Letter from America Philip Delves Broughton
From coast to coast, the USA is the land of the divine cocktail
Before coronavirus struck, I was in Kansas City, Missouri, at the end of a long and dreary day, looking for a drink.
If I were into craft beers, I’d have been in luck. There were any number of beardy-run ale houses. But I wanted something shorter and stiffer. A drink that spoke of the city’s ribald past, the dark clubs which once nursed a jazz scene second only to that in New Orleans, and a total disregard for Prohibition.
I found it in a bar called Manifesto. It wasn’t just my dismal eyesight that had me squinting at the cocktail list. The amperes were down to a flicker. The walls felt damp. A few couples huddled around the thin light of their phones. Only the rattle of ice broke the quiet.
There, in the Classic Drinks section, was the Pendergast, named after Tom Pendergast, Kansas City’s Democratic Party boss in the 1920s and 1930s. The Pendergast is a Manhattan – bourbon, sweet vermouth and bitters – with an added slug of Benedictine, to ensure it slithers into the lining between your brain and skull. You drink it in a tumbler: cold, no ice, with a twist of lemon.
You imagine craggy men, with drooping jowls, in heavy suits, doing whatever they damn well wanted. While most of America was sweating out Prohibition, Kansas City under Pendergast was wild, full of gambling, vaudeville, jazz and booze. The Paris of the Plains. A couple of Pendergasts later, I had to leave my rental car on the street and take an Uber back to my hotel.
One of the many treats of America is the ubiquity of good cocktails. None of those watery measures served in British pubs. Of course there are the lofty peaks of midtown Manhattan, where you can sit by a rain-soaked window with a great drink at rush hour, watching the poor bastards trying to find a taxi. Or the downtown joints haunted by the ghost of Peter Beard, the photographer who wandered into the woods of Montauk and died in April. He was 82 but so vivid was his earlier life that people were still gossiping about his exploits with camera, drugs and models decades later.
But almost anywhere you go in America, you can find a barman who can sling a drink the way Rod Laver used to sling forehands. Strong wrists.
Where I live in Litchfield, Connecticut, I could show you five places where you would experience the full 6pm mood shift a proper cocktail can deliver.
American cocktails first flourished in the late-19th century, from the Gilded Age to Prohibition, which kicked off a century ago, in 1920. The Martini was invented in San Francisco in 1863, between the Gold Rush and the laying of the Transcontinental Railway. If mixed right, it still tastes of money.
The Daiquiri was created by Americans settling in Cuba after the Spanish were sent home. The classic, fruitless version still evokes white men in the Caribbean, tart and oddly joyless.
The real driver of the boom in cocktails was their efficiency. As life sped up in America, and the economic and social wheels whirred faster than anywhere else in the world, cocktails took you where you wanted to go far more quickly than wine or beer.
If whisky merely lugs you from one melancholic peat hut to another, and gin plunges you from frenzy to tears, cocktails rapidly conjure a beautiful palette of moods. Leave the long claret sessions to Europeans. A good barman is like David Hockney with his ipad, stirring your emotions with a few deft strokes – as he’s just done with his new pictures of spring blossom in Normandy.
During Prohibition, when the cops came bursting in, you were better off stashing a bottle of rye than a case of wine. Cocktails were never about nose, legs or mouth feel. Just pure efficiency.
The last couple of decades have seen the rise in America of the ‘mixologist’, hipster for ‘barman’. The barman will pour you anything, from a Bud Light to a Harvey Wallbanger. The mixologist is the cocktail purist. But the economics of tending bar mean the mixologist often has to slum it and pull pints.
The great leap forward in American cocktails has been fabulous. I never imagined you could improve on a classic Martini until I had one with clarified milk punch. Mezcal spoke of gunslingers asleep under sombreros. Now it’s everywhere, smoky and delicious.
I even love the trend towards gigantic ice cubes. If the company is dull, you can figure out the physics of getting your drink past the icebergs into your mouth.
How little is done with the resources available in a British pub. You’ve got glasses, ice and all sorts of drinks and mixers – and what do you get? A limp gin and tonic. With a citrus zester, a jar of cherries and a freezer for cocktail glasses, you could have so much more. A proper Tom Pendergast night out – with raging headache to follow.