The Shaken and the Stirred

Description

Over the past decade, the popularity of cocktails has returned with gusto. Amateur and professional mixologists alike have set about recovering not just the craft of the cocktail, but also its history, philosophy, and culture. The Shaken and the Stirred features essays written by distillers, bartenders and amateur mixologists, as well as scholars, all examining the so-called 'Cocktail Revival' and cocktail culture. Why has the cocktail returned with such force? Why has the cocktail always acted as a cultural indicator of class, race, sexuality and politics in both the real and the fictional world? Why has the cocktail revival produced a host of professional organizations, blogs, and conferences devoted to examining and reviving both the drinks and habits of these earlier cultures?

Introduction: The Shaken and the Stirred (Stephen Schneider and Craig N. Owens)
Part 1: Muddled Mythologies
1 "The greatest of all the contributions of the American way of life to the salvation of humanity": On the Pre-History of the American Cocktail. (Jonathan Elmer)

2 The Boulevardier: Craft, Industrialism, and the Nostalgic Origin (Antonio Ceraso)
3 A Continued Stream of Fire: Professor Jerry Thomas invents the "Blue Blazer" (Christoph Irmscher)

4 The Sazerac: Ritual, Parody, and New Orleans Cocktails (Joseph Turner)
5 My First Time (Albert W.A. Schmid)

Part 2: Spirits of the Age
6 "They made me feel civilized": The Martini as Modernist Culture (Michael Coyle)
7 At Home with the Postwar Cocktail Party and the Cocktail Dress (Lori Hall-Araujo)
8 Middlebrow Cosmopolitanism and the Post-War Cocktail in Canada (Lisa Sumner)
9 Absolut Psychosis (Craig N. Owens)
10 Joy Perrine and the Bourbon Cocktail's Renaissance (Susan Reigler)

Part 3: Mixed Messages
11 Inventing Margarita: Femininity, Fantasy, and Consumption (Marie Sarita Gaytán)
12 Polynesian Paralysis: Tiki Culture and American Colonialism (Andrew Pilsch)
13 The Irish Car Bomb (and One Other "Disreputable" Cocktail) (Stephen Watt)
14 Bar Trek (William Biferie)
15 The Taming of the Shrub ( Dan Callaway)

Part 4: In A Glass, Darkly
16 The Lingering Louche: Absinthe, the Green Demon of Alternative Modernity (Aaron Jaffe)
17 A Rye Take on the Old Fashioned (Judith Roof)
18 Cocktails that aren't Cocktails for Gentlemen who aren't Men: Recovering the Metaphorical Body of the Fictional Drinker (Michael Lewis)

19 The Manhattan (Edward P. Comentale)
20 The Cold, Gray Dawn of the Morning After: Hangover Cures and the Inevitability of Excess (Stephen Schneider)

Afterword: Confessions of a Cocktail Nerd ( Sonja Kassebaum)
Contributors

Sujets

• Alcoholic
• Cóctel
• Popular culture
• Alcoholic beverage
• Bartender
• Social sciences
• Drink
• Cooking
• Alcoholism
• Cocktail

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780253052322
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 6 Mo

Extrait

THE YEAR S WORK
Edward P. Comentale and Aaron Jaffe, editors

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Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-04973-5 (hardback)
ISBN 978-0-253-04974-2 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-04975-9 (ebook)
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CONTENTS
Introduction: The Shaken and the Stirred (Stephen Schneider and Craig N. Owens)
PART 1 : Muddled Mythologies
1. The greatest of all the contributions of the American way of life to the salvation of humanity : On the Prehistory of the American Cocktail (Jonathan Elmer)
2. The Boulevardier: Craft, Industrialism, and the Nostalgic Origin in Cocktail Culture (Antonio Ceraso)
3. A Continued Stream of Fire: Professor Jerry Thomas Invents the Blue Blazer (Christoph Irmscher)
4. The Sazerac Mixing Ritual: Storytelling, Parody, and New Orleans (Joseph Turner)
5. My First Time (Albert W. A. Schmid)
PART 2: Spirits of the Age
6. They made me feel civilized : The Martini as Modernist Culture (Michael Coyle)
7. At Home with Postwar Cocktail Culture and the Cocktail Dress (Lori Hall-Araujo)
8. Middlebrow Cosmopolitanism and the Canadian Cocktail (Lisa Sumner)
9. Absolut Psychosis (Craig N. Owens)
10. Joy Perrine and the Bourbon Cocktail s Renaissance (Susan Reigler)
PART 3: Mixed Messages
11. Inventing Margarita: Femininity, Fantasy, and Consumption (Marie Sarita Gayt n)
12. Polynesian Paralysis: Tiki Culture and the Aesthetics of American Empire (Andrew Pilsch)
13. The Irish Car Bomb (and One Other Disreputable Cocktail ) (Stephen Watt)
14. Bar Trek (William Biferie)
15. The Taming of the Shrub (Dan Callaway)
PART 4: In a Glass, Darkly
16. The Lingering Louche: Absinthe, the Green Demon of Alternative Modernity (Aaron Jaffe)
17. Rye Take on the Past-The Old-Fashioned Cocktail: A Glass of Crooning Sophistication (Judith Roof)
18. The Manhattan (Edward P. Comentale)
19. Cocktails That Aren t Cocktails for Gentlemen Who Aren t Men: Recovering the Metaphorical Body of the Fictional Drinker (Michael Jay Lewis)
20. The Cold Gray Dawn of the Morning After: Hangover Cures and the Inevitability of Excess (Stephen Schneider)
Afterword: Confessions of a Cocktail Nerd (Sonja Kassebaum)
Contributors
Index

INTRODUCTION
The Shaken and the Stirred
STEPHEN SCHNEIDER AND CRAIG N. OWENS
IN AN ESSAY ENTITLED IN Search of the Auden Martini (2009), Rosie Schaap embarks on a mission to discover what kind of martini it was that poet and martini devotee W. H. Auden actually drank. 1 But more importantly, Schaap sets out to disprove John Lancaster s contention in The Debt to Pleasure that Auden made martinis not with a properly English gin but rather with vodka. And as the essay progresses, what is at stake is nothing less than saving Auden himself from the accusation of pedestrian taste. As Schaap puts it,
Maybe what I m trying to say is: I don t want to believe it. I don t want to lump Auden in with the cocktail consumers I ve seen belly up to bars at innumerable happy hours, lean their elbows on the polished wood or marble or zinc, and, with an air of sophisticated authority, order an extra-dry vodka Martini with extra olives. 2
After all, these drinkers require not pity, nor scorn, but rather an intervention: I want to pry away their drinks, Schaap continues, and replace them with real martinis-made with gin and considerably more than a rumor of vermouth, and garnished, if garnished they must be, with clean, curly twists of lemon peel. 3 (But, as Michael Coyle s essay in this volume shows, opinions on the question of the garnish differ even among the most orthodox of martinistas .)
For Schaap, drinking a vodka martini is akin to reading Ayn Rand, when one s time could be spent with Milton or Wordsworth-that is, with something beautiful and humanizing and good. 4 And in an essay on a poet such as Auden, the analogy is no doubt fitting. Yet Schaap-despite not wanting to believe that Auden made his martinis with vodka-can t dispel the possibility. She notes that Auden s brother is ambiguous with respect to his brother Wystan s Martinis, sometimes describing them as vodka Martinis and sometimes as plain Martinis -though plain likewise proves ambiguous. 5 In the end, Schaap chooses to believe an anecdotal story about a New York writer and editor who swore off gin after one too many of Auden s martinis: Anecdotal, sure, but it suggests that Auden could go both ways with the Martini, sometimes deploying gin, sometimes vodka. 6
We shouldn t be surprised that Schaap, herself an authority on the cocktail, wants to prove that Auden s martinis were every bit the equal to his poetry. As both Paul Fussell and Eric Felten remind us, we often imagine that what we drink says something about who we are. And contemporary cocktail culture is a culture that demands not just a refined sense of taste, but also a sense of cocktail craft and cocktail history. In other words, Schaap s own status as a bon vivant depends as much on her knowing for a fact what kind of martini Auden drank as it depends on her knowing that the vodka martini is to cocktails what Atlas Shrugged is to literature.
Any martini enthusiast would likely agree with Schaap on this last point, but they would also note that her own recipe for a martini-and especially her disdain for the inclusion of a garnish-would make much the same point even if the consideration of Auden s drinks were missing. After all, every serious martini drinker has a theory of how a proper martini is to be mixed, and that theory in turn tells you whether that martini drinker is to be taken seriously: for, cocktail culture is as much about reading the craft and form of the cocktail itself as it is about anything else. But as Schaap s essay makes clear, cocktail culture is a loquacious culture-one that has turned the witty banter associated with the cocktail party into a discourse on the cocktail itself. The cocktail that emerges is not so much a drink as a provocation: an occasion to think not just about what we d like to drink, but also about the broader cultural symbolic systems that render those preferences meaningful.
COCKTAIL CULTURE
It seems only proper to open a volume on cocktail culture with a discussion of the martini, perhaps the drink most closely associated with cocktail culture. After all, the martini is nothing if not iconic: a crystal-clear drink, served in an elegant and geometrically exact glass, with only an olive to trouble its otherwise placid depths. Of course, if Schaap and other martini enthusiasts are to be believed, not even an olive should interrupt the visual perfection of the martini (therein, too, lies the injunction against shaking your martinis, lest shards of ice end up in your drink). The martini has an entelechy, an aspiration toward formal perfection that has been the stuff of discussion and debate for as long as the martini has had its modern form.
We might suggest, then, that the martini most perfectly represents cocktail culture because it is a drink that demands theorizing. It isn t enough to mix a martini, one has to mix it right; and to mix it right, one must account for one s choices and preferences. Gin or vodka? How much vermouth? Olive, lemon twist, or unadorned? It isn t enough to answer these questions. One must also answer why-or why not-and the myriad other questions of meaning and value that inevitably arise.
Perhaps the most detailed answer to these questions-and arguably the earliest study of contemporary cocktail culture-can be found in Lowell Edmunds s Martini, Straight Up (1998). 7 Edmunds offers a thorough examination of the martini s history and cultural resonance in an effort to answer the question What does the Martini communicate? His answer takes the form of seven simple messages and four ambiguities:
1. The messages of the Martini
The Martini is American-it is not European, Asian, or African
The Martini is urban and urbane-it is not rural or rustic
The Martini is a high-status, not a low-status, drink
The Martini is a man s, not a woman s, drink
The Martini is optimistic, not pessimistic
The Martini is the drink of adults, not of children
The Martini belongs to the past, not the present 8
2. The ambiguities of the Martini
The Martini is civilized-the Martini is uncivilized
The Martini unites-the Martini separates
The Martini is classic-the Martini is individual
The Martini is sensitive-the Martini is tough 9
Edmunds s approach is to focus on the Martini as an image-or, in semiotic terms, a sign or a sign-vehicle-without going any more deeply into social contexts than a sketch of the sign requires. 10 The messages and ambiguities that Edmunds identifies seem to bear out Roland Barthes s contention that the ideal drink would be rich in metonymies of all kinds. 11 And perhaps that s why, despite Edmunds s ostensible eschewing of social