The Booze Ban Backlash
Brain drain. It's likely that Prohibition's most lasting damage to cocktail culture was the closure of America's premier hotel bars. Bartenders at New York's Waldorf-Astoria and Algonquin had become celebrities by inventing new drinks with fresh ingredients and embarking on international tours. "A lot of American bartenders packed up and went to London or Capri," says Ted Haigh, author of Vintage Spirits & Forgotten Cocktails. "So the drinks created during Prohibition, like the sidecar and one version of the corpse reviver weren't created here."
More than 70 years after passage of the Prohibition-ending 21st Amendment--borne partly of the need for jobs and government revenue during the Depression--connoisseurs complain that bartenders still haven't recovered their pre-'20s artistry. At Bill's Gay Nineties, a onetime speak-easy in Manhattan, Esquire 's Wondrich orders a sidecar, drawing a blank stare from the bartender. But Wondrich defiantly ticks off the ingredients: brandy, triple sec, lemon juice. And, because the liquor's not stretched and there's no threat of a raid, it goes down a lot easier than it did, from the same bar stool, three quarters of a century ago.
The Depression
One of the ironies of the Great Depression was that an enormous surplus of food was being farmed around the country, while in the cities, people fought over rotting refuse in garbage cans. Government programs helped bail out farmers, buying up the unsold crops and burning them or using them as feed. But the International Apple Shippers Association approached the produce glut with city folk in mind, putting thousands of the unemployed to work by offering them crates of 100 apples for $2, usually on credit. By 1931, city streets around the nation were filled with apple vendors hawking their goods at a nickel apiece.
advertisement
