Drink tank

How’s Your Drink?
By Eric Felten (Surrey Books, $20)
Eric Felten’s handsome cocktails book is based on his Wall Street Journal column of the same name. Such self-derivative writing can sometimes bode badly for a book (ending up like the latest wine tome of Jay McInerney, whose recycled House & Garden articles make for narrativeless, disjointed chapters). But Felten’s writing is seamless: Dividing the subject into chapters such as “Straight Up,” “On the Rocks” and “How Sweet It Is,” he fluidly drifts from one cocktail to the next, putting each one in its contemporary cultural context. He busts the myth about James Bond being a vodka-martini guy, tells the story of how a teetotaler created the Bronx Cocktail, details how John Updike “killed the Old-Fashioned” in Rabbit, Run (and how Mickey Rooney may have helped revive it in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World). In the wrong hands, these anecdotes could put you to sleep, but Felten is like those legendary barflies who always have a good story on hand: He has a casual yet authoritative voice, a relaxing lilt to his sentences, and he always knows where to put the punch line.

Imbibe!
By David Wondrich (Perigee Books, $23.95)
Whereas Felten’s book takes a more contemporary view of cocktails, David Wondrich’s Imbibe! is rooted in the mid-1800s. A columnist for Esquire, contributing writer at Wine & Spirits and all-around heavily worshipped cocktail guru, Wondrich originally intended to simply update what he considers to be one of history’s most important cocktail documents, How to Mix Drinks, or The Bon Vivant’s Companion by Jerry Thomas. But the deeper he got into the details of Thomas’s life, the more he wanted to know. Consequently,  his book is part biography, part classic-book update, but all with the same goal: to explore the genesis of America’s first original art form (jazz came much later). Wondrich can get a little nerdy—in fact, at times Imbibe! reads more like a textbook than popular social history (no surprise, considering that Wondrich was once a college professor). But his enthusiasm is contagious. Besides, there’s no reason to read this book word-for-word (with the exception of maybe the first 35 pages), making it easy to take it in manageable doses.

How they measure up
In his introduction, Felten admits that “the average bar guide runs somewhere north of a thousand recipes…they can’t all be good.” He is, therefore, judicious with his recipes, using them to supplement his anecdotes. His relaxed attitude toward cocktails is clear even here: In his directions for making a silver gin fizz, he instructs the reader to “Shake juice, sugar, egg and gin with ice. Then shake it some more. Don’t stop shaking yet. If you’re using pasteurized egg whites, keep shaking.” The result of all that shaking is a cocktail with a three-inch head of agitated egg white that looks like merengue.

Wondrich’s version of the same cocktail is a bit more serious.  Wondrich not only researched the history behind the cocktails, but meticulously dissected each of the recipes and adapted them for modern-day use. For example, an egg in the 1800s was much smaller than eggs are now, so he instructs budding bartenders to use only half of what’s called for (a tip that Felten’s modern recipe could use). Wondrich’s silver gin fizz (pictured, page 33) is, ultimately, more successful. He’s also more prolific when it comes to recipes, offering 100, compared to Felten’s 50.

But just as there’s no substitute for Wondrich’s fascinating histories, there’s also no replacement for Felten’s anecdotes. (After all, drinking a gin fizz is much more fun if you know how it once ruined the evening for novelist Walker Percy.) Where Wondrich’s histories end, Felten’s stories pick up—and in both cases, reading about the cocktails turns out to be (almost) as enjoyable as drinking them.