Synopses & Reviews
Nearly everyone has heard of bathtub gin, but how many people know what it really was--or how to make it? During the height of the Prohibition, one anonymous physician compiled more than 200 recipes for "compounding" spirits, hiding the manuscript from authorities. By adding extracts, essences, and oils to plain old sugar moonshine, bootleggers would simulate the taste of gin, whiskey, cordials, rums, absinthes...booze that was otherwise impossible to procure. The potential profits were staggering.
Synopsis
A secret, handwritten collection of illicit booze recipes--hidden in a volume of poetry during the Prohibition--annotated and explained in fascinating detail
Synopsis
American Prohibition was far from watertight. If you knew the right people, or the right place to be, you could get a drink--most likely a variation of the real thing, made by blending smuggled, industrial alcohol or homemade moonshines with extracts, herbs, and oils to imitate the aroma and taste of familiar spirits. Most of the illegal recipes were written out by hand and secretly shared. The "lost recipes" in this book come from one such compilation, a journal hidden within an antique book of poetry, with 300 entries on making liquors, cordials, absinthe, bitters, and wine.
Lost Recipes of Prohibition features more than 70 pages from this notebook, with explanations and descriptions for real and faked spirits. Readers will also find historic and modern cocktails from some of today's leading bartenders, including rum shrubs, DIY summer cups, sugar-frosted "ice" cordials, 19th- and 21st-century cinnamon whiskeys, homemade creme de menthe, absinthe-spiked cocktail onions, caramel lemonade, and more.
About the Author
Matthew Rowley is an expert on the manufacture and distribution of illicit spirits and has written for numerous publishers, magazines and universities, as well as writing his own book, Moonshine. He is on the editorial board of David Wondrich's forthcoming Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails, contributing editor to Distiller magazine, and a contributor to Whiskey Advocate and other publications. Since 2008 he has written Rowley's Whiskey Forge, a blog dedicated to food and drink. He lives in San Diego, California.