BAROQUE AGE (1830-1885)
In the fifteen-odd years between Jerry Thomas’s birth and his apprenticeship behind the bar, the profession of barkeeper changed utterly. Not everywhere, of course. The land was still infested with a vast profusion of low doggerys where the man behind the stick was required to do nothing more complicated in the way of serving liquors than put them in a glass, if that—for most of the century, it was customary to put the bottle and a glass in front of the man ordering straight goods and allow him to help himself (those who took advantage could expect to face the barkeeper’s ridicule).
But in the best places, the barkeeper at work was, as we have seen, a marvel of the age. It was ice that did the trick; that turned him from a host and server, albeit an unusually busy one, into a juggler, a conjuror, and an artist. Iced drinks had always been available for the few, but in the 1830s, with the burgeoning trade in fresh, clean New England ice, delivered by horse-drawn carts from insulated central warehouses even in the hottest months of the year, ordinary people started getting used to the stuff, expecting it, calling for it in their drinks. Suddenly, the bartending game was entirely transformed. Ice, combined with the American drinking public’s ever-increasing preference for individual drinks made to order over things drunk communally out of bowls, meant that the barkeeper had to add a whole set of tools to his kit. Once the blocks—in New York, at least, they were cubes twenty-two inches per side—reached the bar, they had to be butchered, as it were; cut into useable pieces. This meant ice-tongs and ice-picks (both single-and multipronged), ice-shavers, ice-breakers, ice-axes, ice-scoops, ice-bags, ice-mallets—a whole world of new tools to master. It also meant straws: the state of nineteenth-century dentistry dictated that if at all possible the stuff be kept away from direct contact with people’s teeth.
And it also meant the eclipse of the venerable toddy-stick. Once bartenders started mixing their drinks with ice, its days were numbered as the primary mixing tool due to the awkwardness of fitting both it and the ice in the same glass (its sugar-breaking function was obviated by switching to syrup). By the 1860s, after ice had found its way into just about any drink that wasn’t made with actual boiling water, old-timers were reduced to fond memories of how “the ring of the tumblers, as [the toddy-stick] hit the sides in mixing, had its peculiar music, with which nearly every one was familiar.” Bartenders would still keep one around, to be sure, but its uses were very limited.
For stirring, bartenders replaced the toddy-stick with a long-handled spoon with a twisted stem, whose design ap-peared to have remained pretty much unchanged until Prohibition. Far more interesting, though, was the new method of mixing iced drinks delineated by Charles Astor Bristead in his 1852 novel The Upper Ten Thousand , when one of his characters prepares a Sherry Cobbler:
He took up one of the spare glasses, covered with it the mouth of the tumbler which contained the magic compound, and shook the cobbler back and forwards from one glass to the other a dozen times without spilling a drop.
The 1840s-vintage shaker (right) was too simple and effective a device to escape the American need to improve things. The hermaphrodite shaker-strainer on the left, patented in 1882, is one of the more benign results. (Author’s collection)
This way, the ice itself did the mixing. Neat enough, and effective (I’ve done it myself countless times in hotel rooms). It wasn’t long, though, before the knights of the bar figured out that this is much more fun if you don’t keep the glasses jammed together. Case in point, this description (from Mayne Reid’s 1856 novel Quadroon ) of a Mississippi riverboat bartender making a Julep:
He lifted the glasses one in each hand, and poured the contents from one
In the fifteen-odd years between Jerry Thomas’s birth and his apprenticeship behind the bar, the profession of barkeeper changed utterly. Not everywhere, of course. The land was still infested with a vast profusion of low doggerys where the man behind the stick was required to do nothing more complicated in the way of serving liquors than put them in a glass, if that—for most of the century, it was customary to put the bottle and a glass in front of the man ordering straight goods and allow him to help himself (those who took advantage could expect to face the barkeeper’s ridicule).
But in the best places, the barkeeper at work was, as we have seen, a marvel of the age. It was ice that did the trick; that turned him from a host and server, albeit an unusually busy one, into a juggler, a conjuror, and an artist. Iced drinks had always been available for the few, but in the 1830s, with the burgeoning trade in fresh, clean New England ice, delivered by horse-drawn carts from insulated central warehouses even in the hottest months of the year, ordinary people started getting used to the stuff, expecting it, calling for it in their drinks. Suddenly, the bartending game was entirely transformed. Ice, combined with the American drinking public’s ever-increasing preference for individual drinks made to order over things drunk communally out of bowls, meant that the barkeeper had to add a whole set of tools to his kit. Once the blocks—in New York, at least, they were cubes twenty-two inches per side—reached the bar, they had to be butchered, as it were; cut into useable pieces. This meant ice-tongs and ice-picks (both single-and multipronged), ice-shavers, ice-breakers, ice-axes, ice-scoops, ice-bags, ice-mallets—a whole world of new tools to master. It also meant straws: the state of nineteenth-century dentistry dictated that if at all possible the stuff be kept away from direct contact with people’s teeth.
And it also meant the eclipse of the venerable toddy-stick. Once bartenders started mixing their drinks with ice, its days were numbered as the primary mixing tool due to the awkwardness of fitting both it and the ice in the same glass (its sugar-breaking function was obviated by switching to syrup). By the 1860s, after ice had found its way into just about any drink that wasn’t made with actual boiling water, old-timers were reduced to fond memories of how “the ring of the tumblers, as [the toddy-stick] hit the sides in mixing, had its peculiar music, with which nearly every one was familiar.” Bartenders would still keep one around, to be sure, but its uses were very limited.
For stirring, bartenders replaced the toddy-stick with a long-handled spoon with a twisted stem, whose design ap-peared to have remained pretty much unchanged until Prohibition. Far more interesting, though, was the new method of mixing iced drinks delineated by Charles Astor Bristead in his 1852 novel The Upper Ten Thousand , when one of his characters prepares a Sherry Cobbler:
He took up one of the spare glasses, covered with it the mouth of the tumbler which contained the magic compound, and shook the cobbler back and forwards from one glass to the other a dozen times without spilling a drop.
The 1840s-vintage shaker (right) was too simple and effective a device to escape the American need to improve things. The hermaphrodite shaker-strainer on the left, patented in 1882, is one of the more benign results. (Author’s collection)
This way, the ice itself did the mixing. Neat enough, and effective (I’ve done it myself countless times in hotel rooms). It wasn’t long, though, before the knights of the bar figured out that this is much more fun if you don’t keep the glasses jammed together. Case in point, this description (from Mayne Reid’s 1856 novel Quadroon ) of a Mississippi riverboat bartender making a Julep:
He lifted the glasses one in each hand, and poured the contents from one
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