Recipe: Carolina Punch
An Interview with Nicola Nice About Her Pioneering New Book, "The Cocktail Parlor," plus Recipes.
The sheer number of cocktail books published in recent years exceeds that of any period in history. Dozens of books about drinking and bartenders have been released in the last year alone. And yet, at the same time, media coverage of these books is on the decline. I can tell you this from first-hand experience, both as a cocktail book author who has sought media attention for my recent books, and a journalist who has pitched stories about new cocktail books that have fallen on deaf editorial ears.
The Mix hopes to remedy this situation by providing a forum for new cocktail books and cocktail book authors. Last week we spoke with John Maxwell Hamilton, the author of The French 75. This week, we talk to Dr. Nicola Nice, whose pioneering new book, The Cocktail Parlor, was published this week.
I have a particularly close connection to The Cocktail Parlor. I wrote the foreword to the book. In it, I told of the unusual circumstances of how Nice and I met, and how I subsequently wrote a profile of her for The New York Times. The article told of her mission to draw attention to the unsung role women authors and entertainers played in the popularization of cocktails in the American home in the 19th and early 20th centuries. That research and that article led to the book we now have. It explores areas of cocktail history that have been all but ignored by the many cocktail books that have preceded it. In it you’ll learn about pre-Prohibition versions of influencers like Eliza Leslie, Florence Williams and Alma Whitaker—names you likely don’t know, but will be hearing more about from now on.
I spoke with Nicola Nice about her new book. The conversation is below.
The Mix: I know from previous conversations how your interest in women authors' roles in the popularizing of cocktails came about. How did this book come about?
Nicola Nice: This book basically happened when I realized that my hobby of collecting women-authored drinks books had turned into an obsession! Initially, I had just wanted to prove the hypothesis that women had been writing about drinks and cocktails in the home environment for as long as men and bartenders had; however, what started out as a handful of such books soon turned into a library of more than 200. It was at this moment that I realized it’s not simply that women have not been properly credited in the historical narrative of the cocktail, it’s that the story of the cocktail itself might not even be halfway told.
Was it difficult finding the right structure for the book, including what recipes to include?
NN: It is tremendously hard to write a book about books in a way that could be interesting and engaging to a wide audience! I had three main objectives in mind as I planned out the structure of the book. First, I wanted the book itself to serve as a living record of the written contributions that women have made to the cocktail and a resource for anyone looking to plan their own research on the topic. Second, I wanted to provide narrative context to the individual writers featured in the book and share more about their inspiring life stories. And third, I wanted to examine the evolution of the home cocktail menu and how the thousands of cocktail recipes that have been created over the years somehow get whittled down to a much smaller collection of drinks that are popular in homes. This was by no means an easy task! But my hope is that the book will be just as enjoyable and informative whether someone is interested in looking up books, knowing more about social history, or searching for a simple menu of recipe ideas for their next party.
In the past, I've heard you mainly talk about women authors of the 19th and early 20th centuries. In the book, you decided to extend the narrative to the present days, talking about female cocktail bartenders, bar owners and cocktail writers, people like Julie Reiner, Audrey Saunders and Kara Newman. Why did you think that recent history was important to include?
NN: When reading accounts of the history of the cocktail, I have often seen it stated that the three most important time periods for the cocktail were the pre-Prohibition era, Prohibition, and the recent cocktail revival of the early twenty-first century. The time periods in between are then often glossed over or ignored completely, as if what people were drinking during these periods was somehow not as relevant. In some places I’ve seen the late twentieth century in particular referred to as “the Dark Ages” of the cocktail. Yet, I’m sure very few people who were drinking mixed beverages in bars or at home parties during the 1980s or ‘90s felt that they were in any way living in the Dark Ages! For me, I didn’t want to put any kind of preconceived framework around what constituted a “good” or a “bad” era for the cocktail or judge past recipes based on today’s standards. For that reason, it didn’t make sense to leave any time periods out of the story, and in many ways, I actually found the in between periods to be more sociologically interesting anyway.
I was surprised to see the inclusion and emphasis of The Cocktail Jungle, a 2003 book by Cosmopolitan editor Nicole Beland, a book I'd never heard of. How did you come across that book and why did you include it?
NN: One of the absolute joys of researching The Cocktail Parlor was that, as I got closer to the contemporary era, I was able to interview many of the authors whose books I was referencing. For example, I spoke to Kara Newman, whom you mention, about her numerous books, and had interviewed Julie Reiner a few years previously, as well. Nicole Beland’s book turned up during one of my many trawls through secondhand online bookstores and as soon as I saw it, I just knew I had to track her down! Even though she has moved on in her career since writing The Cocktail Jungle, speaking with her and reading the book took me instantly back to being that single, independent woman who first arrived in New York City in the early aughts. It also joined so many dots for me in the story of the cocktail that I had not seen connected anywhere else (the highly symbolic feminine imagery of the Cosmopolitan cocktail and its Martini glass, as an example) and so, it felt like a really important missing piece in the puzzle.
While writing the book, did you discover some additional history that you hadn't known yet?
NN: One of the questions that I wanted to explore in the book was how the phenomenon of the cocktail party first got started, and then how and why cocktail parties eventually fell out of favor. It seems logical to assume that the cocktail party must have started around Prohibition, but as a sociologist I know that social behaviors never appear out of nowhere. Indeed, it seems that the origins of the cocktail party arrived alongside the first wave feminism movement of the early twentieth century and its denouement came with the advent of second wave feminism in the 1960s. The deeper I dug into these parallels between cocktail history and women’s history, the more I realized how intertwined they were—I now strongly believe that cocktails would not be what they are without women’s fight for recognition, independence, and equality over the last 150 years.
What chapter in the book do you expect will provoke the most discussion?
NN: The last chapter of the book addresses the present trend of no and low alcohol cocktails and the so-called sober-curious movement. However, taking a bird’s eye view of this topic over the last two centuries reveals how the theme of responsible drinking is not at all a new one. For as long as women have been writing about drinking alcohol, they have been writing about not drinking alcohol and the importance of moderation, as well. While the movement may have had a few different faces over the years, it can’t be said to be new and there’s a lot the industry can learn from how generations of hosts and hostesses have thought about it in the past.
That's quite a lengthy bibliography at the end, all of cocktail and entertaining books written by women over the past two centuries. Did you draw on all of them when writing and researching the book?
NN: Absolutely, and some! The one hundred or so books that I chose to include in the bibliography are just a selection of what I actually collected and read in researching this book. And of course, that list doesn’t include the hundreds of newspaper articles and other resources that I drew from, or the many that I certainly missed, as well. The really frustrating thing I discovered about writing a narrative history like this one, however, is that new information has a habit of showing up after the fact, making the idea of ever being “done” a virtual impossibility!
You mentioned to me at your book launch party that you have more writing projects in the pipeline. Can you talk about that?
There was so much excess material that came up in the course of researching this book that with the limited word count I had I really needed another place to put it all. So, I recently launched a new blog site called The Hostess Diaries that is entirely dedicated to the culture of hospitality as told through the lens of women’s history. As well as sharing more stories about forgotten books and their authors, I will be exploring the sociology of hosting and cocktail etiquette through the ages and writing a slightly different style of restaurant and bar review, as well. I also have a couple of new book ideas in the hopper, so there is a lot more to come from me on this topic!
Two recipes from The Cocktail Parlor follow.