The Midcentury Cocktail Book That Paved the Way for Modern Cocktail Theory

David Embury taught people how to think about cocktails.

“Anyone can make good cocktails.” With that line, David Embury opened his 1948 cocktail manual, The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, the most important midcentury book on cocktails. 

The line is typical Embury — democratic in its assertion that anyone might produce a good drink, yet realistic in its acknowledgment, with that knowing emphasis on the word “can”,…