Jerry Thomas

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Jerry Thomas , actually Jeremiah P. Thomas (* around 1830 - according to the New York Times obituary not until 1832 - in Sackets Harbor , New York ; † December 14, 1885 in New York City , New York ), was one of the most famous Americans Bartenders and restaurateurs .

He is considered the "forefather of American mixed art" and was one of the pioneers of the "golden age of cocktails " in the second half of the 19th century, which earned him the nickname "professor" during his lifetime. His book How to Mix Drinks, or the Bon Vivant's Companion or The Bartender's Guide , a handbook for bartenders, the first editions of which appeared in 1862, was the first specialist book of its kind in the United States and contributed significantly to professionalizing the profession . It is still considered a standard work today.

Life

Jerry Thomas preparing a blue blazer . Illustration from Jerry Thomas: How to Mix Drinks (1862).

Little is known about Jerry Thomas' childhood and youth. He was born in Sackets Harbor , New York, and began working as a bartender in New Haven, Connecticut , before joining a ship in the late 1840s - he later said of himself that he was also a "sailor" - traveled to California to participate in the gold rush . He hired himself as a gold prospector , organized entertainment shows ( minstrel shows ) and worked as a bartender. In 1851 he returned to New York and opened a bar in the building of Barnum's American Museum , a museum of popular culture. After a few years he began to travel again and worked as a bar manager in various hotels and saloons, including in St. Louis ( Missouri ), Chicago ( Illinois ), San Francisco (California), Charleston (South Carolina) and New Orleans ( Louisiana ) . He also went on a long tour of Europe, where he developed a preference for Bric-à-Brac , among other things . As a bartender, he was known for his great artistry and entertained his guests with shows, such as juggling bottles, glasses and ingredients, which is now known as flair bartending . Thomas is said to have always worn elaborate jewelry and worked with ornate mixing cups (the cocktail shaker was only used later) and valuable bar tools . At the Occidental Hotel in San Francisco, he earned $ 100 a week - more than the Vice President of the United States at the time . During this time he was already mixing the Blue Blazer , his signature drink . The drink allegedly originated in El Dorado , a game room in San Francisco. During production, burning whiskey is artfully thrown back and forth in the air between two mugs (technically "thrown").

Back in New York , Thomas first became head bartender at the Metropolitan Hotel and published his famous bar book How to Mix Drinks, or The Bon Vivant's Companion in 1862 . In 1869 (according to W. Grimes as early as 1866) Thomas opened his own bar on Broadway , between 21st and 22nd Streets . There his guests could not only drink, but also admire their distorted reflections in a kind of laughing room or political caricatures like that of Thomas Nast , which Jerry Thomas was one of the first to exhibit. He was not only active as an art collector - his bar looked like an art gallery - but also painted himself, traveled a lot and must have been one of the most famous personalities in New York society at that time. His interest in bare knuckle boxing and bottle gourds is also recorded . In the late 1870s, Jerry Thomas became chairman of the Gourd Club , which he founded , after his garden had produced the longest specimen; He was also a member of the Fat Men's Association , albeit undoubtedly one of the lighter at 205 pounds.

In the 1880s, happiness seemed to be turning away from Jerry Thomas. Due to heavy losses on stock market speculation , he had to close his famous saloon on Broadway and sell most of his art collection. Although he opened several new bars, but could not build on the successes of earlier times. When he died a sudden death in 1885 at the age of 50, obituaries appeared in newspapers all over the country. The New York Times wrote: "At one point Jerry Thomas was the most famous bartender in town among the club men and bon vivants, and he was extremely popular with people of all walks of life." He left his widow and two daughters.

plant

Jerry Thomas' book How to Mix Drinks or The Bon Vivant's Companion (" How to mix drinks or the companion for bon vivants") or The Bartender's Guide ("Guide for bartenders") is considered to be the first specialist book that was written exclusively about mixed drinks . For the first time, it also contained a few mix recipes for the cocktails that came into fashion in the first half of the 19th century . According to general opinion, it appeared in 1862 in two editions which were identical in content and differed only in title and price. For the alternative title The Bar-Tender's Guide And Bon Vivant's Companion , however, there is also an advertisement in another beverage specialist book published by Dick & Fitzgerald from 1858. The advertised publication is a double edition, which has been supplemented by recipes for making cordials , liqueurs and syrups, written by the Swiss Christian Schulz. The different titles should obviously appeal to different target groups - on the one hand professional bartenders, i.e. the professional world, on the other hand interested laypeople. In total, the first edition from 1862 was produced over a period of more than ten years with constantly changing binding quotas, with different prices and bindings in an estimated total print run of around 8,000 copies, which today can fetch prices of many thousands of US dollars.

The resulting only in 1800 word " cocktail " was around 1860, no generic term for all alcoholic mixed drinks, but according to Thomas "a modern invention" and called at the time only a very small group of short drinks , whose recipes he in the chapter The Cocktail & Crusta amassed. Thomas' "cocktails" were all from a spirit and a few splashes ( Dashes ) sugar syrup , bitters and Curacao . The closeness to the form of a "cocktail" as "bittered sling", which was first defined in 1806, is therefore still clearly recognizable. Decorated with a bit of lemon peel (today: Twist ), Thomas called these cocktails "fancy"; If he added a little lemon juice to the drink and covered the glass with a long piece of sugared lemon peel, you got a crusta .

Thomas assigned all other mixed drinks in his book to the drink categories that were already established at the time: Punch; Egg nogg; Juleps ; The smash ; The Cobbler; Mulls and sangarees; Toddies and slings; Fixes and sours ; Flip , Negus and Shrub . He summarized non-alcoholic mixed drinks as Temperance Drinks ; those that he could not clearly assign to a type, he called fancy drinks (for example "fantasy drinks ", from English fancy = unusual, original) or listed them under the miscellaneous drinks ("different drinks"). Many of the drinks that are still known today, such as the Flip , were first printed out by Thomas. In a later edition of 1876, which Thomas had added new recipes, the Tom Collins is mentioned for the first time, shortly after the so-called Tom Collins joke (English The Great Tom Collins Hoax ) of 1874. Jerry Thomas also claimed that the mixed drink To have invented Tom and Jerry as early as 1847 in California at the age of (probably) 17 years. He named the drink after his two mice and lists a recipe for several people in his book published in 1862.

At times, Jerry Thomas was even referred to as the inventor of the Martini cocktail or its close relative and alleged forerunner Martinez . In fact, there is no Martini recipe in his books, and the Martinez can only be found in a completely revised new edition from 1887, which was published posthumously two years after his death , and whose authors are not known. In this book entitled The Bar-Tender's Guide or How to Mix All Kinds of Plain and Fancy Drinks ("Guide for bartenders or How to mix all kinds of ordinary and fancy drinks"), the now fashionable "cocktails" were already there the first drink group, and its number had almost doubled since the first edition in 1862.

reception

Jerry Thomas' books heralded a whole series of other publications in the years that followed, whose works were clearly influenced by him, for example the Cooling Cups and Dainty Drinks by William Terrington , published in 1869 . The mix recipes from the Dr. Case's Recipe Book from 1882, which contains a total of over 2000 recipes for all situations, even go back completely to Thomas; entire sections of his book were taken over directly. Even later, Jerry Thomas' name was never completely forgotten, but his recipes were at times. Initially copied and passed on many times by other authors, many classic drinks were hardly to be found in bar and mix books in the 20th century, especially after the prohibition of the 1920s. The Herbert Asbury Edition , published in 1928, was also to be the last reprint of Thomas' work for many years.

That didn't change until the mid-1980s, when New York bartender Dale DeGroff started working with an old book by Jerry Thomas. By the turn of the millennium, reproductions of Jerry Thomas' books became widespread on the Internet and through facsimile reprints. In the United States and Europe in particular, bartenders went back to the origins of their craft and set about remixing and reinterpreting historical recipes from the 19th century. In 2007 the American cocktail historian David Wondrich published his book Imbibe! , in which he shows the great influence of Jerry Thomas on the "American Bar" and adapted many of the historical recipes and made them accessible again. In 2009 the first German-language version of Jerry Thomas' book was finally published as a special edition by whiskey manufacturer Beam Global (since 2014: Beam Suntory ), which is based on the Bartender's Guide from 1887. In 2015, a revised edition of Imbibe followed, supplemented with newer research and with a foreword by Dale DeGroff ! .

Publications by Jerry Thomas

  • Jerry Thomas: How to Mix Drinks, or the Bon Vivant's Companion . Dick & Fitzgerald, New York 1862; complete texts at Google Books (also as PDF): Schlesinger Library ; Harvard College Library . The book was also distributed under the title The Bartender's Guide and was reprinted many times with various covers. An expanded edition appeared in 1876.
  • Jerry Thomas: The Bar-Tender's Guide or How to Mix All Kinds of Plain and Fancy Drinks . Posthumously published, expanded edition. Dick & Fitzgerald, New York 1887; Full text (without illustrations) at www.artofdrink.com .
  • Jerry Thomas' Bartender's Guide or How to Mix all Kinds of Drinks . German translation of text and recipes of the posthumously published edition from 1887. Special edition of Beam Global Germany limited to 2000 copies, the recipe section edited by Klaus St. Rainer. 2009, ISBN 978-3-00-028946-0 .

Literature on Jerry Thomas

  • Introduction ( Introduction ) by Herbert Asbury in: Jerry Thomas: The Bon Vivant's Companion or How to Mix Drinks. Alfred A. Knopf Publisher, New York 1928. The 5th edition (1929) is available online at EUVS Vintage Cocktail Books (English). Life and classification of Jerry Thomas' work as an introduction to a new edition of the historical first edition from 1862.
  • Dietrich Bock: Exquisite cocktails for private guests. Self-published, Erkrath-Hochdahl 1997, ISBN 3-00-001901-4 , on Jerry Thomas and his publications in particular pp. 9–16, 27–31, 40–42. First comprehensively researched presentation of the history of cocktails and American drinking culture in the 19th century in German based on original sources.
  • David Wondrich: Imbibe! From Absinthe Cocktail to Whiskey Smash. A Salute in Stories and Drinks to "Professor" Jerry Thomas, Pioneer of the American Bar . Perigee (Penguin Group), New York 2007, ISBN 978-0-399-53287-0 (English); Revised and supplemented new edition: Tarcher-Perigee, New York 2015, ISBN 978-0-399-17261-8 . Jerry Thomas biography and historical cocktail recipes depicting bar culture in the United States.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In the personal database of the Library of Congress , in the entry Personal database Jerry Thomas, the date of birth is approximately ("on or around") November 1, 1830 noted in the death certificate; a piece of information that can be found in David Wondrich's biography of Jerry Thomas: Imbibe! From Absinthe Cocktail to Whiskey Smash. A Salute in Stories and Drinks to "Professor" Jerry Thomas, Pioneer of the American Bar . Perigee (Penguin Group), New York 2007, ISBN 978-0-399-53287-0 . Dietrich Bock gives in his book exquisite cocktails for private guests. (Self-published, Erkrath-Hochdahl 1997, ISBN 3-00-001901-4 , p. 10) as the year of birth 1825, but does not cite a source.
  2. ↑ a b c d e A Noted Saloon-Keeper Dead. (PDF) ( Memento of the original from January 23, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Obituary for the death of Jerry Thomas in the New York Times on December 16, 1885. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / query.nytimes.com
  3. ↑ The New York Times reported on December 16, 1885, a Wednesday that Jerry Thomas died on Monday afternoon: A noted Saloon Keeper Dead (PDF) ( Memento of the original from January 23, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link became automatic used and not yet tested. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ; Thomas' biographer David Wondrich mentions the same date and refers to the death certificate: Imbibe! From Absinthe Cocktail to Whiskey Smash. A Salute in Stories and Drinks to "Professor" Jerry Thomas, Pioneer of the American Bar . Perigee (Penguin Group), New York 2007, ISBN 978-0-399-53287-0 , p. 34. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / query.nytimes.com
  4. ↑ a b c d Pete Wells: Frost on the Sun: Summertime Cocktails In: New York Times, June 21, 2006, accessed September 7, 2012.
  5. ^ William Grimes: Shaken, Stirred or Mixed, The Gilded Age Lives Again (English) In: New York Times of March 26, 2003, accessed September 9, 2012.
  6. ^ John Hodgman: All Shaken Up In: New York Times, October 17, 2004, accessed September 9, 2012.
  7. ↑ Recipe: Blue Blazer , New York Times , October 31, 2007.
  8. ↑ a b William Grimes: Critic's Notebook; Shaken, Stirred or Mixed, The Gilded Age Lives Again in: New York Times, March 26, 2003, accessed September 29, 2012.
  9. ↑ The Gourd Club In: New York Times, May 10, 1878, accessed September 9, 2012.
  10. ↑ The New York Times reported the cause of death as " apoplexy ," a term that in the 19th century was used not only for stroke but also for a variety of other causes of sudden death such as sudden cardiac death , aortic aneurysm, and heart attack .
  11. ^ Dietrich Bock: Exquisite cocktails for private guests. Self-published, Erkrath-Hochdahl 1997, ISBN 3-00-001901-4 .
  12. ↑ a b Martin Stein: “Dr. Cases New Recipe Book “or the cocktail copycat. In: mixology.eu. February 25, 2019, accessed February 28, 2019 .
  13. ↑ Harry Croswell, editor of the weekly magazine The Balance, and Columbian Repository (Hudson, New York), replied to a letter to the editor in the May 13, 1806 issue: “Cock tail, then, is a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters - it is vulgarly called a bittered sling […] " . See Anistatia Miller, Jared Brown: Spirituous Journey. A History of Drink. Book one: From the Birth of Spirits to the Birth of the Cocktail . Mixellany, London 2009, ISBN 978-0-9760937-9-4 , pp. 191ff.
  14. ↑ Jerry Thomas: How to Mix Drinks, or the Bon-Vivant's Companion. Dick & Fitzgerald, New York 1862.
  15. ↑ George Sinclair: The Great Tom Collins Hoax , accessed September 9, 2012.
  16. ^ Simon Difford: Cocktails . Diffrordsguide, London 2008, ISBN 0-9556276-0-5 , p. 351 ( excerpt from Google Books ).
  17. ↑ Jerry Thomas: How to Mix Drinks, or the Bon-Vivant's Companion. Dick & Fitzgerald, New York 1862; Searchable scan on Google Books .
  18. ↑ Jerry Thomas: The Bar-Tender''s Guide or How to Mix All Kinds of Plain and Fancy Drinks . Dick & Fitzgerald, New York 1887, p. 25.
  19. ^ William Terrington: Cooling Cups and Dainty Drinks. George Routledge and Sons, London and New York, 1869.
  20. ↑ Imbibe! From Absinthe Cocktail to Whiskey Smash. A Salute in Stories and Drinks to "Professor" Jerry Thomas, Pioneer of the American Bar . Perigee (Penguin Group), New York 2009, ISBN 978-0-399-53287-0 .
  21. ↑ Jerry Thomas' Bartender's Guide or How to Mix all Kinds of Drinks . Translation of the posthumously published edition from 1887, the recipe section edited by Klaus St. Rainer. Beam Global Germany (editor), 2009, ISBN 978-3-00-028946-0 .
personal data
SURNAME Thomas, Jerry
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Thomas, Jeremiah P.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American bartender and restaurateur
DATE OF BIRTH 1830 or 1832
PLACE OF BIRTH Sackets Harbor , New York
DATE OF DEATH December 14, 1885
Place of death New York City , New York