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Contraband Cocktails: How America Drank When It Wasn't Supposed To

Americans weren’t supposed to drink at all during Prohibition, but that’s not how things worked out: just as Congress amended the Constitution to make their countrymen dry (while a bootlegger known as The Man in the Green Hat helped keep wet bars well-stocked on Capitol Hill), “cocktail culture” as we know it was born. The Bloody Mary, sleek chrome cocktail shakers, hip flasks and streamlined bar carts, craft mixology, and hundreds of other essentials of modern drinking life owe their origins to the dark days and boozy nights of the Dry Years. Rich with history, political intrigue, and cultural curiosities, in Contraband Cocktails Paul Dickson pours us an intoxicating narrative of how Americans drank during Prohibition.             But Contraband Cocktails isn’t just a wild ride with bootleggers and bartenders, rumrunners and mobsters, it also brims with literary lore: from when the word “cocktail” first appeared in print in D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover, to Daisy pouring Tom a mint julep at the Plaza Hotel in The Great Gatsby, to recipes (some of them shockingly, comically undrinkable!) for what Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Tennessee Williams, and many others were drinking when they ordered “just the usual,” this small, heavily annotated mixology brings readers out of our 21st century take on the speakeasy and straight into a chair at the Algonquin Roundtable.             We also visit the dimly lit nightclubs that displaced legal cabarets and gave a backdrop to the Jazz Age, a hedge outside the White House where bootleggers stashed bottles of booze in a burlap bag, and even the bathtub where the great chef and food writer James Beard spent Sunday afternoons concocting homemade gin.             Chock-full of scandalous history, delicious anecdotes, dozens of recipes, and a glossary of terms that could surprise even the most seasoned bartender, Paul Dickson’s Contraband Cocktails is the perfect companion to any reader’s Cocktail Hour.From the Hardcover edition.