1934 What Shall We Drink by Magnus Bredenbek

Author's Foreword When Prohibition placed its stranglehold on our nation, it doomed for more than thirteen years the real art and eti quette of drinking. Books, articles, advertising and broadcasting concerning liquor, and all formulas for mixing drinks once popular in all branches of society, were placed under Federal ban. From the hands of law-abiding experts the hquor business passed into the hands of novicesfrom the underworld. The speakeasy and night club came along to replace the legitimate dispensaries and to sell surreptitiously hquors and needled beers of most questionable origins. Concoctions were served under titles never before known to the drinking world. Mostof these drinks were abominable, mixed by men who did not know even the rudiments of the art. They will pass into the oblivion whence their inventors sprang. Gone is their influence over the drinking habits of a nation which, before the World War,was headed for temper ance and which was plunged by Prohibition not only into intemperance,butinto vicious excesses. America today must unlearn all the follies she was taught in the name of Bacchus and must learn aU over again what she has unlearned. My design, therefore, is not to encourage drunkenness— we have had plenty of that during the heyday of boot legging—but to guide drinkers of the new day back into the safer channels of the old days;to make possible the safe home mixing of delectable beverages;to promote temperate rather than inordinate drinking;to help host and hostess with their problems of whatto serve,when to serve and how to serve the now legal liquid refreshments of a re-emancipated America. And, as toasts always are in demand,I have compiled a carefully selected potpourri of those which long have been