The Bartender's Guide: How to Mix Drinks: The Bon-Vivant's Companion

In 1862 Jerry Thomas, the most celebrated bartender of his day, famed for the flaming Blue Blazer he tossed between two silver-plated mugs, published the first bartender's guide to appear in the United States. His book gathered the punches, juleps, cobblers, smashes, cocktails, crustas, flips, sangarees and toddies of the American bar into 236 numbered recipes, including the first cocktail recipes ever printed in a book, and it became the model for the bar manuals that followed.

Dick & Fitzgerald bound Thomas's guide together with a second work: Christian Schultz's Manual for the Manufacture of Cordials, Liquors, and Fancy Syrups. This practical distiller's handbook contains more than 400 recipes for liqueurs, cordials, ratafias, bitters, syrups and flavoring essences. It opens with Schultz's own instructions on distillation, filtration, clarification and the degrees for boiling sugar. Together, the two works give a full picture of how Americans made and mixed their drinks in the middle of the nineteenth century.

This edition presents both works complete, in the text of the 1862 first edition:

• Newly transcribed from scans of the original rather than reproduced from old OCR, and checked page by page against a second copy of the 1862 printing
• Original spelling, recipe numbering and period units of measure preserved
• The original engravings, with Schultz's still and filtering apparatus redrawn for clarity
• Facsimiles of both 1862 title pages, and period illustrations of the New York bar world Thomas worked in
• The original 1862 Preface
• A new introduction on Thomas, Schultz and the history of the book, with notes and a glossary of period terms
• A new table of contents, and new alphabetical indexes to both works keyed to recipe numbers

For bartenders, cocktail historians, collectors and anyone curious about the origins of American drinking culture, this is the book where it all began.