Mad Men, Round Two: The Cocktails
A couple months ago, we wrote about the incredible use of period food on Mad Men, and as the season has continued, our obsession with the restaurants they visit and the dishes they eat has not abated one bit. Even more fascinating and glamorous-seeming than the Mad Men dining scene though? The constant flow of cocktails, for sure.
It's no secret that fancy old-timey cocktails are having a major resurgence. After all, the pre-Prohibition cocktail trend made the New York Times dining section last week, which is a pretty sure sign that they're a thing &mdash well, that and the fact that posh cocktail lounges are opening up in most major American cities.
We're just glad that Mad Men is coinciding with this renaissance of old school beverages, because if it weren't, it would be a lot harder to sample the drinks that seem so alluring in this post-Mad Men world. There's a pretty good piece over at Paper Magazine on some the main characters and their signature cocktails (a Brandy Alexander for Peggy Olson, a Tom Collins for Betty Draper, and so on), although it's not as exhaustive as we'd like for it to be, as it's based on cocktails that the characters have requested in episodes.
Then, we stumbled upon a post at A Continuous Lean about Esquire’s Handbook for Hosts, published in 1949. The scanned pages are beautiful, and best of all, they detail very Mad Men-esque cocktails &mdash divided by gender!
After the jump, the full-length images!
The Clover Club seems like something that Joan Holloway might order, no? If you are feeling ambitious, replicating some of these seems like a very fun activity. Otherwise, be glad that we have bars like Temple Bar to carry out your vintage cocktail sipping.
[Photo: Mad Men party scene via The Hartford Courant]
[Photo: Pages from Esquire's Guidebook for Hosts via A Continuous Lean.]
Temple Bar [MenuPages]
Temple Bar [Official Site]
By Pink Lady on 10/23/2008 at 3:34 PM