NY Times food columnist Amanda Hesser has taken a tipsy time travel through that paper's considerable archives and excavated a whopping 40 pages of drink recipes for her new book, The Essential New York Times Cook Book. If this book is true to the form of the Craig Claiborn-era Times cookbooks, it will have a thousand+ recipes and be approximately the size of a major city's phone book (speaking of time travel). Even in that context, this is an impressive showing.
America has never quite settled the question of whether it’s a wine- or beer-drinking nation, so our liquid preferences have always been a free-for-all. Wine for the erudite. Cocktails for the adventuresome. Beer for the mainstream.
(...And all three if you're a Tipsy Texan.) So begins the chapter on Drinks, Cocktails, Punches and Glög. Hesser notes that the Times began publication a decade before Jerry Thomas's game-changing 1862 manual on cocktails, and has borne witness to the codification and mainstreaming of American mixed beverages.
Apropos of its nickname, "the newspaper of record", the Times has also witnessed other major milestones in American history, like, oh, the Civil War, for example. Which is why it pisses me off when intellectual lightweights attempt to slander the Times as "liberal media", irrespective of the fact that it pre-dates our contemporary understanding of such distinctions, and will hopefully outlive it. When I was a fledging journalism major at the University of Texas, I took the intro class from Dr. Stephen Reese, a legend in his own right. The A Section of the Times was required daily reading, and we had to subscribe to the print edition as part of the course. On the first day of class, a girl asks the professor, "If we live in Austin, TX, why do we have to read a paper from New York?" Dr Reese seemed a little surprised by the question (one would think an aspiring Journalism major would be able to differentiate between the Times and the Statesman, or worse, the East Bumblefcuk Reporter), but responded kindly, "The NY Times is one of the finest journalistic institutions in the world...". The paper still shows up on my doorstep each morning, along with the local rag.
Hesser will be in Austin for the Texas Book Festival, and will be doing a book signing event at Rainlily Farm on October 16, 7-9pm, where the Tipsy Texans will be proudly demonstrating cocktails from the venerable newspaper's past. (And, one may hope, sampling a cocktail or two). Tickets available at the link above. Thanks to Marla Camp of Edible Austin magazine for help with coordinating this event.
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