Sherry Cobbler
INGREDIENTS for sufficient for 3 persons. -4 glasses of sherry, 1 bottle of soda or seltzer, 1 tablespoonful of pounded sugar, 1 glass of liqueur, ice.
AVERAGE COST, 1s. 6d.
Put into 3 tumblers a lump of ice, a third of the sherry, and a little dash of TANKARD. liqueur. Next divide the soda into the 3 glasses, and serve with straws.
SEASONABLE in summer.
A Victorian summer drink written in the shorthand of a household that owned specific glassware. Two of its instructions have gone missing in the printing, so read the ingredient list against the method before you start.
- What a "glass" holdsA wine glass in this period is about 2 fl oz, so four glasses of sherry is roughly a cup total, split three ways. A liqueur glass is smaller, about 1 fl oz, and here it is divided as a dash across all three tumblers.
- The bottle of sodaA Victorian bottle of soda or seltzer was far smaller than a modern litre bottle; half-pint sizes (about 10 fl oz) were common, and smaller ones existed. Use a small bottle or can so the drink is lengthened rather than drowned.
- The sugar never gets usedA tablespoon of pounded sugar is listed and then never mentioned again. Pounded sugar is caster or superfine sugar; dissolve it in the sherry, or use a spoonful of simple syrup, before the ice goes in.
- That stray word"TANKARD" in the middle of the sentence appears to be a stray headword from the original page rather than an ingredient or a vessel. Ignore it.
- Ice"A lump of ice" reflects blocks chipped from an icehouse. A cobbler is properly built on crushed or cracked ice filling the glass, which is what makes the drink cold and slightly diluted rather than merely chilled.
- Which sherryAny sherry works, but a dry amontillado or oloroso stands up to the ice and soda better than fino, which thins out. Cream sherry with the added sugar will be cloying.
- The liqueurUnspecified, as it would have been whatever stood in the sideboard. Maraschino, curaçao or a good brandy are all period-plausible; a teaspoon or so per glass is the intended dash.
- ServingThree tall tumblers. A cobbler was conventionally finished with slices of orange or lemon and berries in season, and the straws in the original are the point, not a flourish.
The cobbler is an American invention that crossed the Atlantic in the 1830s and 1840s, and the sherry version was the one that took hold in Britain. Its arrival is bound up with two things happening at once: the commercial ice trade, which put crushed ice into ordinary glasses on a scale not seen before, and the drinking straw, which the cobbler is often credited with popularising. Dickens gave it a famous notice in Martin Chuzzlewit, in a number issued in 1843 and collected in the volume of 1844, where Martin drinks one through a straw and is transported. The name is usually traced to the ice "cobbles" filling the glass, though that explanation is traditional rather than documented. Its appearance in a Beeton compendium, priced at one and sixpence and marked seasonable in summer, shows how thoroughly an American bar drink had been domesticated into the English household repertoire.