Vintage cocktails and nutrients in their ingredients
I found a 1946 cocktail guide and researched nutrients in its recipes.
Sometime over the past few years at a random thrift shop I found Old Mr. Boston’s DELUXE OFFICIAL BARTENDER’S GUIDE from 1946. A bookplate touts Star Liquor Dealers in Long Island City, New York distributed the copy. Since I love old cookbooks where I feel you get to taste history, I thought the cocktail book would be a great addition to my home library. Not only that, I grew up on Long Island, so the bookplate felt like a sign that I was meant to bring it home.
The vintage book is full of beautiful typefaces, glorious stained pages indicating consistent use by previous owners, and curious cocktail names such as the Castle Dip, Eyeopener, Corpse Reviver, Between the Sheets, Hop Toad, and Weep No More. The last page details the proper sequence of drinks to courses, such as cocktails for appetizers, sherry for soup, and so on. It also boasts a lovely quote: “Champagne is the only wine that may be served with any course and at all times during the meal.”
I’m uncertain about the number of different cocktail recipes in the book, and the old index doesn’t allow a way to search by ingredients. However, I read the entire book over the past few weeks and, based on my own personal observation, many of the cocktails contain egg (whether white, yolk, or whole), various fruit juices, and ginger ale.
If you’re making your own cocktails, you have the opportunity to choose and source ingredients with an eye for nutrition. Pastured eggs are higher in many nutrients (and lower in inflammatory properties) than factory farm eggs. I know many folks cringe at the thought of a raw egg, but I absolutely love egg whites in cocktails and incorporating raw eggs into smoothies. According to a piece authored by Dr. Allen Williams for Understanding Ag, “An egg produced by a laying hen raised on pasture is a self-contained nutrient powerhouse. It is hard for any single food to match the nutrient density in a pasture-raised egg.”
Fresh fruit juices, while increasing the sugar content of a drink, also boost vitamin levels, which would otherwise be missed. When sourcing the right producer of ginger ale, the drink could help deliver the antioxidant and digestive benefits of ginger. (Many of the mainstream ginger ales today are full of high fructose corn syrup, colorings, and preservatives. I’ve been reading about DIY ginger ales recently and hope to try it and share about that process.)
Mixology hobby
Last year my husband started to get interested in making drinks. It started with old-fashioneds. Then it branched out so much that I bought a beautiful refurbished credenza that we’re using as a dry bar. Over Thanksgiving my mom asked if we’d like my great-grandmother’s drink cart, which we accepted to help store the overflow of bottles needed for the foundation of my husband’s creations.
This weekend I asked him to make me something out of the tattered bartender’s guide. I chose the Zanzibar, a cocktail with lemon juice, gin, vermouth, a little powdered sugar, and a dash of orange bitters. I’m not a big drinker, so I liked that this was a small drink. A side benefit rests in vermouth, which has six times as many polyphenols (nutrients with antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties) as white wine.
Straight from the farm
The citrus flavors in the drink, and reading other recipes in the cocktail guide, reminded me that I haven’t ordered a box of oranges from Papa Citrus this season. (I’m not affiliated with PC and just sharing because they’re fantastic.) A friend and TLT subscriber recommended them last year and I ordered a few boxes then. Their citrus sample box is approximately $40, includes shipping, and comes with nearly 20 seedless oranges. They pick and box the oranges, then ship direct.
Last winter I made candied chocolate-covered orange peels, snacked on the fruits, made household cleaner with the peels, and juiced them. There’s something special about having fresh-squeezed orange juice on a gray winter morning, almost just as special as sipping a Zanzibar on a rainy, fall evening.