass Rail at the (original) Waldorf-Astoria. Bullock’s is the first by an African American author. Ensslin’s is the last significant American cocktail book prior to Prohibition. See Ensslin, Hugo Richard; and Hoffman House.
By the time Prohibition (1920) temporarily complicated the bartender’s profession in the United States, many dozens of trade books existed—including in other countries and languages—and mixed drinks were a major feature of global cosmopolitan culture. In the United States, Prohibition moved mixology from the bars into the homes, creating a new market for how-to books and articles by and for amateurs, as defiant Americans tried to hold on to their disrupted drinking habits. These Prohibition-era books are often delightfully witty, even if the quality of their information is unreliable. Some were self-published, and a few, such as the tiny, infamous “Judge, Jr.” books, employed pseudonyms. One landmark of this era is Drinks Long and Short (London, 1925), an entire drink recipe book specifically for home use, by Nina Toye and A. H. Adair, which is an early example of a “foodie” or “lifestyle” drink book (in today’s sense), following in the rather less sleek footsteps of Edward Spencer’s The Flowing Bowl (London, 1903). All these new kinds of drink writing are perhaps best contextualized by the broadly contemporary literature by the likes of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and company and the similarly urbane stylings of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker.
During American Prohibition, “American-style” bars flourished in Europe and its colonies and in Latin America, as did trade and consumer literature dedicated to mixed drinks. Veteran American bartenders working in Europe such as Harry McElhone (Harry’s ABC of Mixing Cocktails) and Harry Craddock (The Savoy Cocktail Book) published major anthologies to support their résumés, and European and Caribbean bartenders assumed the mantle. See Craddock, Harry Lawson; and McElhone, Henry “Harry”. As American Bars themselves became tourist attractions, some produced recipe books as souvenirs and promotional items. This same general idea was widely adopted by liquor producers everywhere, who began commissioning their own books and booklets with recipes that specified their products, a practice that remains de rigueur today.
By the conclusion of American Prohibition, the Western world was experiencing an explosion in mixed drink literature. Indeed, more books, articles, and ephemera concerning alcohol and mixed drinks were published in the 1930s than all prior decades combined. The end of Prohibition even spawned its own temporary genre in the United States of witty musings on the return of public alcohol consumption, such as Gilbert Seldes’s The Future of Drinking (1930), along with dozens of celebratory recipe anthologies. Patrick Gavin Duffy, a bartender from before Prohibition, published a particularly ambitious example of the latter, his
Despite these efforts, cocktail culture remained more anchored abroad than at home in the United States until World War II. The Club de Cantineros, a bartenders’ trade group in Cuba, set themselves up as standard bearers and published guides for their members, beginning with the Manual del cantinero (1924). The United Kingdom Bartenders Guild, under Harry Craddock and William Tarling, did much the same, starting with The Book of Approved Cocktails (1937). Other notable publications from Europe in this era include the best-selling Cocktails: How to Mix Them (1922) by Robert Vermeire, several Spanish books by Pedro Chicote such as El bar Americano en España (1927), L’heure du Cocktail (Paris, 1927), Cocktails de Paris (Paris, 1929), and Des Herrn Munkepunke Cocktail- und Bowlenbuch (Berlin, 1929). This is also when the first cocktail books appear in Japan, such as O’Dell’s New Book of Cocktails and Fancy Drinks (1932), although cocktails would only take serious hold there fourteen years later during the years of American occupation. See Chicote, Pedro “Perico”; mixology, the history of; and Vermeire, Robert.
From the start, cocktail literature for consumers often mirrored the terseness of the trade books in the recipes themselves but added levity in form of ornamentation, humor, and cartoons (often racy, sexist, and racist, consistent with twentieth-century white, patriarchal, cosmopolitan culture and the popular press that served it). Following World War II, lifestyle magazines, such as Gourmet, Town and Country, The New Yorker, Esquire, and ultimately Playboy, took over as America’s cultural authorities, editorializing on what you drank alongside what you wore or read or the theater you attended. Thus, mixed drinks were equally integrated with the commercial, the literary, and the culinary; as predicted by Seldes, the future of drinking was now in the hands of the drinkers and not the bartenders.
In addition to producing their own cocktail books, Esquire (and later Gourmet) employed traveling socialite Charles H. Baker Jr., who wrote about drinks (and food) in the hyperbolic style of Victorian adventure writers and yielded two of the most distinctive cocktail books ever: The Gentleman’s Companion (1946) and The South American Gentleman’s Companion (1952). See Baker, Charles Henry, Jr. Another essential entry from this era is The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks (1947), the first theoretical work on mixed drinks, written by attorney David Embury. See Embury, David A. Other ubiquitous writers included Crosby Gaige, a theater promoter, gourmand, and cookbook author, and Lucius Beebe, the “cafe society” journalist, gourmand, and historian. The former penned a few books, most notably his Cocktail Guide and Ladies’ Companion (1941); the latter wrote the Stork Club Bar Book (1946) along with many cocktail book prefaces and countless articles for many of the above magazines and a popular column for the New York Herald Tribune. G. Selmer Fougner’s groundbreaking daily column Along the Wine Trail—which often addressed spirits and cocktails—ran for years in the New York Sun and was influential enough to be anthologized multiple times. See Fougner, G. Selmer. Probably the most spectacular Cold War cocktail book was Ted Saucier’s 1951 Bottoms Up, which combined surprisingly well-curated recipes and pinup art in lavish packaging and sold well. Saucier was a publicist for the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. See Saucier, Ted.
Along with mixed drinks as a whole, mixography persisted during the compression of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, but with greatly reduced relevance. The state of drinking from this era is thoroughly documented, but subsequent events have largely isolated this period as aberrant. In 1991, when William Grimes published his groundbreaking Straight Up or On the Rocks, an exactingly researched history of the cocktail and its kin, it stood alone, but not for long. Yet books were not the main agents for reviving the cocktail’s fortunes. As discussed elsewhere, the revival of interest in mixed drinks in the 1990s and the emergence of the internet are inextricable. See cocktail renaissance. The internet—writing, pictures, audio, and video—is the avenue through which interest was revived, most information spread, and the history reconstructed at a level of detail that was never available in the past (particularly through digitized archives). See Haigh, Ted; Harrington, Paul; and Hess, Robert.
The other essential component of the current mixographical era is the concurrent, wildly expansive multicultural fascination with globe-spanning cuisine, from which contemporary mixology is nearly inextricable. The vast majority of the mixography of the current era has been executed by amateur enthusiasts and professional writers, rather than bartenders (with notable exceptions such as Dale DeGroff and Gary Regan, whose respective works,
New to the discipline, however, is research and writing executed with something approximating academic rigor. Lowell Edmunds’s Martini, Straight Up (1998) was perhaps the first example; subsequent examples include Imbibe! (2007) and Punch (2010) by Esquire’s drinks correspondent, David Wondrich, Sippin’ Safari (2007) and Potions of the Caribbean (2013) by Jeff Berry, and Moonshine! (2007) and Lost Recipes of Prohibition (2015) by Matthew Rowley. Equally rigorous, but in the realm of science rather than history, was Dave Arnold’s Liquid Intelligence (2014). As a sign of how this approach was received, it is worth noting that the James Beard Foundation gave book awards to Wondrich’s Imbibe!—the first cocktail book to be so honored—and Arnold’s work.
The mid- and late 2010s saw more of the new historicism, most prominently in books from Robert Simonson and Philip Greene, but it also saw a flood of bartender’s guides, competently written by practicing professionals, but perhaps no longer groundbreaking. In time, undoubtedly, a smattering of these recent volumes will demonstrate enduring influence. At this writing, it is impossible to say if the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020–2021 will bring this age of mixographical abundance to a close or refocus it to home mixology as during Prohibition.
See also Miller, Anistatia, and Brown, Jared; and spirits writing.
“American Fancy Drinks.” New York Sun, August 22, 1873, 3.
By: Martin Doudoroff