Back in the Day

This drink is pictured in the 13.5 oz
Polka Dot Zombie Glass, available on the
Contemporary Complements website.

So, I'm wandering the streets of Bisbee, Arizona. (Don't worry, I'm home now, you're all safe.) Myself and a few friends duck into an antique shop, and start rummaging around the well-kept piles of aged folderol. I have two targets in the typical antique store: board games and books. (Barware is coming on strong as a third category, but unless I have a good way of getting it home, I mostly just look at it and whimper.)

My find for the evening is a well-kept 1956 copy of the Esquire Drink Book. This is, to my knowledge, not a particularly valuable or important tome, but it does fit nicely into my enjoyment of watching recipes change over time. This applies equally to food and drink - my go-to cookbook is the mid-1960's Culinary Arts Institute cookbook with the orange cover that my parents had, and that I now have a new copy of thanks to my local used bookstore. Sometimes, you do need to know how to use animal fats and cook game in the way that was ubiquitous back in the day, and you fancy-schmancy lowfat modern cookbook is not gonna have a clue.

In reading through my little window on 1957, I'm struck by the things that are to be casual knowledge to reader. There's delightful anecdotes about the various alcohols common to the Mad Men bar era, but you're also expected to be able to casually divide by 17 in your head (the "basic 17" being the number of jiggers - 1.5 ounce pours - in a standard fifth of alcohol). So if you're mixing for 20 people, you're to use 3 drinks a person, for 60 drinks, meaning four bottles of any alcohol being used in your drinks at a 1-part ratio. Fortunately for you, there should be 9 or so drinks left over at the end of it after having done all that math.

There's a much stronger focus on certain alcohols of the time: rye whiskey definitely gets its due, and applejack and gin, though certainly not uncommon today, rate page after page of recipes, with tequila ranking a miserable three recipes total. And, of course, there are several pages of celebrity-endorsed cocktail recipes. Many are notable for their lack of effort (Bob Hope's Rye Lemonade has two ingredients, left as an exercise to the reader), some are more hyperbole than substance (the Ernest Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon is absinthe and champagne - replacing the tradition water drop with the bubbly - and the admonition to "drink 3 to 5 of these slowly") and some are, well, impractical (the Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road Cocktail starts with step one: "Select in May six of your finest McIntosh trees and place a hive of bees under each tree in ensure the setting of the blossoms."). However, some recipes were perky enough to take notice of, and so we have arrived at Bing Crosby's Kailua Cocktail.

There's no story or information given as to the endorsement; there's a line in a Bing Crosby song named "You Took Advantage of Me" that goes:

But horses are frequently silly-
Mine ran from the beach of Kailua And left me alone for a filly,So I-a picked you-a.

Hey, they can't all be winners.

The obvious "Blue Hawaii" and "Mele Kalikimaka" aside, this may have simply been Esquire looking around and saying "hey, this Polynesian thing has some legs, let's The Bing in for a spread and ply him with drinks," which, truth be told, would actually be a pretty cool way to get an endorsement of your drink. In any event, his cocktail is a nice little tiki-ish drink that's a bit on the sweet side (thank you pineapple), and if it doesn't in any particularly new directions, it at least gives me an another reason to admire my book purchase. Certainly more than the "365 Excuses for a Party" (November 28: Anniversary of peace between U.S. and Tunis)...

Bing Crosby's Kailua Cocktail (from the Esquire Drink Book, 1957 printing)

2.25 oz. Puerto Rican dark rum (I used Bacardi Gold, spiked with a bit of Myer's*)
.75 oz. pineapple juice
.5 oz fresh lemon juice
.5 oz pomegranate syrup

Add to a shaker with ice; shake to blend. Pour into punch or tall glass with ice.

*Interestingly, when working on this, it appears that the dark rum I drank for years, Bacardi Black, is no longer available in the US (or at least in Michigan). I know that Select is also a 4-year age, the same as Black, but it's definitely not the same visual as the dark rum of my misspent youth. I obviously haven't missed it, what with my Myer's and my Cruzan Blackstrap and my Kraken and so on, but it does give me a bit of pause (and perhaps incentive to pick up a bottle at the Schipol duty-free on my way through Amsterdam next month, for nostalgia's sake...)