Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

Authenticity in Every Glass

Season three of the period 1960s drama Mad Men starts this weekend, and I'm sure you're all quite excited. There's nothing like a whole tv show full of smoking, drinking, sexism, and completely fabulous vintage clothes & interiors! The New York Times reported a few days ago that the show's prop masters work terribly hard at getting all those vintage details just perfect, including the drinks, the glasses they go in, and the liquor brands they use. Mad Men's network has an online guide to 1960s era cocktails, but since I know you're all so incredibly retro that you prefer to get your information from books, here are some suggestions:

If you want to make cocktails, learn to drink them with discernment, or just find out a bit about what can make them truly great, you could hardly find a better place to start than Dale DeGroff's The Essential Cocktail. DeGroff is a leading authority on cocktail history, and not only does he know how to mix a dreamy drink, he can show you how to do it too. He's arranged his recipes into logical categories, and he explains the features of the classic version of each famous drink, as well as providing an intelligent guide to creating variations. (And, as the Times article noted, DeGroff is not only a cocktail expert, he was himself in the advertising business in the early 70s, so he's definitely got the down low on authentic Mad Men-style boozing.)

If you require a wider knowledge of the drinking arts, you might turn to Kinglsey Amis's Everyday Drinking, a compendium of highly intelligent (though thoroughly subjective) drinking lore, advice and history originally written between 1971 and 1984. Among other things, Amis can help you figure out how to fool people into thinking you’re an expert on liquor or wine even if you know next to nothing, he provides thorough advice on all aspects of dealing with a hangover, and he outlines a recommended weight-loss diet for the heavy drinker. But humorous content aside, Amis was a great authority on wine, liquor, and beer, and had a lot to say about how to understand it and how to best enjoy it.

If you'd like to reach even further back in the past, well before the Mad Men era, I must recommend Charles H. Baker’s Jigger, Beaker, & Glass: Drinking Around the World, originally published in the 1930s. It provides an astonishing catalog of libations and detailed instructions for making each one, together with a dictionary of cocktail ingredients and a huge amount of commentary and advice. Some recipes are exotic, some familiar; some are complex, some incredibly straightforward; but all are clearly but amusingly written -- in fact, you could pick up this book without ever intending to mix a cocktail or concoct a punch, and still find it delightful.