For all the ice cold beers and perfect glasses of red wine I have had, very few things are more satisfying than a perfectly mixed cocktail.  The cocktail culture is undergoing a complete rebirth and along with knowing your reds from your whites you also need to know how to serve Scotch neat and make a mean Martini.  James Beard award winning columnist for the Wall Street Journal and jazz musician Eric Felten has done a fabulous job of introducing a little of that cassic cocktail culture to us in his book "Hows Your Drink? Cocktails, Culture, and the Art of Drinking Well".  In this book Mr. Felten re-introduces us to the most well known and classic cocktails, from the Mint Julep to the Manhattan, he explains to us how they came to be, how to make them, and the roles they played in classic literature and film.  In the excerpt below you will find the original recipe for the long forgotten "Clover Club" cocktail and author F. Scott Fitzgerald's role in the introduction of the illustrious "cocktail sets" complete with a Russel Wright cocktail shaker (for all you vintage barware collectors).  Although this book may not appeal to those looking for something more basic in way of classic cocktail preparation, if you love cocktails, literature, film, and a little jazz, in that order, then this is definitely a must have for you. 

The following is excerpted from "How's Your Drink?" by Eric Felton, Agate Surrey 2007

The same year that Babbitt hit the shelves, F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Beautiful and Damned, whose protagonist, the upper-crusty Anthony Patch, doesn’t mind quite as much as Babbitt about being known as a Drinker. When Patch gets married, a friend gives the happy couple “an elaborate ‘drinking set,’ which included silver goblets, cocktail shaker, and bottle-openers.” Fitzgerald allowed that this was a slightly less conventional “extortion” than the silver Tiffany tea set the Patches also received.

By the 1930s, cocktail sets had become among the most conventional of wedding presents. No doubt many were put to good use, but plenty went the way of other wedding presents: up on the shelf to be used for extra-special entertaining—which is to say, never. That’s one reason why it is easy to find great shakers and cocktail glasses from the mid-20th century. On any given day, eBay has hundreds of vintage cocktail shakers on offer. There are utilitarian shakers in stainless steel, arch chrome-plated art-deco icons, glass shakers in cobalt or ruby, elegant sterling silver sets, and very occasionally something from Russel Wright.

In Mary McCarthy’s novel, The Group, newlywed “Kay’s first wedding present, which she had picked out herself, was a Russel Wright cocktail shaker.” Made out of spun aluminum, the shaker came with “a tray and twelve little round cups to match—light as a feather and nontarnishable, of course.” When Kay throws a cocktail party, she serves up Clover Club cocktails in those little round aluminum cups.

The novel is autobiographical, and McCarthy had her own Russel Wright cocktail set. Leftist politics in New York in the ’30s flowed along a river of cocktails, and McCarthy later wrote that “the literary rackets—The Hollywood racket, the New York cocktail-party racket, and the Stalinist racket” were “practically indistinguishable.”  It seems that all the most fashionable fellow travelers were pouring from Russel Wright cocktail shakers.

I can see why the Wright stuff would appeal to the striving literary bohemian set. The lines and shapes reflected the machine-age craze for industrial design. More important to the socially conscious was that it was made of simple honest materials: spun aluminum, cork, and walnut. Most Deco bar sets are dressed up in chromium—a little too flashy for serious-minded contributors to Partisan Review.

Wright designed more than one cocktail shaker. His 1932 version looked like a howitzer shell and has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And then there is Wright’s “Cocktail Hour Set,” the one with the little round cups that McCarthy remembered. The shaker is a marvel of counter-programming. When every other designer was making tall slender shakers called “skyscrapers,” Wright fashioned a gourd-shaped mixer, a slightly smushed sphere topped with a thick pipe of a neck for holding and pouring. The neck is wrapped in cork for a good grip and to keep one’s hand from freezing. When McCarthy bought her set in the thirties, she would have paid about seven dollars. Today, a Russel Wright shaker and tray with a dozen cups can run toward $10,000. 

Clover Club

• 1 1/2 oz gin
• 1 oz fresh lemon juice
• 1/2 oz grenadine
• 1/2 teaspoon sugar
• 1 egg white (fresh or pasteurized)

Shake vigorously with ice—drinks with egg white need extra elbow grease—and strain into little round aluminum Russel Wright cocktail cups, if you can afford them.

About How's Your Drink?

Based on the popular feature in the Saturday Wall Street Journal, How’s Your Drink is an essential addition to the literature of spirits and a fantastic holiday gift for husbands and fathers. It illuminates the culture of the cocktail. Cocktails are back after decades of decline, but the literature and lore of the classics has been missing. John F. Kennedy played nuclear brinksmanship with a gin and tonic in his hand. Teddy Roosevelt took the witness stand to testify that six mint juleps over the course of his presidency did not make him a drunk. Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Chandler both did their part to promote the gimlet. Fighting men mixed drinks with whatever liquor could be scavenged between barrages, raising glasses to celebrate victory and to ease the pain of defeat. Eric Felten tells all of these stories and many more, and also offers exhaustively researched cocktail recipes.

Available at Amazon.com