THE SHERRY COBBLER AND THE COCKTAIL PARLOR

By Kirsten Amann
Women in cocktails and spirits have been my beat for as long as I’ve been writing on the topic — nearly two decades. It all began when I joined my friend (and now coauthor) Misty Kalkofen to found a Boston chapter of Ladies United for the Preservation of Endangered Cocktails. Misty discovered the Pittsburgh-based enthusiast group via the power of the internet sometime around 2006, and with the blessing of their founder, a gal who went by the moniker Whiskey Daisy, we formed our own local club. Our mission was to “breed, raise, and release” what we dubbed “endangered cocktails” into the wild.

Boston has always been a drinking town, and cocktails were popular back then, to be sure. That said, most cocktail menus at the time (if a bar even had one) were cluttered with cloyingly sweet, unbalanced drinks. Very few bars had fresh juice or a variety of bitters, and most of the cocktails people were dreaming up masked the flavor of their base spirit instead of highlighting it — and they certainly didn’t complement the cuisine. We used old cocktail books and bar manuals we could find on eBay or at garage sales for inspiration, and our home kitchens became our laboratories as we set about learning the forgotten classics that we could then share with the world. We also started a blog as part of this project because blogs were new, free to start, and seemed like a fun endeavor. I became an enthusiastic contributor and, unwittingly, one of the few female writers in a male-dominated space.

My research typically began with a recipe from an old bar manual written by a man, enriched by newspaper stories written by their contemporaries, who were usually also men. Some mold-breaking female bartenders made it into the mix, such as Ada Coleman, who held forth at the Savoy Hotel bar in London from 1903 to 1923. Her celebrity bartender status is well documented, but she is the exception rather than the rule. As modern cocktail enthusiasts and bartending broads, LUPEC members asked: Who were our forebears? Did we have any? Where are the women in the history of the cocktail?

It turns out we were looking in the wrong place.

FROM SALOON TO COCKTAIL PARLOR
If there is one place that most women were usually not in 19th-century America, when the cocktail was born, it was the bar — where, “for almost two centuries, women had to be accompanied by men, if they were even allowed in at all,” writes Dr. Nicola Nice in The Cocktail Parlor: How Women Brought the Cocktail Home. Indeed, public and private life was strictly defined for men and women in this period, with private men’s clubs and later, the saloon, being public spaces meant to be a distinctly male preserve. A commercial sociologist and spirits entrepreneur, Nice argues in her wonderfully written history of women and cocktails that by telling the cocktail’s story solely through the recorded history of the barroom, we are barely scratching the surface.

Where were the women? As Nice writes, she “had a sneaking suspicion that as the chief entertainers

of the home for centuries, women may have had something to say about the cocktail.” She spent a decade collecting every book she could find that was written by a woman and openly discussed mixed alcoholic beverages, looking to “cookbooks, household management guides, entertaining handbooks, etiquette manuals, and lifestyle guides from around 1800 to the present day,” in her quest for answers. “I very quickly realized that it wasn’t simply that women had been overlooked in the story of the cocktail,” writes Nice, “it was that the very story of the cocktail itself was not even halfway told.” The Cocktail Parlor makes the compelling case that “many of the drinks that have found their way into wider drinking culture over the last two centuries have most likely done so because women, or rather, hostesses, have brought them home.”

DRINK OF THE (19TH) CENTURY: THE SHERRY COBBLER
I initially encountered the Sherry Cobbler in the first edition of Imbibe! by David Wondrich, a book that came out in 2007 and which continues to be essential reading for any student of cocktail history. While researching the 2015 edition, Wondrich uncovered the history of Martha King Niblo, an influential 19th-century New York City bartender who may, in fact, have been the progenitor of the Sherry Cobbler — making her one of the few mold-breaking female bartenders whose history has not been forgotten. According to Nice, it was also an important cocktail for the 19th-century hostess mixing these up at home.

In The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails, Wondrich describes the Sherry Cobbler as “a simple mixture of sherry, sugar, and citrus peels or slices, shaken or tossed with ice, poured into a tall glass, and garnished with fruit and berries and sipped through a straw.” It’s hard to imagine now, but the ice trade was a relatively new phenomenon in this period, and the straw itself was also a new invention. All came together in the Sherry Cobbler, which was “one of the most popular mixed drinks of the nineteenth century and did more than any other to convert the world to taking its warm-weather drinks iced in the American style.”

The earliest reference to the Sherry Cobbler comes not in a barkeeper’s manual (we wouldn’t have those until Jerry Thomas published his Bartender’s Guide: How to Mix Drinks: A Bon Vivant’s Companion in 1862) but in the diary of an Englishwoman named Katherine “Janie” Ellice. She first encountered the drink in the resorts of New York state while traveling there in the summer of 1838 and recorded the recipe, which she described as “delicious and easy of composition.” The drink spread far and wide in popularity in the 1840s and even makes a cameo in the Charles Dickens novel Martin Chuzzlewit. By 1869, it was on the menu at the American bar at the Paris Universal Exposition, where they were depleting 500 bottles of sherry per day, deployed exclusively in Sherry Cobblers.

The drink was a popular serve for ladies’ luncheons in this period: “Since women were frowned upon for drinking more than one glass of wine at a mixed-company dinner at this time, a ladies’ lunch was an opportunity for hostesses to let loose a little bit,” writes Nice. Mary Sherwood, a popular society writer of the 1880s, described the ladies’ luncheon as “‘apt to be a lively and exhilarating occasion’ and ‘the best moment in the day for some people,’” according to Nice.

But before Charles Dickens and the Paris Universal Exposition, Martha King Niblo was mixing up Sherry Cobblers in New York City. Martha was born in 1802 into the business, the daughter of David King, who kept a porter house on Wall Street. William Niblo was an Irish immigrant who worked for her father after coming to New York, and the two were married in 1819 as William’s career was prospering. In 1828, they opened Niblo’s Pleasure Garden in Soho, which was then a “leafy suburb outside of town,” writes David Wondrich in an EATER article titled “Five Unheralded Pioneers of the American Bar Who Pre-Date ‘Professor’ Jerry Thomas.”

Niblo’s Pleasure Garden was a vibe: “The walled garden offered seating in cool, shaded bowers, country breezes, fountains, soft lantern light among the trees, music, and refreshments.” It was a respite from the hustle and bustle of downtown, where Martha helmed the bar serving legendary cocktails — especially her Sherry Cobblers.

WE’VE BEEN HERE ALL ALONG
By studying the history of cocktails through the lens of the barroom, as Dr. Nicola Nice reveals in The Cocktail Parlor, we’ve only been getting half the story. Whether breaking the mold and mixing cocktails in public spaces like Martha King Niblo or shaping what and how we drink at home and at private social gatherings, women have been influencing drinks culture all along. This Women’s History Month, let’s raise a glass to Martha King Niblo — and to all the women who have shaped cocktail history, both behind the bar and in the home Cocktail Parlor!