1935 Old Waldorf-Astoria Bar Book

BAPTISMAL named other cocktails. "Trilby" had been drunk back in the days of the Waldorf sit-down Bar. In compliment to the locale of the play, the Trilby cocktail was made of one-third French Vermouth and two-thirds Old Tom Gin, with dashes of Orange Bitters and Creme Yvette. "Salome," making a tremendous sensation in a single presentation at the Metropolitan Opera House, in 1907, was celebrated in a way that might have made Strauss , weep for · his seidel or his stein of Pilsner. With its two dashes of Absinthe, cementing half portions of Ital– ian Vermouth and Dubonnet, the cocktail lacked Ger– man authorship, but certainly nothing in authority. Mrs. Les)ie Carter must have heard, when she helped make David Belasco loom larger on the theatrical map, that "Zaza" made one of its biggest hits in the form of an invention of a Waldorf barman. The Zaza cocktail was somewhat milder than the Salome, for only one-third of its content was Old Tom Gin, .that being allied with two– thirds Dubonnet and tw'o dashes of Orange Bitters. And Charlie Chaplin had a cocktail named in his honor when he began to make the screen public laugh. In those days every big or spectacular event claimed its appropriate honorification at the hands of those Wal– dorf dispensers of drink. For example, the first composi– tion of the Arctic cocktail celebrated Peary's discovery of the North Pole-or.. where it ought to be; the Doctor Cook cocktail proclaimed the exposure of a celebrated polar faker whose very entrails Peary once confessed to me personally, in effect, he hated; the invention of the Coronation cocktail was anticipative of the ten minutes' rest the late King Edward got when they sat him on the Stone of Scone. The Fin de Siecle came toward the end