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

THE BON VIVANT'S COMPANION

of which would make a Prohibition agent burst into tears and tear up his bootlegging contracts, he added,"then smile." Again, when he had described a favorite beverage in great and glamorous detail, he concluded with the simple injunction, "Imbibe!" Occasionally he soared into the more rarefied strata of literary endeavor and brought down a poem; it is to one of these inspired moments, when the mantle of Omar lay caressingly across his shoulders, that we are indebted for the proper method of preparing mulled wine, a not so mild beverage which in those simple and lawless days was usually consumed amid the tender intima cies of the home. The Encyclopedia Brittanica and other standard works of reference, to their shame be it said, contain no accounts of Professor Thomas's life, and extensive research has failed to unearth any information about the period of his early youth. It seems fair to assume, however, that he did not attend Yale College or otherwise employ his time in dissipa tion, for at the age of twenty we find him a very eager but humble Assistant to the Principal Bartender of a New Haven saloon,where hesoon attracted favorable attention by his indefatigable quest of knowledge and his lush inventive ness. He remained in New Haven for two years, constantly adding to his store of wisdom, and conducting a series of experiments by which he definitely disproved the theory, then widely held, and in recent years revived, that the capacity of the American college boy was (and is) prac tically unlimited. In 1847, having exhausted New Haven as well as a majority of the Yale lads, Professor Thomas decided to seek hardier subjects for his tests,and so shipped before the mast and sailed out of New York aboard the bark Annie Smith.The skipper of the Annie Smith was a notorious martinet, but he served excellent grog, and Professor Thomas hoped that with this as a basis he might invent something which would relieve the sailor's life of much xxvi

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