Esquire's Handbook For Hosts, 1949

Tomorrow night is the first Wednesday of the month, which means it's once again time for 'Book Club' here at The Whistler. This month, I've chosen the 1949 edition of Esquire's Handbook For Hosts. The book came to me on the same day that I scored that amazing vintage banquet bar at a suburban auction--you may remember seeing it featured in Chicago Reader's Space column. There was a whole bounty of vintage cocktail stuff tucked in the drawers, including a stash of 48-star American flag cocktail picks and an unopened package of paper napkins from Bar St Germain in France. However, my favorite treasure found within was the very edition of Esquire's Handbook For Hosts being used for this month's Book Club selection.


The book is much more than cocktail recipes; it includes directions for Boeuf Bourguignon, party tricks, and clever ways to let your inebriated guests know it's time to head home. One of the neatest features is the Bartender's Box Score: a handy chart perfect for keeping track of your guests' favorite (and least favorite) libations:


While preparing for Book Club, I spend a few weeks going through the book and studying the recipes, trying to come away with 20 or 30 to test out.


I then go through those recipes, tasting and tweaking them until I settle on 10 or so of the book's best.


Sometimes there are too many good drinks to fit on one menu, as is the case with the East India Cocktail. So even though you won't be able to order this particular concoction tomorrow evening, you can take Dale DeGroff's modern version of the recipe and make it at home:



See you at Book Club tomorrow night!

Pago Pago Cocktail

I came across the Pago Pago Cocktail while preparing for February's Book Club, which featured modern tiki-guru Jeff "Beachbum" Berry's books Intoxica! and Grog Log. A combination of fresh pineapple, gold Puerto Rican rum, green Chartreuse, crème de cacao and lime juice, it's an especially interesting tiki drink because of the use of green Chartreuse. Though he doesn't have much to say about the cocktail's origins, he does note that the first time the recipe appeared in print was all the way back in 1940, in a book called The How and When (a guide to origin, use and classification of 'the world's choicest vintages and spirits').

The original instructions call for muddling pineapple, but on a busy night at The Whistler, unfortunately muddling is simply too messy and time-consuming. So, we infused Flor de Caña 4 Year (a dry, Nicaraguan rum) with tons of fresh pineapple in order to achieve a similar flavor profile to the original.

At first sip, you meet the tartness of the lime juice, quickly followed by the herbaceousness of the green Chartreuse. The cocktail finishes with the slight chocolate flavors of crème de cacao, which play very nicely with the vanillar notes of the pineapple-infused rum.

Pairing chocolate and green Chartreuse is definitely on-trend right now; Jennifer Colliau (Small Hands Foods and the Slanted Door in San Francisco), has an amazing recipe for tequila hot chocolate with green Chartreuse-flavored marshmallows on her blog. Finding that flavor-pairing in a drink from the 1940s is exciting--and goes to show that there are very few things being done behind bars today that haven't been done before, and highlights the fact that there are so many forgotten vintage recipes just waiting to be rediscovered.

The Pago Pago Cocktail will be on The Whistler's cocktail menu in May ($8).

Illustration via Beachbum Berry's blog.

Rogue Cocktails

We have a pretty new monthly series at The Whistler that we're calling Book Club: once a month I choose one of my favorite cocktail books and create a menu of borrowed recipes.

The first was in December, where I somehow pulled off an overly-ambitious menu of 30 cocktails from Jigger, Beaker, & Glass by Charles Baker, Jr. The next was in February (the night before the blizzard) and featured 15 recipes from Intoxica! and Grog Log by Jeff "Beachbum" Berry. (My pal Ronnie Suburban over at LTH Forum took some great pictures that evening; you can view them here.)

Last night, we featured Rogue Cocktails by Maks Pazuniak and Kirk Estopinal. It was a particularly fun book to feature because so many of the recipes within are by guys that bartend right here in Chicago and were able to make it out that night.



One of Kirk's drinks, the Gunshop Fizz (2 ounces of Peychaud's Bitters, strawberries, lemon juice, Sanbitter, cucumber, orange and grapefruit swaths), was so popular that we ran out by 11 o'clock. My personal favorite was Maks's Moment of Silence (rye whiskey, a full ounce of apricot liqueur, Averna, Laird's Apple Brandy, and a half ounce of Angostura Bitters).

Embury Cocktails Presents: The Gunshop Fizz from Embury Cocktails on Vimeo.

When it was all said and done, we had used 5 liters of Cynar, 3 liters of Peychaud's Bitters and 2 liters of Angostura Bitters. I mean, that's just insane.

A big, big 'thank you' to the featured Chicago bartenders who let me share their awesome, forward-thinking cocktails with The Whistler's guests: Stephen Cole of The Violet Hour, Mike Ryan of Sable Kitchen & Bar, Ira Koplowitz of Bittercube Bitters, Kyle Davidson of The Publican, and Brad Bolt of Bar Deville. Thanks also goes to Maks and Kirk for compiling such a wonderful modern cocktail book. I can't wait for volume two to come out this summer!

Photos by Charles Dastodd.