RonDoids
salutes one man’s heroic quest to try every cocktail on the face of the planet
When asked what he liked to drink, which was often, Charles H. Baker could have replied with great authority: “I Drink the World.”
Which probably would have earned him more than a few: “That’s fine, sir, but which portion of it would you care to drink right now?”
Not that Baker would have minded—he enjoyed a bit of give-and-take with
bartenders and hosts, especially when it came to cocktail recipes. For a
quarter of a century (roughly 1925-1950), Baker took as many as they
were willing to give then unleashed them on the drinking world in his
books and columns. There’s no telling how many cocktails he tried in his
lifetime, but roughly 500 made it into print. Some were famous before
he found them (Side Car, Manhattan), some he helped make famous (Death
in the Gulf Stream, the Gin and Tonic, the Mojito), and some you will
not have heard of (Buddha’s Blood, any of the four(!) Mallingholm
Swizzles). And while you won’t find many of his collected recipes in
today’s guides, you will detect their DNA throughout the contemporary
cocktail kingdom.
Tall and gangling with angular features crossed by a thin Errol Flynn
mustache, to call Baker handsome meant taking full measure of his
considerable dash, style and charm. But there was something in that
crooked, almost shy smile of his that converted detached strangers into
hosts eager to entertain and explain. Most gave up their secrets
willingly. A few, perhaps jealous of their discovery, may have
intentionally fudged their recipes a bit.
Some of them certainly seem fudged. A few seem utterly
preposterous and may have been surrendered in the same manner a local
will reveal the best time for a tourist to hunt the local form of snipe
(usually around 2am or whenever the bars let out).
Or maybe you just had to be there. A Sahara Glowing Heart Cocktail
might come off as gustatorily bizarre in the uninspired confines of a
drinking magazine’s office, but lapped up while “strolling in the
midnight around the Sphinx with some congenial young woman companion”
—well, under those circumstances it might taste like ambrosia poured
directly from Ra’s own ruby-studded cocktail shaker.
It’s not such a stretch to compare Baker to the celebrated Victorian
explorers Dr. David Livingstone and Sir Richard Burton. While they
boldly set out in search of riverheads, lost cities and fresh sources of
malaria, Baker crisscrossed the globe tracking down legendary cocktails
to their sources, bringing to light new tipples, and contracting, again
and again, what he liked to call “lethal morning-after disease.” He
lurched down the bustling back streets of exotic locales in
road-wrinkled white linen suits, sniffing out hidden bars; he expertly
bluffed his way into private clubs and gilded mansions, interrogating
barmen and bigshots alike, all in a near-fanatical bid to catalog worthy
cocktails and codify the rules of drinking.
The drinking world owes Mr. Baker a great debt. Not only for
heroically rescuing cocktails tight roping over the black abyss of
history, but gathering them in a such a way that elevated drinking from a
sedentary sport, as many imagine it to be, to one of movement, mystery,
and most of all, adventure.
Cocktail guides, then and now, are generally dull and derivative
affairs with as much oomph as car repair manuals. Baker pushed the form
into an entirely new dimension, wrapping each recipe with an exotic
story and often a strong dose of drinking wisdom.
His writing style, like some of his cocktails, is initially jarring,
but if you can get enough of it into your bloodstream, it becomes damned
charming. His patois is a wild mix of high-toned Victorian dash and
hard-boiled world-wise banter undershot with a rich vein of Deep South
cracker-ese and an oft-employed secretarial shorthand. Not to mention
enough offhand cultural incorrectness to send a liberal arts major
shrieking toward the nearest safe space.
Interspersed among his recipes are many experience-polished “Words to
the Wise” illuminating cocktailology and drinking behavior in general.
The lessons dispensed run the gamut from innocuous and common-sensical
(the importance of icing your shaker and glassware, to shake or not to
shake) to the hard-boiled and grim (how to “salvage a guest from the
effects of hanging by rope” and what to do if the “suspect liquor”
you’ve been guzzling turns out to be poison—a not uncommon prospect
during Prohibition.)
Below you’ll find a summoning up of a portion of his vast trove of dispensed wisdom.
Baker’s Dozen: Strong Advice from a Strange Man
A vast, shimmering web embraces the world, connecting all the Right Sort of People, and that web is called Booze.
Baker shared bar tabs (and recipes) with many of the first-rate
boozers of his day, including Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner,
Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn. It wasn’t mere coincidence that
deposited them on adjoining barstools.
“All really interesting people—sportsman, explorers, musicians,
scientists, vagabonds and writers—were vitally interested in good things
to eat and drink,” noted Baker. “This keen interest was not solely
through gluttony, the spur of hunger or merely to sustain life, but in a
spirit of high adventure.”
Crossing all language, class and cultural barriers, the offer of a
drink is the handshake for this excellent set, who knows what’s right
when the sun slips over the yardarm, or any other arm for that matter. A
shared drink is not only a form of welcome, it was an instant bond, a
shared experience that put you and your newfound cousin on a common path
to a more interesting place.
Moderate drinking is a measure of behavior, not quantity.
Baker held firm to the idea that moderate drinking wasn’t a matter of how much you drank, but rather how
you drank. Baker often raises salutes to “moderate drinking” (in
between tales of excesses), but you soon get the drift that to his gang
this meant drinking as much as you want, so long as you don’t act too
much the fool and ruin it for those around you. If you could sink a
1.75’s worth of rum drinks and remain a swell fellow and didn’t complain
too loudly in the morning, you were drinking moderately.
Fear no booze.
Baker made a point of never refusing a drink, no matter how
unpromising it might initially seem. Oh, he might grimace with alarm
while the ingredients were thrown together, but he always gave it a go.
He wasn’t so much worried about the mixer’s feelings (once given a go,
he wasn’t shy about announcing a cocktail was a “freak fit only for the
drain”), he just felt that every cocktail deserved a chance to shine.
There’s not a damn thing wrong with drinking alone.
Said Baker:
“We’ve never yet seen why the fact that you up-end a glass with no
witness present should be classified as a sin apparently rating only 1
rung worse than incest and short-changing old maiden Aunts at Church
Bazaars. Either it’s wrong to drink or it isn’t. Since it isn’t, why,
the hell! What difference does it make because Bill and Babs is out? If
we feel the need of a shorty we want to tell you that we yank the cork
and pour—whether it be for need of a lift, the warding off of colds,
forgetting of taxes or to neutralize serpent bites.
“Like our old Florida Cracker guide told us 1 time when on a swamp
deer hunt we naively—then being of wide-eyed tender years—asked him if
there was any better cure for snake-bite than a hold of store-bought
liquor. He grinned and spat. ‘Who cares, Sonny?’ he said. ‘Who cares?’”
Indeed.
| Hmmmmmmmm SLURP SLURP |
You have no obligation to explain anything to anybody.
Between the intense and golden light he poured upon broad swaths of
his life lay dark gaps his pen never touched. His second wife, for
example, is an utter mystery, aside from a mention that the short
encounter ended badly. As far as Baker was concerned, a man’s past, so
long as he can contain it, belongs to no one but himself. He also held
tight to the belief that any less-than-gentlemanly events that
transpired during a booze-up could and sometimes should be sent down the
memory hole, never to be mentioned again.
If you know how you’re getting there, you’re on an errand, not an adventure.
Baker missed a lot of boats (and later, flights) in his travels,
sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. He never seemed to let it bother
him. On the road—and in life—Baker became uneasy when everything was
steaming along smoothly. It suggested that he might be in a rut. He
understood that the path of least resistance almost always pulls
drainward.
Nobody told Baker he could present himself as a global authority on
drinking. He didn’t graduate with honors from a cocktailology college
then apprentice under a known master of the drinking arts. He never
asked anyone for permission, hell, he never even worked in a bar. He
simply went forth into the world, drank as many drinks as he could get
his lips around, absorbed as much knackered knowledge as experience and
the experienced would lay on him, wrote it down, then unleashed himself
on the drinking world.
There is no greater catalyst for adventure and happiness than alcohol.
In the forward of his first drinking guide, Around the World with Jigger, Beaker and Flask,
Baker describes a wild series of adventures he experienced while in the
grips of The Booze, then notes that had he instead been under the
influence of strawberry soda or ice water none of those life-enriching
moments would have happened. Not a single one. And he’d have been a much
poorer man for it.
“That per hour of elapsed time, man and boy, we probably have been
happier when mildly looking into the ruddy cup than at other times,”
Baker posited. “Even granting our lethal morning-after disease we
question if willingly we would exchange our hunting, fishing, or blue
water sailing experiences for those mellow and gorgeously spiffed
hours!”
Don’t forget where you’re from.
Going native is a fine thing if you don’t care for your current
incarnation and plan on sticking around like Gaughan. But if you’re just
passing through and fall into the habit of trading in pieces of your
identity at each stopover, you end up feeling like a patched-up rag
doll. Too many contemporary booze travelers on TV and in print are so
eager to blend in with the natives, to not imperialistically “judge” the
local culture and cocktails, that they lose all sense of perspective.
Instead of being the outsider looking in, as they’re supposed to be,
they frantically rub on cultural blackface and imagine they’re being
sensitive.
While eager to try any and every local booze, Baker always spoke from
his bedrock sense of self. He didn’t disguise who he was, nor did he
apologize. Which the natives undoubtedly preferred to being aped.
Anything can be improved, but that doesn’t mean it should be.
Oftentimes, instead of adjusting a recognizably flawed cocktail,
Baker will metaphorically shrug and strongly suggest it be served “very
cold indeed,” or, in the case of the Eagle’s Dream, send it packing:
“Taste it. If you don’t like what eagles dream about, why, toss it down
the drain. No one will lift an eyebrow.” He recognized that if you go
around shaving off all the rough corners you end up with a bag of balls
that all look roughly the same. Just as strikingly beautiful women
always possess a singular “flaw,” some cocktails stand out because they
are not perfectly tuned to the tastes of the masses.
Mixology is medical science.
Or at least alchemy. Before Big Pharma marched in with their vast and
shrill cacophony of insanely dangerous drugs, alcohol was used by
mankind to address all sorts of mental and physical calamities, and it’s
plain Mr. Baker was a world-class practitioner of the form. He
described and prescribed the presently misplaced (if not lost) art of
the Picker-Upper, those lively, sometimes outlandish cocktails that
cause “the numbed nerve centers to nod closer and closer together until
they, at long last, touch and the day is begun!” He also wrote Rxs for
Nerve Soothers, Pain Relievers, Spine-Stiffeners and Brain-Fixers.
When traveling through foreign lands unbothered with modern concepts
of sanitation, Baker considered steady drinking not only a fine time but
a medical necessity. Teetotalers, he observed, were much more likely to
get sick and/or die while abroad while he and his merry band remained
healthy and hardy. The reason, he explained, was “. . . we never
permitted the setting sun—or at least midnight curfew—to find our mouth,
throat and alimentary linings unfortified with at least a daily minimum
of 1/2-a-5th of good liquor.” It should be noted that Baker continued
this regimen until he died at the ripe old age of 91.
A cocktail is more than what’s in the glass.
Where, with whom, and under what circumstances you imbibe that drink
has an immense effect on its taste and perceived quality. Which may
explain why so many of today’s mixologists “correct” and sometimes sneer
at many of Baker’s recipes. Some have even suggested that Baker
included outrageously bad recipes to lend a sense of scope, that decent
recipes will shine all the brighter when sitting next to monstrous ones.
What they’re missing is Baker included some cocktails not because
they were particularly good, but because they offered an accurate
portrait of a place and time. A Jersey Lighthouse taken in the company
of William Faulkner during a blizzard is going to possess a singular
flavor that may not translate under less poignant circumstances. The
context of the moment and the lingering nostalgia are as much an
ingredient as booze or bitters. You don’t have to wonder why the
Farewell to Hemingway cocktail, conspired during a booze up with its
namesake the evening prior to Papa flying off to cover the Spanish Civil
War, found its way onto page. To Baker, certain cocktails were
bookmarks in a life well lived.
“Each one of them fetches joyous memory of some friend, place, or
adventure; is flanked with happy memory of a frosted glass, a smile, the
sip of something which is perfect,” wrote Baker of his collected
cocktails. “No, nothing shall ever pirate away those memories.”
You have to dig through a lot of coal to find a diamond.
God and the Devil know how many different concoctions sluiced down
Baker’s courageous throat during his lifetime, but it was surely in the
thousands. During his first round-the-world cruise in 1931, he packed
along the fattest cocktail guide available and swore he tried each and
every recipe during five-months’ worth of international travel. He was
aghast at how bad most of them were. From that point on, Baker felt it
his sacred duty to right the many terrible wrongs done to the nation’s
cocktail culture by that societal hurricane known as National
Prohibition, even if it meant drinking and vetting every cocktail known
to humankind.
Now, what qualifies as a diamond is entirely subjective. It’s
instructive to note that Baker once said that he doubted if there were
170 “good” cocktails in the world, yet he published nearly 500 recipes.
Maybe he reckoned that coal, while not as precious as diamonds, is still a damned fine fuel.
- “Take of dry gin, 1 pony, absinthe, 1 pony, dry imported apricot brandy, 1 pony; donate 1/2 pony of bright rose colored grenadine. Shake with lots and lots of ice and strain into a large saucer champagne glass, and pray to Allah for forgiveness of all imminent and future sins of the flesh.”-CHB
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