It is pronounced “bee-shoo” not “bye-yoo” as I, the unworldy country child, was prone to say before being corrected by the more sophisticated half of this cocktail book.

Old cocktail books are always presenting biased opinions as fact, a torch I was happy to carry.

To say this sounds “kind of gross” is an intentional understatement, since some writers claim to like it this way. My critical-ass brain is thinking something more like “this is barely a cocktail”. Mixing two liqueurs together and adding a dash of bitters is attempting Midwestern-suburban levels of cocktail sweetness, where menus feature a whole section called “Martinis” but there are no martinis only tons of chocolate stuff.

It is also a nice reminder that not all old cocktails are good cocktails. Old books like the Waldorf are full of disgusting sounding concoctions.

Apparently axe shaving used to be a thing, though it seems difficult to get into some of those contours.

Much has been made of Harry Johnson’s tendency to overcompensate when writing about bartending. People often associate this with his second place status in the race for the first cocktail book, after Jerry Thomas, but this is likely revisionist history, since it’s unknown if Johnson even knew about Thomas' book.

The Mixellany edition of “The Bartender’s Manual” makes an interesting case for Johnson’s second banana syndrome in the introduction:

Harry was not trying to best Jerry Thomas. He was fighting an uphill battle against a much tougher opponent: prejudice. He was a member of the burgeoning and industrious German immigrant community… Anti- German sentiment ran high during his adult lifetime even before Germany entered into war in 1914.

This is like saying “Henry Ford breathes and eats in the shadow of the Horseless Carriage.” Just because someone builds off something, does not mean they are inherently disqualified from improving on it.