Had no idea there was a Star Trek canon.
I believe there is a Star Wars canon, too. 
Ha! Canon is HUGE in Star Trek. One of the first occurrences was in The Trouble with Tribbles, where the Organian peace treaty (established in the episode "Errand of Mercy") with the Klingons is mentioned. ST:TOS didn't have a lot of references to past episodes, but enough to build up the notion of canon. All televised episodes are considered canon, as are the movies. Many debate if the books can be considered canon, and if so, which ones. With the new "Discovery" series (which I haven't been watching), there are countless arguments about its use and abuse of canon.
…but back to the topic at hand…
I’m frankly not sure if cocktail books lend themselves well to establishing a canon. Recipes vary so much from one to another, and over time the recipes evolve such that I don’t think it is possible to think of them so much as canon, but as a snapshot in time. Otherwise we would need to be insisting that a “Martini” should be made with sweet vermouth.
and I’ve got an evolving list of cocktail books here:
https://www.chanticleersociety.org/index.php?title=Bibliography
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I don’t think of the cocktail canon as providing the definitive recipes for every drink so much as being the best documentation of the waypoints in the evolution of the art.
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To prevent this thread from getting stretched way out with different versions of the same lists of books, I’ve converted the top post into a “wiki” post, meaning any of you should be able to edit it as a working document. We’ll see how that goes.
I think the next step is to start adding notes why each candidate might belong in the canon. I’ll get that started this weekend if nobody beats me to it.
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I think that’s an excellent idea.
As a bartender, here are a handful from my end- mostly in an attempt to provide more context to both the pre & early post modern renaissance periods. I would say that Mautone’s was fairly pivotal as one of the very first that provided recipes with an intentional culinary direction.
Hewett & Axton, Convivial dickens, 1983
Gary Regan, Bartender’s Bible, 1991
Georgeanne Brennan, Aperitif, 1997
Brown & Miller, Champagne Cocktails, 1999
Colin Field, Cocktails of the Ritz Paris, 2001
Difford’s Sauceguide to Cocktails, various volumes from 2001 onward
Dave Wondrich, Esquire drinks, 2002
Salvatore Calabrese, Complete Bartender’s Home Guide 2002
Nick Mautone, Raising the Bar, 2004
Mittie Hellmich, The Ultimate Bar Book, 2006
Essential Bartender’s Guide, Robert Hess 2008
Tony Abou Ganim, Modern Mixologist: Contemporary Classic Cocktails, 2010
Tony Conigliaro, The Cocktail lab, 2012
Flavor Bible provides a great deal of insight into the concept of flavor pairing and a fantastic reference book, overall.- to the degree that I’ve broken the spine on mine and gone through it with a highlighting marker. That said, I’m not certain that it belongs on this list, as it is not a book written in the context of cocktails, or specifically directed at the genre overall.
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I tend to agree. Even the books I love/respect the most leave me with reservations.
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At college, I only learned of the Western Canon. Northwestern obviously let me down.
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My first cocktail book was actually the Hellmich. Haven’t opened it in years, still very glad it’s on your list, it tends to be quite forgotten today.
The Flavor Bible was a book every serious bartender seemed to have here in Spain back when I first moved here in 2009.
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When it comes to cocktails, I’m quite happy with the canon not being about definitive books. The thing with a canon is that it says more about the era when it’s put together that about the art it’s meant to circumscribe. If we focus on books that are important snapshots, we can avoid that pitfall.
What’s been put forward is quite sensible. If I focus on the 1920’s-1930’s which really is my era of interest at the moment, I’d make some change though.
For Cuba, for example, the Escalante is great because it has the first Presidente, but most of the recipes are uninteresting. The 1930 Club de Cantinero book is the defining book of the Cuban golden age and I can’t take seriously a canon that doesn’t feature it.
For Europe, the key book for me is Vermeire’s. MacElhone’s ABC owes its fame more to its author than to its actual content (most of it similar to Vermeire’s).
For France, however much I love Rip’s Cocktail de Pairs I actually think Requien’s L’heure du cocktail is the key text. This was a time when (some class of) the French started making cocktails at home and Requien’s a celebration of the type of people who were into cocktails. Rip’s extremely valuable for recipes for star bartenders of the time, but it’s mostly a collection of bad drinks invented by ‘famous’ French stars of the time for a ‘celebrity’ competition.
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A number of books from my list wouldn’t be on today’s main-stream radar, as the current generation of bartenders have little reference to books circa 1970s - pre-2010. But that shouldn’t negate their importance because in all frankness, they acted as foundational precursors to the new books that we are now able to enjoy in print. Nor was Mud Puddle churning out reprints until sometime around '08. As a young bartender during that time-period, I was grateful for those earlier books. Was also very grateful for Fernando Castellon’s 2001 reprint of JT’s Bartenders Guide (“Vintagebook”).
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McElhone’s book was probably more important in America than it was in Europe. Here, it was one of the foundational texts of the reconstruction that came after Prohibition. Edwin Woelke’s Barman’s Mentor was a far better book, but nobody read it. Everyone who had been to Paris came back with a copy of Harry’s ABC, which represented a prelapsarian world of good fellowship and cheap, we’ll-made cocktails.
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Please work with me on this because I’m still struggling with Flavor Bible given the parameters of the canon, and would really like to include it on my list. In my mind, we are talking about cocktail books here- but can we consider this book and other writings of its ilk as being “fluid”? Books that categorically transcend the “either / or” label since they are more for general reference? Do these parameters allow for fluidity?
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I have zero reservations whatsoever about including the Flavor Bible in the canon. It’s trivial to justify and I’m confident the justification would be compelling. There may be a few spirits-oriented works (about the stuff in the bottle, not how you mix it) that need to be included too.
I do not believe that it is trivial to justify it- the book does not directly address cocktails, and I could not understand its inclusion here given the fact that something as important as Regan’s Book of Bourbon (which does include some cocktail bits as well as a recipe for orange bitters) was not.
I think the justification for including the Flavor Bible (with which one might lump the companion book on drinks) is mostly its ubiquitous influence on what mainstream mixology has come to: the anything-goes expansiveness found in the food on the opposite page of the menu.
Does that not sit right?
Please don’t read any omissions from on my part as implying judgment. I seeded the list to merely to get the ball rolling, and most of what I put on there were the lowest-hanging of the “low hanging fruit”. If you think something belongs on it, please edit the top post and add it, preferably accompanied by a brief justification.
The books of the 1990s and early 2000s are interesting case, since they emerged deep into the near extinction event. I had almost all those books, too, and deliberately added them to the Cocktail Kingdom Library because they do at least document where we were at during the time.