The 1862 Origin of the Cocktail

The first printed definition of the word cocktail appeared in 1806, in a Hudson, New York newspaper called The Balance and Columbian Repository. A reader had written in to ask what a "cock-tail" was. The editor's reply, often quoted, never gets less wonderful:

"Cock-tail is a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters — it is vulgarly called a bittered sling, and is supposed to be an excellent electioneering potion."

That definition — spirit, sugar, water, bitters — is what we now call an Old Fashioned. It's also the entire structural premise of half of modern mixology. The cocktail was, from its first appearance in print, a category, not a recipe.

Fifty-six years later, in 1862, Jerry Thomas published How to Mix Drinks; or, The Bon-Vivant's Companion. He had been working as a bartender for almost two decades by then — New Haven, San Francisco during the Gold Rush, New Orleans, Charleston, St. Louis, and finally New York, where he tended a celebrated silver-fitted bar at the Metropolitan Hotel on Broadway. He was, by every account, a showman: he kept songbirds on a perch behind the bar, owned a bar dog, and famously prepared the Blue Blazer by passing a stream of flaming whisky between two metal mugs.

The book that came out of all that was not, structurally, a celebration of his own showmanship. It was something quieter and more important: it was the first attempt in English to codify bartending as a discipline with reproducible procedures, named drinks, standardized vocabulary, and a defended classification system.

What Thomas actually did

The book is short by modern standards — about 230 pages in the 1862 edition, including a long appendix on wines, cordials, and bitters borrowed almost verbatim from Christian Schultz's Manual for the Manufacture of Cordials, Liquors, Fancy Syrups (1862). Thomas does not credit Schultz, which is now considered an embarrassment but was perfectly normal for a 19th-century practical manual.

Strip out the borrowed material and what remains is roughly a hundred original recipes, organized by category. The categories themselves are an act of taxonomy:

• Punches (Thomas takes them most seriously — the section is largest, with 53 recipes)
• Juleps, Smashes, Cobblers, Mulls, and Sangarees
• Toddies, Slings, and Flips
• Sours, Fixes, and Daisies
• Crustas (Thomas is the first to print the recipe; he attributes the invention to Joseph Santini of New Orleans)
• And, finally, ten recipes specifically called "Cocktails"

This last category is the historically loaded one. To Thomas, "cocktail" is not yet a generic term for a mixed drink. It is a specific subgenre — bittered, sweetened, diluted spirit. The Old Fashioned wasn't called the Old Fashioned because nothing else existed yet to make it old-fashioned. Thomas just calls it the Whiskey Cocktail, the Brandy Cocktail, the Gin Cocktail.

The 1806 definition has been preserved more or less intact, but with one critical addition: ice. By 1862, the commercial ice trade — pioneered by Frederic Tudor of Boston, who had been shipping New England pond ice to the Caribbean since 1806 — had made ice cheap enough to use behind a bar. Thomas's recipes assume ice the way modern recipes assume electricity. It is the technological precondition of everything else.

What he didn't do

Three modern conventions are conspicuously absent from Thomas's book.

He does not give exact measurements in any consistent way. A typical recipe reads "1 wine-glass of brandy, 3 dashes of gum syrup, 2 dashes of bitters." A wine-glass in 1862 was understood to mean roughly two ounces, but it was a folk measure, not a calibrated one. The standardized 1.5-oz / 0.75-oz ratios that any modern bartender carries in their head as muscle memory are a 20th-century development — and a development Thomas would probably have considered absurdly fussy. His drinks are designed to be made by feel by someone who already knows what they're doing.

He does not classify by flavor profile. There is no acknowledgment that a Sour and a Fix are nearly the same drink. Categories are defined by technique (built, shaken, layered, churned over crushed ice) and by temperature, not by what the drink tastes like. Cobblers and Smashes both use crushed ice and citrus, and they appear in different chapters. The reader is expected to learn the differences by making them.

He does not theorize. Modern cocktail writing — Wondrich, Boudreau, Embury — spends much of its page count on why: why this ratio, why this glass, why this technique. Thomas writes only the what and the how. The reasoning is left implicit, embedded in the recipes themselves. If you want to understand why the Sazerac is built the way it is, you have to make a hundred Sazeracs.

This is, paradoxically, the source of the book's enduring usefulness. A recipe book that explains its reasoning becomes obsolete when the reasoning does. A recipe book that just transmits what works is harder to outdate.

The Blue Blazer problem

The recipe Thomas is most famous for — the Blue Blazer — is also the recipe that best illustrates what makes him a difficult source for the modern bartender. The instructions, in full:

"Use two large silver-plated mugs, with handles. Put the whiskey into one mug, and the boiling water into the other; ignite the whiskey, and while blazing mix both ingredients by pouring them four or five times from one mug to the other. If well done this will have the appearance of a continued stream of liquid fire."

That is the whole recipe. There are no measurements. There is no temperature target for the water. There is no warning about the mug being hot enough to burn through a wet bar towel. There is no acknowledgment that on the second pour, the burning whiskey will inevitably spatter, and that the result is a drink that requires a small amount of theatrical fearlessness from the bartender and a large amount of trust from the guest. It is a recipe written for a colleague who has already watched it done.

This is not a flaw in Thomas's book. It is the central feature. The book is a trade reference, written for trade. The modern reader who treats it as a how-to guide for the home will burn down a kitchen.

Why it still works

What makes How to Mix Drinks a living document, 164 years later, is the same thing that made it useful in 1862: it answers the working bartender's three operative questions in a form that fits behind a bar.

1. What is the structure of this drink? — Thomas tells you what category, what spirit base, what builds it. You can riff from there.
2. What's the canonical version? — When a guest asks for a Whiskey Cocktail or a Punch in the abstract, Thomas gives you a defensible default. You don't have to argue about it.
3. What technique does it want? — The category placement tells you. A Smash gets muddled mint and crushed ice. A Cobbler gets shaken berries. A Flip gets the whole egg. You don't have to guess.

A modern bartender can pick up the book today, open it to the Punches section, and produce a drink that will surprise a 21st-century guest with how good it is. The recipes have aged because they were never trendy in the first place. They are infrastructure.

A reading suggestion

The 1862 edition is in the public domain and freely available through Project Gutenberg, the Library of Congress, and the Internet Archive. The 1887 revised edition (published posthumously) adds a few recipes — including the Tom Collins — and is the more commonly reproduced version, but the 1862 edition is the historical artifact. Read both side by side; the differences are instructive.

Read it the way you'd read an old technique book in any craft — not to extract recipes but to absorb a posture toward the work. Thomas treats bartending as a serious occupation, deserving of careful documentation, capable of bearing the weight of attention. That posture is what built the modern profession. Everything since has been argument with him.

Have a question about a specific Thomas recipe, or a request for a deeper reading of one? Send it to The Bar Lab — we read every message.