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Coolers
Break a fresh egg, separate white from yolk, place yolk in a schooner glass, add a half teaspoon powdered sugar and thoroughly beat up with spoon. Moisten with a half pony maraschino, pony brandy, fill glass with cracked ice, thoroughly mix for a half minute, strain through strainer into a claret glass and serve.
Place in a large glass six tablespoons cracked ice, a half teaspoon powdered sugar, pour in a half pony red curacao, wineglass Catawba wine, and shake contents for three-quarters of a minute, pour all back into glass without straining and serve with straws.
Have at bottom of a very large glass three sprigs good fresh mint, two teaspoons powdered sugar, then fill with cracked ice and add one sherry wineglass good brandy or whiskey, whichever is preferable. Thoroughly shake, pour all back in glass, arrange three sprigs very fresh mint near edge inside, a slice of orange on top, and serve with straws.
Have in a large glass four heaping tablespoons clean, cracked ice. Squeeze in the juice of a medium-sized, very juicy, sound lemon, add a half teaspoon powdered sugar, one pony glass each of raspberry syrup and Swiss kirsch. Thoroughly shake it with the glass and shaker, strain in a lemonade glass, pour in a bottle cold plain soda, mix well and immediately serve. Squeeze the juice of a good-sized, sound lemon into a large tumbler, add two teaspoons powdered sugar, one tablespoon syrup of orgeat, two tablespoons St. Croix rum and finely cracked ice, thoroughly mix with a spoon, pour in one bottle cold plain soda, continually mixing with a spoon meanwhile, then strain into a large glass and serve.
Place in a large glass three tablespoons clean, finely cracked ice, squeeze in juice of a good-sized, sound, ripe, red orange, pour in a pony brandy and half pony red curacao. Gradually pour in a bottle cold plain soda, briskly mixing with a long spoon while pouring in, strain through a fine strainer into a large glass and serve.
Place in large glass white of a fresh egg, squeeze in juice of a medium-sized sound lemon, adding a teaspoon fine powdered sugar, thoroughly beat up with spoon, then pour in one and a half ponies Old Tom gin, fill up glass with plain soda, mix well with spoon and serve.
Seven separate drinks printed as one unbroken paragraph, in the shorthand of a professional bar of the period. Read each sentence beginning "Break a fresh egg", "Place in a large glass six tablespoons", "Have at bottom of a very large glass", and so on, as a distinct single-serving recipe.
- Pony, wineglass, schoonerA pony is 1 fl oz, so a half pony is a half ounce; a wineglass or sherry wineglass in bar usage is about 2 oz. A schooner is simply a large-capacity glass used here as a mixing vessel, and the claret glass it is strained into holds roughly 4-5 oz.
- "A bottle cold plain soda"This means a small bottle or split of soda water, on the order of 6-8 oz, not a modern litre bottle.
- Raw eggTwo of these drinks are built on uncooked egg, one yolk and one white, and neither is heated at any point. Use pasteurized shell eggs or cartoned pasteurized whites if you make them, and avoid serving them to anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immunocompromised.
- "Shake it with the glass and shaker"This appears to be the two-piece Boston shaker: the mixing glass capped with a metal tin. The stated shaking times, half a minute to three-quarters, are long by modern standards.
- Catawba wineA still or sparkling wine from the native American Catawba grape, once a mainstay of Ohio and Finger Lakes production and now uncommon. A light off-dry rosé or a labrusca-based wine gets closest; a dry white will leave the drink sharp.
- Old Tom gin and St. Croix rumOld Tom is a lightly sweetened gin, back in production and worth seeking out, since London dry makes the fizz noticeably leaner. St. Croix rum here means a Virgin Islands rum of medium body, not a heavy blackstrap.
- Orgeat and raspberry syrupOrgeat is a sweet almond syrup with a trace of orange flower water, still sold for tiki work. The raspberry syrup called for is a sugar syrup, not a modern seedless jam or a cordial concentrate.
- Red curaçaoCuraçao coloured red with cochineal or similar, sold alongside the orange and green versions. Any decent orange curaçao behaves the same on the palate; only the colour is lost.
- The mint drinkThe third recipe is a julep in all but name, with three sprigs and sugar at the bottom and three more set near the edge inside, where they stand at the drinker's nose.
The International Cook Book belongs to Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and its bar chapters read exactly like the American cocktail manuals that proliferated between Jerry Thomas's 1862 guide and Prohibition: terse, glass-specific, and written for a man working behind a counter rather than at a stove. "Cooler" in that idiom is loose, covering anything long, iced and often lengthened with soda, and the group here runs from a near-julep to a gin fizz. The Catawba wine is the period marker. Catawba is a native American grape, and sparkling Catawba from the Ohio River valley enjoyed a real vogue in the mid-nineteenth century before fungal disease — black rot and powdery mildew, which ruined Ohio's vineyards from the 1850s and 1860s — along with changing tastes and finally Prohibition pushed it to the margins, so a bartender in 1906 could still reach for a bottle in a way no one does now. The heavy use of cracked ice rather than cubes reflects the ice trade of the day, when blocks were chipped down by hand behind the bar.