“Every drink worth drinking in the history of modern + classic cocktails” is kind of throwing down the gauntlet, no?
Initial observations:
every recipe has an attribution ; this usually means a bartender, bar and year for the modern drinks, and an author, title and year for the historical drinks
this book seems first and foremost a reference to the Petraske school of bartending, going way way beyond Regarding Cocktails in scope with a ton more modern recipes from that diaspora
the historical recipes are interpreted through that Petraske school lens (not a bad lens); for one example, Fouquet’s Fisherman’s Prayer gets muddled raspberries rather than raspberry syrup
this book also (unsurprisingly) documents a lot of modern recipes from Australia, which is helpful
this book is also, obviously, the de facto Everleigh Cocktail Book
the recipes are categorized first by “branch” (i.e., drink type) and then by base, and then alphabetized; consequently, the primary way of using the book is to look over an array of more or less similar/comparable variations on a theme
I have my doubts about the necessity of big compendium of drinks (Wad o’ Drinks, as @RobertHess would say) in 2025. From what I hear they’re not doing very well in the marketplace anymore. But the Petraske school, the authors, the method all contribute to increasing my interest in this one, which, I was recently told, will be published in Spanish next year so at least some people still see this as a viable proposition.
Didn’t they publish a Everleigh book before the pandemic?
Ah, it seems they did a book “A Spot at the Bar: Welcome to the Everleigh” (2017) with 300 recipes. I don’t have it to compare, but the new book has loads of Everleigh recipes, some more recent than 2017.
With the help of @francois, I was able to do a quick Index-based comparison between “A Spot at the Bar” and the MCC. All the drinks from the earlier book made it into the MCC except, it seems, these (~21):
American Negroni
Andy Shandy
Blenton
Bootleg Fizz
Precursory Cocktail
Chancellor #1
Creamy Town
Cuban Cocktail #3
Cubano
De La Louisiane
Drowsy Girl
1920 Cocktail
Oh Mary!!
Old Pepper
Serpent’s Tooth
Single Standard
Smoky Choker
Stinger Royal
Stout Flip
Talent Scout
Tattletail
There’s some subtle renaming of drinks from the earlier book to the later. It’s also possible that some of the ideas from the omitted drinks are documented in-line in the MCC. I have not performed a full recipe-to-recipe comparison.
; this usually means a bartender, bar and year for the modern drinks, and an author, title and year for the historical drinks