1920s cocktails and their 2020s legacy - with recipes

2020 has become the Summer of Cocktails in my house, due to my having discovered the How to Drink YouTube channel.  This is an excellent channel which I highly recommend if you're at all interested in cocktails, their history, and how to make them.  It's well produced, well presented, and very informative.

On the left we have the monkey gland, and on the right we have the bee's knees.  These 1920s cocktails really deserve to make a comeback.

This video presents five cocktails invented during the 1920s.  I tried two of the recipes (the ones I had the ingredients for), and was impressed.  Here are the recipes I use for the pictured cocktails:

Honey syrup is very easy to make.  You dissolve half a cup of honey in half a cup of hot water, et voila: you now have honey syrup.

The monkey gland is an aromatic drink with notes of aniseed from the absinthe and a bright, fruity taste, like tropical punch for adults.  The grenadine gives it a gorgeous psychedelic peach colour which I absolutely love (and which unfortunately does not photograph well).  Greg from How to Drink recommends spritzing a tiny amount of absinthe into the glass with a small spray bottle instead of adding absinthe when you mix the drink, which I find works really well.  I also suggest adding about 10 ml of lemon juice.  It's not in the original recipe, but it really gives the drink a little extra something.

The bee's knees is less complex and not as colourful, but makes up for it by being magically delicious.  It's like a lemon honey drink, and if you drink it hot when you have a cold it will probably make you feel a whole lot better.  Greg's 1920s version doesn't include orange juice, but some recipes do, and I like it with a splash of orange in there.  I've stuck to the 1920s 1:1:1 ratio, with equal parts gin, honey, and citrus.

It turns out few of the well known classic cocktails were actually invented in the 1920s.  The 1920s brought prohibition to the United States (and parts of Europe), and during this period the goal of cocktails was often to mask the taste of questionable bootleg hooch.  That said, 20s cocktails were creative in their own way, and their legacy is still with us today.  Take a look at any bar's cocktail menu and you'll find a long list of sweet, dangerous drinks that don't taste like alcohol.  These drinks are the descendants of 1920s cocktails.

Previously, mixed drinks had been all about the alcohol. If someone offers you pineapple punch today it's probably going to taste mainly of pineapple juice, regardless of what else is in it.  We think of punch as a fruit juice based beverage that could be either alcoholic or non-alcoholic.  But the pineapple punch recipe from Jerry Thomas's 1862 bartending guide How to Mix Drinks contains 4 bottles of champagne, 1 pint of Jamaica rum, 1 pint brandy, and 1 gill of curacao, along with 4 sliced pineapples and the juice of 4 lemons*.  Mixed drinks that didn't taste alcoholic existed in the 19th century, but they were unusual.

The 1917 book Recipes for Mixed Drinks by Hugo Ensslin is noticeably more modern than How to Mix Drinks, but still very much a product of the same tradition.  Hugo Ensslin's recipes generally contain two or three different types of spirits, which might be enhanced using bitters, syrups, or citrus juice.  Like Jerry Thomas's recipes they focus on the flavours of the various spirits and liqueurs used to make them.

These cocktail recipes were apparently on the menu at the Savoy in London during the 1920s and are similar to the recipes in Hugo Ensslin's book, but in the United States a different trend was emerging.  In America cocktails started to include only one or perhaps two kinds of spirit, generally gin or rum, depending on your proximity to Cuba and its rum smuggling routes.  Clear spirits dominated the US market during prohibition because they were quicker and easier to make, and easier to conceal.  But they often didn't taste great, and even after prohibition was repealed American spirits were often poor quality, so it was necessary to add sweeteners and other flavouring agents.  This resulted in drinks like the bee's knees, where the alcohol component is completely overpowered by other flavours.

Soft drinks were also becoming more widespread at this time, in part because of technological advances and partially because Americans drank them as an alternative to alcoholic beverages.  It was only a matter of time before people decided they made good mixers. 

So yes, I think the 1920s changed the way we think about drinks in general.  The evolution of colourful, fruit flavoured cocktails does appear to coincide with the 1920s.  They became popular in the US and took off in other countries as well, because while not every country had prohibition, most people like fruit drinks.

And you know, we can learn from the drinking habits of the 1920s.  This economy is pretty tough for a lot of us.  If you're on a budget and choose your gin for reasons of economy rather than flavour, why not improve it by making a South Side fizz?  Apparently it was Al Capone's favourite, and for all his many faults he was an expert on the subject of dodgy gin.



* This is a fairly typical Jerry Thomas punch recipe.  Those drinks are called "punch" for a reason.