Midcentury Cocktails: History, Lore, and Recipes from America’s Atomic Age

Midcentury, the era of Mad Men, suburban sprawl, convenience foods, and Davey Crockett, provides the setting for Tichi’s third gathering of cocktail culture recipes, after Jazz Age Cocktails and Gilded Age Cocktails. Tichi, professor of English and American Studies at Vanderbilt University, portrays the postwar era and all its confidence and enthusiasm with recipes of drinks that fueled the times. The Barbizon Hotel, a female-only Manhattan institution where single women, usually office workers, resided merits a chapter as does the bar car of the commuter trains from New York City to Connecticut. The recipe for each cocktail matches the settings. Plane trips for travelers other than businessmen was new and exciting with “stewardesses” (required to retire at age 32) to serve. The Playboy Club with Bunnies doing the bunny-dip was a culture all its own.