1935 Old Waldorf-Astoria Bar Book

II. CONSTITUTIVE AND DERIVATIVE

T HE cocktail, as many generations have known it, is a distinctively American drink. Its name, its formulas and its influence as well, have been spread by traveling Americans to every corner of the globe. Or else Britons, bound for some distant part of an empire on which the sun is always setting, learned a recipe in an American bar and made the barman at the club in their remote destination experiment until he had achieved some– thing like the flavors of the mixture whose tastes and ef– fects they longed to experience again. At home-in London, or wherever he dwelt in his tight little island-the Englishman as a rule did not succumb easily to the innovation. For many years the fact that the cocktail was an American drink was sufficient to condemn it in his eyes. The Britisher stuck to his Sherry or his Scotch or Brandy-and-Soda. So that the spread of the cocktail in anything like its pristine purity, so to speak, was due in greatest measure to peripatetic Yankees, some of whom never found any strange place liveable, or even bearable, unless or until they could get their cocktails when they wanted them. Not· until the present century was ending its second decade was it possible anywhere in the London the com– piler of this volume knew-and that was considerable– to buy a genuine cocktail made in the American way. In Paris, yes. The French, making early discovery that profit lurked in catering to thirsts hostile to claret or Burgundy, IO