Title: Gilded Age Cocktails
Series: Standalone
Author’s Name: Cecelia Tichi
Publisher: NYU Press
Genre: Cocktails and Mixed Drinks
Page Count: 176 Pages
ISBN: 978-1479805259
Author or Book Website: N/A
Link to Amazon purchase page: Gilded Age Cocktails: History, Lore, and Recipes from America’s Golden Age (Washington Mews Books): Tichi: Amazon.com: Books
Link to Goodreads: Gilded Age Cocktails: History, Lore, and Recipes from America’s Golden Age by Cecelia Tichi | Goodreads
Release Date: N/A
How I Got the Book: Review Copy
Summary of the Book:
A delightful romp through America’s Golden Age of Cocktails
The decades following the American Civil War burst with invention–they saw the dawn of the telephone, the motor car, electric lights, the airplane–but no innovation was more welcome than the beverage heralded as the “cocktail.”
The Gilded Age, as it came to be known, was the Golden Age of Cocktails, giving birth to the classic Manhattan and martini that can be ordered at any bar to this day. Scores of whiskey drinks, cooled with ice chips or cubes that chimed against the glass, proved doubly pleasing when mixed, shaken, or stirred with special flavorings, juices, and fruits. The dazzling new drinks flourished coast to coast at sporting events, luncheons, and balls, on ocean liners and yachts, in barrooms, summer resorts, hotels, railroad train club cars, and private homes.
From New York to San Francisco, celebrity bartenders rose to fame, inventing drinks for exclusive universities and exotic locales. Bartenders poured their liquid secrets for dancing girls and such industry tycoons as the newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst and the railroad king “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt.
Cecelia Tichi offers a tour of the cocktail hours of the Gilded Age, in which industry, innovation, and progress all take a break to enjoy the signature beverage of the age. Gilded Age Cocktails reveals the fascinating history behind each drink as well as bartenders’ formerly secret recipes. Though the Gilded Age cocktail went “underground” during the Prohibition era, it launched the first of many generations whose palates thrilled to a panoply of artistically mixed drinks.
My Personal Review: I received a copy of this book for a fair and honest review. It is a wonderful good of cocktails. They make my think of the art that is mixing cocktails. It makes me things of speakeasies, bars of the gold age and a lot of good times that have happened and those to come. Another nice touch to the book are the pencil drawing of ingredients and cocktails. It just added a little extra something to the experience. The recipes were easy to fall and makes the drinks the same each time.
My Rating of the Book: 4 Stars
From the Book Reviewer's Desk 