The Professor: Jerry Thomas and the First Cocktail Book

This article by Ben Houston originally appeared in The Gourmand magazine.

The early history of the cocktail is inevitably entangled in over two centuries of tall-tale bar-talk. As David Wondrich remarks in Imbibe!, his definitive guide to classic American cocktails, “there was no Homer to record the names and deeds of bartenders”, and so the lineages of many of the cocktail connoisseur’s favourite tipples have been utterly obscured by the “mists of time”.

Within this befogged prospect a few monuments of mixology loom large, and of these perhaps the most colossal is “The Professor” Jerry Thomas’s The Bar-Tender’s Guide: A Complete Cyclopaedia of Plain and Fancy Drinks. First published in 1862, Thomas’s short book was the first ever printed guide to mixing cocktails. Launched into an America heady with Gold Rush Fever and divided by a vicious civil war, the book offered by way of diversion a collection of almost alchemical recipes and fantastical techniques that still dazzle today.

The creative showmanship and flair of these recipes capture perfectly a time when the mixing of cocktails was an art on the edge, equal parts glamour and grift, probably best exemplified by the dangerously spectacular “Blue Blazer”, which required the bar-tender to pitch a cascade of flaming Scotch and boiling water between two mugs. Thomas wisely advises that “the novice in mixing this beverage should be careful not to scold himself”.

Thomas honed his skills, and made his fortune in the bar-rooms of Gold Rush California. Flashily dressed, diamond studs aglint and with a conjuror’s flourish, he mixed the fanciest drinks from the finest ingredients for the assembled prospectors, robber-barons and bunco artists. However, it was in New York that Thomas was to break the bar-keep’s omerta, and set down his recipes and techniques for publication. Today his book is rightly recognised as the earliest printed document of what Wondrich calls “the first legitimate American culinary art”.

The Bar-Tender’s Guide is an exceedingly scarce book in its true first edition with just nine copies recorded in institutions worldwide. Highly elusive, it is remarkable evocation of the time when bar-tenders-as-stars performed the theatre of a truly original culinary art.