Jazz Age Cocktails: History, Lore, and Recipes from America's Roaring Twenties (Washington Mews Books)

Product Description
How the Prohibition law of 1920 made alcohol, savored in secret, all the more delectable when the cocktail shaker was forced to go “underground”“Roaring Twenties” America boasted famous firsts: women’s right to vote, jazz music, talking motion pictures, flapper fashions, and wondrous new devices like the safety razor and the electric vacuum cleaner. The privations of the Great War were over, and Wall Street boomed. The decade opened, nonetheless, with a shock when Prohibition became the law of the land on Friday, January 16, 1920, when the Eighteenth Amendment banned “intoxicating liquors.” Decades-long campaigns to demonize alcoholic beverages finally became law, and America officially went “dry.”American ingenuity promptly rose to its newest challenge. The law, riddled with loopholes, let the 1920s write a new chapter in the nation’s saga of spirits. Men and women spoke knowingly of the speakeasy, the bootlegger, rum-running, black ships, blind pigs, gin mills, and gallon stills. Passwords (“Oscar sent me”) gave entrée to night spots and supper clubs where cocktails abounded, and bartenders became alchemists of timely new drinks like the Making Whoopee, the Petting Party, the Dance the Charleston. A new social event―the cocktail party staged in a private home―smashed the gender barrier that had long forbidden “ladies” from entering into the gentlemen-only barrooms and cafés. From the author of Gilded Age Cocktails, this book takes a delightful new romp through the cocktail creations of the early twentieth century, transporting readers into the glitz and (illicit) glamour of the 1920s. Spirited and richly illustrated, Jazz Age Cocktails dazzles with tales of temptation and temperance, and features charming cocktail recipes from the time to be recreated and enjoyed.
Review
"Cecilia Tichi’s lively, engaging history will find an enthusiastic audience. It’s fun to relate the rum-runners of the era, the movie stars, flappers, jazz musicians, writers, and just ordinary folk to the drinks they consumed. Our glass is raised to
Jazz Age Cocktails!" -- Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald, authors of America’s Founding Food: The Story of New England Cooking
"
Jazz Age Cocktails is a vivacious, accessible history of drinking and popular culture during Prohibition era America. Cecelia Tichi writes with enthusiasm and authority about this heady time, and her work is as easy to savor as a Champagne Julep. Its chapters cover aspects of Jazz Age society, including automobiles and airplanes; the gaudy, violent rise of organized crime; and the explosion of slang, games, and stunts. Vintage cocktail recipes conclude each section―most of them unfamilliar, wild concoctions that are spiked with unusual ingredients … Jazz Age Cocktails is a fun, illuminating look at an unusual decade that will appeal to cookbook and cocktail mavens who like their recipes with a history chaser." ―
Foreword Reviews
About the Author
Cecelia Tichi is Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English and American Studies at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of nine books, including
Jazz Age Cocktails (NYU Press, 2021),
Gilded Age Cocktails (NYU Press, 2021),
What Would Mrs. Astor Do? The Essential Guide to the Manners and Mores of the Gilded Age (NYU Press, 2018) and
Civic Passions: Seven Who Launched Progressive America (UNC Press, 2011).