1929 The Bon Vivant's Companion or How to Mix Drinks by Jerry Thomas

INTRODUCTION

In these decayed and evangelical times,when drinking has reverted to a savage guzzling of liquid dynamite, the name of Jerry Thomas arouses no answering spark of manhood from the craven victims of bootleg liquor or the cowed and beaten slaves who labor in the gloomy galleys of the Anti- Saloon League.But to the ancients who weep beside the bier of a lost art it brings back beautiful memories .of golden fizzes and stimulating juleps, of cobblers, slings and san- garees. For Jerry Thomas was the greatest drink mixer of his age; his praises were sung by enlightened and Christian men from the Gulf of Mexico to the barren coast of Maine, and from the Golden Gate to Broadway.Aye,even in Europe he was recognized as a master craftsman; he visited Liver pool, Southampton,London and Paris in 1859, bearing with him his magnificentset of solid silver bar utensils constructed at a cost of $4,000 for his own personal use, and astounded the effete drinkers of the Old World with the variety and ex tent of his virtuosity. It was Jerry Thomas— rise, please— who invented those celebrated cold weather beverages which have come down to us as the Blue Blazer and the Tom and Jerry, the former a powerful concoction of burning whiskey and boiling water which, if properly employed, would render the hot water bottle obsolete. And it was Jerry Thomas who, a few years before the Civil War,gave the aid and encouragement of his genius to the cocktail,then a meek and lowly beverage pining for recognition and appreciation,and by self-sacrificing work in the laboratory raised it to its rightful place among the drinks. A perfect flood of new mixtures soon showered upon a delighted world, and the Metropolitan Hotel at Prince Street and Broadway, in New York, where Jerry Thomas was Principal Bartender in the days when the metropolis was the scene of the soundest drinking on earth, became the first great cocktail house. As a mark of gratitude for his in vention of the Tom and Jerry and the Blue Blazer, and for xix