A “Perfect” Rob Roy From a 1900s Bartending Legend
Scotch. Dry vermouth. Sweet vermouth. A simple, century old cocktail that's still delicious today.
Happy Friday! Let’s close out January by…
looking at some more historical variations on the Manhattan,
examining some cocktail book history,
and thinking about the nature of creative success and authorship.
In last week’s newsletter, we looked at a Reverse Perfect Manhattan from the 1890s—”perfect” meaning that it uses both sweet and dry vermouth.
Part of the point I wanted to make was the persistence of cocktail ideas over time, and how much our current era of cocktail making—from the Cocktail Renaissance to our current Peak Cocktail era—draws iteratively on ideas from the past. The ideas in circulation today owe a clear debt to ideas that were in circulation in the 1800s.
The same was true in the early 1900s, where cocktail ideas were iterated, traded, updated, and sometimes outright stolen.
So this week, we’re going to look at another century-old drink, a sort of Reverse Perfect Rob Roy—essentially a Manhattan with Scotch whisky instead of rye or bourbon—that appeared in both Hugo Ensslin’s pre-Prohibition cocktail guide, Recipes for Mixed Drinks, as well as Harry Craddock’s Savoy Cocktail Book in 1930.
And then we’re going to look at some modern takes on the same drink concept.
The structures and proportions of this week’s drinks vary. But the core insight behind all of these cocktails is the same: They’re drinks in the Manhattan style that employ both sweet and dry vermouth. That’s often how things are in the history of cocktails: Small iterations, and sometimes outright copies, carry the day and advance the art—or help preserve it in times of trouble and loss.
A Savoy Marketer
Let’s start with Ensslin, whose Recipes for Mixed Drinks was one of the last important cocktail books published in the United States before Prohibition.
I say it was important because, many years later, it turned out to be a highly useful catalog of the era’s drinks and drinking habits. But it wasn’t a big hit during its day, and Ensslin wasn’t very well known in New York bartending circles. Indeed, Ensslin’s influence and importance wouldn’t become clear until much more recently, around 2009 or so, when Cocktail Kingdom republished his book.
Rather, he’d become influential without anyone quite realizing it—because his book inadvertently provided much of the source material for a considerably more popular and successful book, Harry Craddock’s 1930 Savoy Cocktail Book, which also played a role in the contemporary Cocktail Renaissance.
In contrast to Ensslin, Craddock was a celebrated bartender in his time.