Sorry for the long absence. I hope my tens of readers did not forget about me! Tell your friends….

Anyway, I’d like to do a full review of one of the two new books I mentioned before: Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, by Ted Haigh, a.k.a. Dr. Cocktail. I don’t want to bury the lede here, so let me just say at the start, I love this little book. In fact, I hereby give you permission to skip my purple prose in the rest of this post if you promise to buy it. Just come back and let me know how much you like it in the comments.

The first thing I look for in a new cocktail book is, of course, whether or not is has a Pegu recipe within. Sure enough, there it is, nestled on pages 96 and 97. Furthermore, it has close to the exact recipe we feature here, at the Grand High Temple of Pegus. Ted gets his recipe from Daniel Reichert of Vintage Cocktails. This is an excellent site, not least because it has the Pegu as its featured drink! The recipe deviates from mine in a slight increase in the amount of Lime Juice used. If you use my shortcut(sorry, Gabe), this is much too much. With fresh limes, I still think it is too limey for my taste, but I should concede that this was originally a beastly hot weather drink. This much lime makes it more refreshing, but I think it loses some complexity. Ted also comments that many cocktail books list the Pegu as using plain curaçao instead of Cointreau, as well as including orange bitters, and he shows excellent taste in sticking with the recipe he does! Ted is also a partner in CocktailDB.com, which curiously lists two recipes for the Pegu, neither of which is close to the version in his book! When I first started this little blogging adventure, I emailed them about the correct formulation, and Ted’s partner, Martin Doudoroff, replied that they were revamping the database. But then, aren’t we all?

While a good Pegu recipe is more than enough to earn this book an honored spot on my bar library shelf, it really is a winner in other respects as well. There are lots of excellent photographs, the kind that send me scrounging for new glassware. Another neat set of illustrations are sprinkled throughout, comprised of reprints of old liquor ads and photographs of antique liquors from his collection.

The way I read most cocktail books is to read the intro, then page through the recipes. I look at the pictures, skim the ingredients, and mark a few for later experiments. I pay close attention to the sidebars and fun quotes. This book, like only a few others like it, I have read cover to cover. It begins with a well written history of the Golden Age of cocktails, before, during and after Prohibition. It touches on how cocktails, and the use of the word cocktail, evolved.

But more importantly, the recipe pages are absorbing! Most of the text is comprised of anecdotes, personal or historical, related to the drink; discussion on any obscure ingredients it may require; and thoughts regarding the taste of the result or appropriate settings in which to order it. I found some of the most entertaining reading to be in regard to drinks I’d no more likely try than Thunderbird.

The book ends with two sections that are invaluable for someone like me: A persnickety cocktail snob with gaping holes still in his knowledge. It has a good glossary of the more obscure liquors and bitters and other whatnot one uses for the alchemy recorded on the prior pages, and even more importantly, at least one source where you can get what you need to try things out. One word of warning, if you make much use of this last section, this sixteen dollar book is going to cost you much more!

I’ll have more to say about this book, but I’ll save it for parts of some other posts I’ve got planned pretty soon. A few recipes, besides the Pegu, are old favorites of mine that I intended to write about anyway, and there is good material here for them. There also some of my favorite thing in a good cocktail book, great quotes. Even better, Dr. C integrates the quotes into the body of the text. They are harder to excerpt, but make the book a much smoother, more entertaining read.

So, I can give this one an unreserved Bottoms Up! Add it to your library, but be sure to read it through before you put it on the shelf.