Description
Book SynopsisHow the Prohibition law of 1920 made alcohol, savored in secret, all the more delectable when the cocktail shaker was forced to go undergroundRoaring Twenties America boasted famous firsts: women's right to vote, jazz music, talking motion pictures, flapper fashions, and wondrous new devices like the safety razor and the electric vacuum cleaner. The privations of the Great War were over, and Wall Street boomed. The decade opened, nonetheless, with a shock when Prohibition became the law of the land on Friday, January 16, 1920, when the Eighteenth Amendment banned intoxicating liquors. Decades-long campaigns to demonize alcoholic beverages finally became law, and America officially went dry.American ingenuity promptly rose to its newest challenge. The law, riddled with loopholes, let the 1920s write a new chapter in the nation's saga of spirits. Men and women spoke knowingly of the speakeasy, the bootlegger, rum-running, black ships, blind pigs, gin mills, and gallon stills. Passwords (
Trade Review"Cecilia Tichi’s lively, engaging history will find an enthusiastic audience. It’s fun to relate the rum-runners of the era, the movie stars, flappers, jazz musicians, writers, and just ordinary folk to the drinks they consumed. Our glass is raised to
Jazz Age Cocktails!" -- Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald, authors of America’s Founding Food: The Story of New England Cooking
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Jazz Age Cocktails is a vivacious, accessible history of drinking and popular culture during Prohibition era America. Cecelia Tichi writes with enthusiasm and authority about this heady time, and her work is as easy to savor as a Champagne Julep. Its chapters cover aspects of Jazz Age society, including automobiles and airplanes; the gaudy, violent rise of organized crime; and the explosion of slang, games, and stunts. Vintage cocktail recipes conclude each section—most of them unfamilliar, wild concoctions that are spiked with unusual ingredients … Jazz Age Cocktails is a fun, illuminating look at an unusual decade that will appeal to cookbook and cocktail mavens who like their recipes with a history chaser.
" * Foreword Reviews *
