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Toddy
Place in large glass a lump sugar, the peel of half a sound lemon and dissolve with a little hot water, fill up with shaved ice, add a dash maraschino, wine glass rye whiskey and serve with a spoon.
A short bar formula rather than a kitchen recipe, and the measures are the loose ones of a pre-Prohibition service bar. Two of them need translating before you build the drink.
- A wine glassIn American bar books of this period a wine glass is reckoned at 2 fluid ounces. That is the pour of rye here, and it sets the whole drink.
- A lump of sugarA period cube was roughly a teaspoon's worth, so one level teaspoon of granulated sugar is the practical equivalent, dissolved fully in the hot water before anything cold goes in.
- Dissolve first, then chillThe hinge of the recipe. Sugar dissolves poorly in cold spirit, and shaved ice makes a gritty drink if syrup has not already formed. A tablespoon or so of hot water should do.
- The lemon peel"Peel of half a sound lemon" means the zest in a strip or two, not the pith and not the juice. Hot water pulls the oil out of it, which is the point of adding it at this stage.
- MaraschinoThis means a dry, clear maraschino liqueur, not the syrup from a jar of dyed cherries. A quarter to a half teaspoon is a dash.
- Shaved ice, not cubesShaved or finely cracked ice fills the glass and dilutes as it melts; the recipe has it served with a spoon. Cubes leave the sugar syrup sitting at the bottom.
- RyeStraight rye is back on shelves and is what the recipe calls for; a higher-proof bottling will stand up to the melting ice better than a soft blended whiskey.
- YieldOne drink, in a large glass. It is not a punch and does not scale gracefully, since the sugar has to be dissolved individually.
The word toddy came into English from India, where tari described the fermented sap of the palm; by the eighteenth century it had been borrowed for spirits sweetened, watered and usually warmed. This one is not warm, and that is the interesting part: American bartenders of the nineteenth century kept both a hot toddy and a cold one, the cold version differing from a sling or a whiskey cocktail chiefly in bookkeeping. The little dose of hot water survives here as a technical step for dissolving sugar rather than as a way of heating the drink. Its appearance in a general cook book reflects the period when American cookery writers still treated the mixed drink as part of household hospitality — a habit that Prohibition would edit out of the genre for a generation.