Vintage Spirits & Forgotten Cocktails: From the Alamagoozlum Cocktail to the Zombie: 80 Rediscovered Recipes and the Stories Behind Them

I have used or seen a lot of bar guides and cocktail recipe books over the years, and Doctor Cocktail's book is the best - it has all the great drinks and lots of amazing cocktails that have been lost to history. It's full of anecdotes and history, and jammed with great color photos of the cocktails, old labels, bottles, historic cocktail books - you name it. Also included is a helpful list of suppliers for some of the more obscure ingredients. It's well written and funny, so you'll want to read it cover to cover even if you never make a single cocktail, but I guarantee you'll want to - try the 20th Century - in my opinion, one of the greatest lost cocktails of all time. Toss out that old bar guide - here's to the only cocktail book you'll ever need.

Fascinating book! I have many books on vintage cocktails. I also recommend books by Paul Harrington and the Regans. The books complement one another. Vintage Spirits & Forgotten Cocktails is fascinating to read. Recipes for drinks are provided, but also included is their history, the availability and source of ingredients, and the author's opinion on the drink. Enough information is provided to actually make these drinks and know what to expect. Thus far I've successfully mixed Zombies and Aviations. I would have bought this book just for the original Zombie recipe, which is included with lots of detail. The book is beautifully photographed, replete with great pictures of ephemera from cocktail's golden age. Did I mention the great discussion of orange bitters and of Applejack? Get the book and experience some great cocktails.

This book comes along like a cocktail guide, but really is a fascinating journey into past lifestyle pleasures and obsessions that are long forgotten, illustrated with rare visual ephemera. The science of urban archeology has another subcategory now: Cocktail archeology. Jeff Berry and his Polynesian potion research has given us two fine volumes of almost extinct Tiki lounge libations and the way they are to be prepared correctly ("The Grog Log" and "Intoxica"), and now Ted Haigh expands the field to classic cocktail history. Ted's research of decades has been distilled into this handy little tome, resulting in a powerful concoction of recipes and stories from the golden age of mixology. The author never was a bartender, but an ardent customer and a fan. In years of experimentation and alcohol alchemy he has honed his sensibilities to determine which quality cocktails deserve to be resurrected and which are better left forgotten. Yet his superior knowledge never tempts him to take an esoteric stance, his language and instructions are easy to follow, even for the amateur who has just gotten his first whiff of the allure that exudes from cocktail culture. The recipes do not contain any ingredients that are impossible to get, and a resource guide in the back lists the suppliers of those cocktail components not quite available in your neighborhood market. Thus, finally, after being unremembered for too many years, a taste bud teaser like the Monkey Gland can be enjoyed again, because it does not, as rumor had it, actually contain the supposed virility booster of animal origin, but a rare spirit that has recently enjoyed a revival, the distillation of Herbsaint, Absinth. To create a cocktail with Absinth that tones it's distinct taste down to a faint pleasurable sensation is not easy, but the Monkey Gland achieves this task admirably when the steps delineated in "Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails" are followed correctly. I sincerely hope that this fine work will not only be used to inspire the home bar aficionado, but also to enrich the menus of quality cocktail bars around the world.

The cocktail is far more then just booze sloshed into a glass. It is culture, history, cuisine, and within it can be found the muse that inspires us to dream. Within the pages of "Vintage Spirits & Forgotten Cocktails" we can clearly see the inspiration that Ted "Dr. Cocktail" Haigh found from his own personal muse. This book is clearly not just "yet another" volume of random recipes, it is instead a carefully architected portfolio that provides a unique insight into this thing we call a "cocktail". The recipes presented throughout this book are both obscure and amazing. A few of them, such as the French 75, Aviation, Derby, and Pegu Club are libations that may periodically find their way onto a cocktail menu here and there, but others, such as the Jupiter, Modernista, Corpse Reviver #2, and Income Tax are ones you'd be hard pressed to find a bartender who had heard of them, much less knew how to make one. But that is not to say that they deserve this obscurity. Each of the recipes presented in this book are wonderful examples of the culinary capabilities hidden within the cocktail. The recipes aren't the only things that are amazing within this book. Throughout, you will find wonderful historic insights, from one of the few people truly capable of providing them, that will open your eyes to what the cocktail once was, and with luck could eventually become again. There are also beautiful pictures, of not only the cocktails themselves, but also of historically significant books, bottles, and other related miscellanea. If you are a bartender who takes pride in your craft, then this book will provide you with a wealth of new recipes that you can use to expand your repertoire. If you are a home mixologist, then this book will open up a whole new landscape for you to discover. The secret adventure, awaits.