movement that culminated in Prohibition.
Recent Times: The Rise of the Cocktail It
was in the 19th century that mixtures of
distilled and other alcohols, or cocktails,
became fashionable before-dinner drinks in
Europe and the Americas. This development
led to a mind-numbing explosion of
inventiveness: bartenders’ manuals now list
hundreds of different named cocktails. The
origins of the preeminent cocktail, the martini
(gin and vermouth), are disputed; it may have
been invented several times in different
places. The gin and tonic comes from British
India, where gin helped make antimalarial
quinine water more palatable. In the United
States, one of the first famous mixed drinks
was the sazerac of New Orleans (brandy and
bitters), while Winston Churchill’s mother is
said to have incited the creation of the
manhattan (whiskey, vermouth, bitters) at a
New York club. Prohibition and harsh