When Americans repealed Prohibition, drinkers bellied up to bars and asked for one of the few cocktails they remembered: an old fashioned. But the fruity punch they got would have been unrecognizable 20 years prior. Criminals had taken over the bartending trade, and the whole of pre-Prohibition cocktail culture had been degraded and destroyed. Stop romanticizing the speakeasy era, this boozy dive into history suggests. It wasn't really the bee's knees.
From Reason:
Read Full Article »"Prohibition is often held up as the height of drinking. We all think of The Great Gatsby and speakeasies and amazing parties. But in fact, most of the drinks during Prohibition in America were pretty bad," says Noah Rothbaum, chief cocktail correspondent at The Daily Beast and author of The Art of American Whiskey. "In some ways it was close to the illegal drug trade now, I would imagine, where the origin of the alcohol during Prohibition was pretty hard to ascertain and it was cut with all types of stuff." …
Among its many deleterious effects, Prohibition helped destroy the idea of alcohol as a commonplace ingredient found in typical American homes. It's instructive to compare The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, published in 1896, with Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book of the postwar era. Both were the foundational home cooking guides for their periods, but where Fannie Farmer assumes that households will have cooking sherry available, Crocker relies on a non-alcoholic sherry substitute.
