One morsel review: Anastatic reproduztion of a 1926 book, this is a collection of recipes of cocktails popular in the Twenties. Fun to own.

The Cocktail Book
A Sideboard Manual for Gentlemen

Ross Bolton

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Genre: Recipes Book
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This book collects 172 recipes of well known – as well as less so – cocktails, divided into categories, if a bit arbitrary (one category, for example, is “Some recent favourites”). There’s also a section for non-alcoholic drinks.
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I love old books, so I love anastatic reproductions too. Granted, an anastatic copy isn’t the real thing, but it’s good enough, and they still have that feeling of old, because the copy also reproduces the mars and imperfections of the original. Anastatic copies aren’t perfect. Also on this one, the characters are sometimes blurred, sometimes even unreadable, but I think this is the charm of this kind of publication.

This book was originally published in London in 1926, and by today’s standards is a funny book. It starts off with a very unlikely story of how the word ‘cocktails’ was born, but the story is told with such amusement it’s hard to say whether the author is being serious about it. It is fun to read, that’s for sure.

The book then just lists the recipes of the cocktails. For every cocktail, a list of ingredients and very brief directions are provided. And that’s it. No comment, no advice, no pictures. It doesn’t really look like a recipes book how we know it today.
Still it is interesting because of the reference. If a cocktail is in this book, you’ll know it was around in the Twenties. And as anyone doing a research will know, sometimes finding out whether something was around at a particular time it’s the hardest part.

At the back of the book, there are some tips on how to properly handle a dinner, as far as alcohol is concerned.

So, I may have been a bit disappointed, because there is very little in here other than the recipes, and I was hoping for some more piece of information, but I still find it useful and love to own it.