The past is more certain than the future, and vintage listicles are perhaps more interesting than from the present. Hence, one from the brilliantly named 1936 Burke's Complete Cocktail and Tastybite Recipes book and the most popular cocktails in 1934 according to Esquire have become permanent fixtures within our Top 100 cocktail pages.
A cocktail if it is to be of any value must have the quality of revivifying the drinker; it must lift him out of the doldrums of the workaday world and give him rosy visions of himself and his fellow-man. He must be, for a short time, the man he thinks he is and after two of the foregoing, three if he is a hard case, he should be able to say: 'Here I come, head up, tail over the dashboard and all pores open.'
Frank Shay, Esquire, 1934
As we finish the first year of the Newer Freedom the ten cocktails listed and enumerated above hold the leading positions. They won their places on sheer merit and it will be well worth our while to watch them and see how they fare during the second year.
It would be difficult to close this piece telling of the good drinks without saying a word for those 'pansies'[*see below] that are now gone and well-forgotten. Even a list of the worst ten has a charm not unlike a file of the old Police Gazette. We might, in our day of victory, offer them an In Memoriam - with a Raspberry:
The Bronx
The Alexander
The Pousse Cafe
The Sweetheart
The Orange Blossom
The Pink Lady
The Clover Club
The Fluffy Ruffles
The Pom Pom
The Cream Fizz.
Requiescat in pace!
From Harman Burney Burke's 1936 Burke's Complete Cocktail and Tastybite-Recipes
*[The word "pansies" is referring to the short-lived perennial plant so indicating that these cocktails were short-lived.]
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