Why "Recipes for Mixed Drinks"?

Ensslin's Recipes for Mixed Drinks was picked only due to a number of factors of ease and personal preference from a less than exhaustive collection of cocktail books. Mudpuddle has reprinted a brilliant line of antique bar books, which I came across at the bookstore where I work when they were brought in for the annual Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans. These are all listed at cocktailkingdom.com along with a bunch of old school ingredients.

Looking through dozens of different cocktail books from different eras, I decided that Enslin's was the clear winner. Any of the titles newer than Prohibition felt a little too contemporary for my purposes. Many of the 19th century books were exciting to thumb through, but described drinks much more difficult to replicate. The 19th century guides often include horrifying recipes for concoctions like handmade tomato wine or bizarre elixirs involving pots of boiled potatoes. One of my coworkers has, on his shelf, a drinks book from 1826. It's fascinating, but if you go back far enough, the "publican" was less a bartender as we understand things and more a microbrewer, so I wanted something slightly more modern.

Other books were rejected out of my own laziness. The units of measure in Ensslin's book are relatively quick to transpose, which I found much more attractive than dealing with antiquated measures like sixths of a gill. And, some otherwise excellent books were abandoned due to being far too long. I'd like to get through this in a year or two, or at least by the centennial of the book's first edition, in 2017.

Ensslin tops out around 300 recipes, depending on how you count the various variants, like the different highball recipes that differ in base spirit only. This seems to me a highly approachable figure for this project, and it starts to look even easier when I skip the the various punches for teetotalers.

Recipes for Mixed Drinks also has the advantage of ingredient availability. Most of the proprietary spirits listed are still widely available. The cocktail culture was similar enough to our own that we're mostly discussing divergent tastes rather than too many abandoned ingredients. (For instance, what's with putting eggs into everything? Egg whites for froth I can almost understand. But yolks? I am not looking forward to some of these drinks in the slightest.)