SYMHC Live: Gin Cocktails and Jerry Thomas

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. This episode was originally recorded live at the AC Hotel, Los Angeles, South Bay, which was a really really fun night with some really really amazing listeners. We had a wonderful time. We did have a little bit of a wild night in that while we were right in the middle of a sentence, there was a little blackout the whole neighborhood, not just our room. Yeah, that shifted things around a little bit. LA had rained that day and they lost power. Whether or not those two things are related unclear, But after a little break where we figured out a plan, we did pick up. So you may be experiencing a little splice in the middle here where we have studio recorded segment of the show and then it will go back to live. The audience was really, really lovely and rolled with that whole madness completely, So thanks to everyone who came that night. We haven't done this since before COVID. I know, this is our first live show since pre COVID. Yeah, it's pretty thrilling. Yeah, Well, hope we remember how to do any of this. Yeah, it'll be good. Should we just kick right in? Yeah? Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and you guys are here and you're amazing. Yeah. Correct. So we're here tonight to talk a little bit about cocktail history, which, as you may imagine, is a little difficult to pin down because a lot of times, I mean, you've probably done this at home. You're making recipes in your kind of messing with them on the fly, and it's not like someone standing there documenting. So how do we know when something started or got changed? But it's a little bit difficult, right. We're gonna try, though, tonight to delve into the histories of two very well known gin cocktails. They both have conflicting origin stories. There's not one accepted background for them. We're also going to talk about a man who is considered a pioneer in cocktail history and in bartending specifically. And we are starting out Listen, I loaded the deck because I picked one of my favorite drinks and one of Tracy's favorite drinks to talk about. So we're going to talk about my one of my personal favorites. First, this is not a cool drink, y'all. This is like that drink that when you order it, bartender's go old school, and it is. But it's a classic for a reason because it is very simple and well balanced. So now we're going to talk first about the Tom Collins. Yes, so Tom Collins fans in that. As Holly just said, Tom Collins is a classic gin drink. It's spirits, lemon juice, simple syrup or sugar and club sota. So very simple, balanced and refreshing. But maybe you have actually heard of a John Collins or a Vodka Collins, maybe even a Pierre Collins. Holly told me some other Collins' backstage. There are a lot of them, and those are names for variations on this classic drink. It's highly possible, though, that the original one was not Tom Collins, it was John Collins. That was not the drink that's John Collins today. Though today the John Collins is this version that uses bourbon instead of gin, and the John Collins origin story, which is not the bourbon one, involves a bartender named John Collins. This version puts the origin of the drink in London at Limmer's Hotel. That's where Collins was employed as a bartender. And the idea here was that it was a single serving version of gin punch, which was made in large matches that they could ladle out. But sometimes they weren't making that, and people still wanted a gin punch, so they came up with the single serving version. Makes all the sense in the world. Gin punch is made with gin, lemon juice, sugar, and water. There are some variations, like if you look up a recipe today that will include bitters or some other ingredients, but it's basically the same stuff that's in a Collins. But the version called a John Collins had a little bit of a twist on it because it was made with Yenavor or Holland gin. If you've ever had yinavor, you know it's not quite the same as gin. It's a close relative, but it's also pretty distinctly different if you compare them side by side, right, Yenavor has this multi year flavor. It's got less of that juniper note that you probably associate with gin. It's kind of got its own identity. Yeah, if you've only read the word jenavor on paper and no one has ever said it. You might think it's pronounced Jennifer, because that is so if you're confused right now, that's what that is. Some bartenders started making this drink with Old Tom gin and that's drier than your neighbor is, but not as dry as London dry gin is today. Because of the difference in taste between you neighbor and Old Tom drinks that are made with a spirit, they tasted different enough that it seemed like we needed to have two different names. So the Old Tom version, according to this whole version of the story, became the Tom Collins. But in addition to this London origin story, there are a lot of other contenders because according to Difford's guide, creation credit could be given to another bartender named Collins who was working at White House Tavern in New York. Or it might have been a bartender in New Jersey or yeah, or it might have been a bartender on the West Coast, or it might have been a bartender in Australia. I mean, I read like so many different countries this thing could have come from. And it's partially because the name Collins isn't really rare, so any bartender with that name could go, yeah, I totally made that drink up, and we don't know. This is again that hazy problem. And when the John Collins that we know today came to mean a Collins made with bourbon or whiskey instead of gin or you neighbor, we don't know when that happened. It just kind of evolved. It makes a little sense when you consider the multier flavor of you neighbor, that that may have been the transition point or someone's like, oh, we try bourbon in this John Collins, then there you go. But we don't know, don't know. Maybe the oddest twist on the Tom Collins, which is a twist that's so odd that earlier today I asked, Collie, are we sure this is real? It's a prank that this became associated with. So in eighteen seventy four, the hoax of a sort started in New York and so in one paper that Holly found, which was the Yorkville Enquirer of York South Carolina, claimed that this joke had been started by a minstrel named Harrigan, and Harrigan had enough connections all around town in the service industry, like hotel clerks and bartenders and barbers and all of these kinds of people that he could really sell this hoax. So the prank went like this. The person pulling the prank would tell the pranky that he heard something very bad about him, like maybe his wife left him for another man. And then the pranking would be like, whoa, where did you hear this information? That's terrible, And so this person pulling the prank would be like, oh, Tom Collins told me I just saw Tom Collins down at the bar or the hotel, or the shop or wherever. So there, of course was no Tom Collins, and this person who had just been told this horrible thing would run off to try to find somebody who did not really exist, and so he would get to the bar and the bartender would be like, Nope, no Tom Collins here, but I saw him down at the hotel, So go to the hotel. Repeat this whole cycle. Every place the fictional Tom was supposed to be No, no, you just missed him. He went down to this other place. Yes, wow, goose Chase. And so this poor person would be led all over town by this this joke. Don't play this, don't do that, that's mean. This prank was so popular in eighteen seventy four that it was super easy to find a lot of newspaper articles about it all over the United States. Some of these articles were kind of written with a wink, like they were like, let's keep this Tom Collins thing going, and they would write it up like Tom Collins is in town this week and there was no Tom Collins, and they were kind of perpetuating the myth. But others, when you read them, are kind of like the print version of a massive eye roll, where they're just like, oh, go the Tom Collins thing. That same newspaper Tracy just mentioned the Yorkville in choir that write up about it opens with quote. For the last two weeks, people have been talking about Tom Collins. Newspapers have published mysterious hints about Tom Collins, the brick piles have been placarded with allusion to Tom Collins, and peripatetic vendors of card photographs have offered to sell correct likenesses of Tom Collins to the uninitiated. It was very provoking to hear one man say to another, have you seen Tom Collins, and then for both of them to explode with laughter. It seemed very stupid, and upon the whole. I think that it was so that reporter maybe got duped in the Tom Collins thing and was feeling a little salty about it. Definitely had feelings. So what does all this have to do with the cocktail? Right? One origin story of this drink is that there was a bartender who came up with the idea of, like, when somebody comes in demanding to seek Tom Collins, making him a drink and making him pay for it, and that drink, of course, would be the Tom Collins. This doesn't really work out though, because we know the Tom Collins existed before eighteen seventy four, when this frank suddenly became a fun thing, a fun, fun thing for people to do. Yeah, doesn't sound fun at all, But if you are a cocktail person, you may look at what's in a Tom Collins and be like, Hey, isn't this a gin Ricky? They are very very similar. In an article for Feast magazine in twenty fifteen, Matt Seider wrote, quote the Ricky and the Collins. I can't seem to write about one of these cocktails without including the other. They are too similar to warrant individual attention to sort of sound for them. Both. They are a lot alike, right. Both of them have gin, they have citrus, the Ricky usually has lime instead of lemon juice. They have syrup or sugar, and they have club soda. And they both have variations that have whiskey. We've talked about the John Collins. The John Collins the Joe Ricky is the version of the Jinriky that has bourbon or whiskey. But the main difference, according to Cider, is that the Jinriky is made in the glass that the beverage will be served in, whereas the Collins is mixed in a shaker and then strained over ice and then topped with club soda. The subtleties of cocktails. The Town Collins is also really similar to a gin fizz. The fizz may or may not contain egg white, depending on where you get it. That's not the main difference, though. The key differentiator is that the Fizz is shaken with ice and then double strained into a glass without ice before being topped with club soda, but the Colins is shaken and then strained over fresh ice before the club soda is included. Similarly, very nuanced difference in the two of them If that sounds like a lot of drinks are very similar, Yes, that's true. Yeah, it's one of those things. If you start mixing drinks or looking up drinks on your own, you're like, isn't this They're often so similar. It's like those tiny subtleties are what changed things. So at this point we're gonna pause for a sponsor break. All right, So the Tom Collins, as we've said, has a number of possible origin points. But so does another long lived and popular gin cocktail, Tracy's favorite or one of them, the Besneys. Look, everyone loves it. There's a gas, there's a happy gas for the Besneys. This too, is a classic. It has a lot of crossover ingredients with the Tom Collins. So there's gin, of course, there's lemon juice, and instead of simple syrup or sugar, there is honey syrup. Just is my own personal aside. If you're making this at home, honey syrup and honey are not the same thing. You have to dilute your honey with water to get honey syrup or it won't flow properly in your drink. Anyway, that's just my own personal psa. The Besneys is a stronger cocktail than the Collins because it does not get topped with like a club soda, which dilutes the the alcohol by volume of it. And you just make those three basic ingredients, usually shaken with ice, and then it streams into a chilled coop. Please chill your coops. It's my other, my other psa Holly as a number. I've learned so many things about cocktails from Hollywood, just as weekend, not even from this, just from like random side conversations Frank Meyer. When the Ritz Hotel opened in Paris in nineteen twenty one, Frank was working as head bartender at the Cafe Parisian there and as part of that job worked up a cocktail menu for the bar. And in nineteen twenty nine there was a man named George Gabrielle Finnell writing under the pen name RIP, and he published this book titles Cocktail the Three. I'm guessing that was how you would want it to be said, and frank Meyer's b's knees was included on page seventy two. And this recipe is written pretty charmingly, not with like measurements in terms of ounces or any other actual measurements. It's fractions of the drink. And this is not even like one part this and one part this. It is like one sixth of the drink is ju de citrent that is lemon juice. A sixth of it is miel. I forgot how to say that, even though Duo Lingo has told me a lot of times how to say honey and French. Two thirds of the volume is Gordon's dry gent. And then this comes with the direction frappe latout or hit it all that means, of course shaking it. Frank Meyer merits a short aside. He's a pretty interesting character in addition to elevating the role of head bartender to really being a guest services and hospitality manager, because he would, according to various accounts, come out from behind the bar, talk with customers, do things like table touches that are very common today but weren't necessarily then. In addition to all of that, he was also an accidental spy, according to writer to lar J Mozeo, who wrote The Hotel on Place Vendome Life, Death and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris. So, according to that book, when Paris was occupied by the Germans in World War II, Meyer stayed and he kept the bar open, and a lot of Nazis started to frequent the place, and Meyer is said to have used his position to eavesdrop on his German clientele and then use that information to aid the French resistance and British forces. He is also believed to have assisted Jewish hotel guests who needed papers to get out of the city to safety. So kind of a hero, h but don't get too excited. He also may have made some dodgy financial deals with people, like saying, hey, if you give me your money, I will pay all your debts while you're gone, and then when the occupation is ended and you come back, everything will be taken care of. He didn't do that. He pocketed the money in a lot of cases that ultimately got him in hot water. He got fired from his job, and he kind of vanishes from the historical record after that. So sort of a hero, sort of a cheat, total mixed bag. Another story of where the bees knees comes from is tied to a well known historical figure, and that's Molly Brown, as in the Unsinkable Molly Brown, survivor of the Titanic disaster. She was also an activist two championed women's rights and workers' rights, and a very wealthy woman who was active in philanthropy. She may have invented the Bee's Knees cocktail. Historians Jared Brow and Anastasia Miller turned up a nineteen twenty nine newspaper mention of the bees Knees that gave Brown the credit for creating it in Paris while she was in one of the city's drinking establishments that catered exclusively to women. So because this mentioned as the same year that cocktails the parih came out, doesn't really answer the question of who invented the drink. It does place its origin, though, pretty squarely in Paris in the nineteen twenties. So there is also another common origin story for the Besnies that I bet sad on you have heard, which is that it was a prohibition era drink that came about because the lower quality gin that was what hello. The lower quality gin that was available at the time, like the honey serrut, covered some of that and smoothed out the flavor. Look, we have the other two origin stories that are actually in print. This one seems pretty trophy. It existed already, It wasn't that. That's like a cute way to describe it. But there's a lot of stuff that ties cocktail history to like prohibition doings that doesn't really have legs. Yeah, the expression of the bees knees was pretty popular during the jazz Age. It makes sense that the cocktails creator would invoke a saying that meant something that was great and then reference bees because of having honey in it. So now we had to transition because we cannot talk about cocktail history, particularly in the US, without discussing Jerry Thomas. He was born Jerry or Jeremiah. We're not sure pee Thomas on October thirty at eighteen thirty in Second's Harbor, New York. Some sources actually say it was eighteen thirty two. Who knows. If you're wondering what that pee stands for me too, we don't know. Never never was ever disclosed in any sort of way. It's not certain. As I said it, his given name was Jerry or Jeremiah. He said both at different times when he got interviewed. His parents were Jeremiah and Mary, and he had three brothers that we know of, George, John, and David. And when Jerry was still a kid, although once again exact dates I don't know. The family moved to new Haven, Connecticut when Jerry was sixteen. I keep trying to speak into the microphone, like I know, I gotta know. I fear it will cut on and feel like an event. Horizon will open up so much. It's like with the puff out at your house, and every time you walk into a room, you flip the lights went back the back and there's a blazing sun. Yeah. So, when Jerry was sixteen, he started working as a barkeep in New Haven, but just the following year switch trajectories completely and went to sea. He told a reporter years later that he went to Cuba. That may or may not have been true. Uh. He did end up though, on a ship called the Ann Smith. The Ann Smith was based out of New Haven, and on the Ann Smith he went to California via the very lengthy route that ran down the North American and South America. Comments around Cape Horn and then up north on the West coast window from a passenger's account that there was a lot of alcohol flowy very on this shit. We don't really know whether Jerry Thomas was pouring any of that alcohol though, but the Ann Smith got to know got to San Francisco on November fourth, eighteen forty nine. That, of course, was not long after the start of the California gold Rush. Thomas really wanted to get in on that action, so he jumps ship. Didn't work out for him though, I mean the gold rush didn't work out for most people who were trying to get gold. It worked out for people who ran bars and ruffles himself and sell things to people trying to get gold. Associate he was working as a bartender. So at last his bartending career has begun. No, not really, because he left that job. He was very fickle at seems. He left that job less than a year in to start a musical group. And this music group toured up and down the state of California and apparently did pretty well. But he didn't stick with that either. He left that enterprise. There was one story I read that suggested that while they were traveling, a bunch of the other this is dark so get ready, a bunch of the other musicians got cholera and died and he had to bury them. I don't know if that's true or not, because he told a lot of lies, but he he did leave his musician life. He was back on the East Coast in New York by eighteen fifty two, and when he got there he was really flush with cash. He had sixteen thousand dollars in his pocket, not adjusted for today's money sixteen eighteen fifty two, so he was rolling hot. We don't know how he got that money. Mysteries about, but it doesn't matter because he spent it all nealy fast. He is said to have been a sporting gentleman, meaning that he gambled like crazy. His New York Times obituary indicated that his money came from an inheritance. That doesn't quite seem right, but according to that when his father died, he got a small sum and that was what enabled him to travel. And the New York Times included this really cute description of him that as he traveled, quote, he developed quite a taste for pictures and brick the brack. Not quite what you would expect of a man who was traveling the seas, but yeah, he did like stuff. His whole story is wild, because the next thing that may have happened is opening a bar in eighteen fifty two under the Barna Museum of All places. That too, is difficult to verify, though before long he was back in New Haven at the City Hotel. He might have traveled around the country for a little bit, kind of working in bars and saloons wherever he went. As he made this little journey, he definitely claimed that was what was happening. I was not in New Haven for very long though, and was working at the Metropolitan Hotel in New York in eighteen fifty eight. He was the principal bartender there. This was a good job at a well established location, and Thomas did well enough that he could travel to Europe and see prize fights, maybe do some guest bartending there. Yeah, it's one of those things where if you look up, Jerry Thomas says he bartended. So how much of that is we don't know. But his really big move in terms of like becoming a figure in this scene, happened in eighteen sixty when he and his brother George opened up a drinking establishment at six twenty two Broadway, and this became an incredibly popular spot. Like it is written up in all of the newspapers. It attracted all of the actors of Broadway. It attracted very famous people, including Royalty. It said that Prince Edward stopped there when he was visiting New York. But while Thomas was really good at making drinks and really good at engaging with guests, he really really sucked at managing business, and that business ultimately tanks. So not long after Jerry Thomas's bar at six twenty two Broadway closed, he published a book. And that book is The Bartender's Guide, how to Mix Drinks or The bon Vivant's Companion. And each of those title segments gets used as the title of this book when people talk or write about it, and that is because the cover of the book reads Jerry Thomas's Bartender's Guide, how to Mix Drinks, Receipts for mixing all kinds of punch, eggnog, july smashes, Powper's cock Fails, and its seguris, Maul's Toddy slings, sours, flips Flip, and two hundred other fancy drinks. Uh you know, we leve alone title. The title page of this book is even wordier. It doesn't match what Ali just said. The words are all completely different. This reads how to Mix Drinks or The Bonvivant's Companion, containing clear and reliable directions for mixing all the beverages in the United States, together with the most popular British, French, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish recipes embracing punches, juliets, coddlers, etc. Etc. Etc. In endless variety. There's more that I have to say. There's an equally long subhead that we're not reading regarding all of the appended manual for manufacturing cordials, liquors, fancy syrups, etc. Et cetera. That section, though, was written by Professor Christian Schultzho's title is Practical Chemist and Distillery print against title. To be very very clear, Jerry Thomas did not invent those recipes. He basically, during all of his travel, was collecting them. It was the first book of its kind in North America, though, and he had learned bartending the way I mentioned earlier that people learn it all the time by going and working in bars, often as like a junior bartender or a barback, and you know, picking up all of the various tricks the other bartenders and master printenders were teaching him. The recipes were known to barkeepers, but at this point they hadn't been written down anywhere and I kind of feel like this might have been like the magician who tells the tricks where they're like Jerry. But because he had traveled so much, he had been exposed to a lot of different drinks. And this was a very successful book, although like his other business deals, he made a really really lopsided deal with the publisher. He didn't get any residuals off of it. He got paid the one time for the book and that was it, even though it went to printing after printing, after printing. The year after the book came out, Jerry moved to San Francisco and worked at the Occidental Hotel. He wrote a second book, which sadly is now lost. This was titled Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Bartenders. He was really on the move all the time. He did not stay in San Francisco long either, and he had it to Nevada. I almost said it the way I say it in my head, which is the way people will yell at me for saying when the US Civil War. And then he had it right back to the East Coast and got a job at the Metropolitan until he opened up a new establishment of his own with his brother near Madison Square. And there the art that he had collected over the years, which included a series of prints by previous podcast subject William Hogarth. Those are all hung up on the walls so the people could come, they could have some food, they could look at all this art, and they could drink. And this became really successful as an assigned I think the hogart thing was cheeky, because if you know Hogarth's works, they're all like morality tales about not giving into excess and drinking and carousing with loose humans. So I'm like, I'm like, Jerry, where you being a little cheeky tiky. In eighteen sixty seven, Jerry got married. He married a widow named Henrietta Waits. Henrietta already had a daughter who became part of their family, and then she and Jerry had a child together, a son. So he went from this life on the move, I mean, he shifted careers so many times to this kind of sessile one in New York, complete with a business and family responsibility. And I don't know why I choked on that word, with business and family responsibility. And this was really in the course of just a couple of years. He went from like free Meeland to sit in. Still, the bar did move north in eighteen seventy two to a location on Broadway near thirtieth that's because Rent went up at his old one, and once again he created a sort of combination bar restaurant museum to great success. Oh, Jerry, you never learn how to handle money. It's so sad he was making. I read one thing that said like they routinely brought in over four hundred dollars a night, which today would not be amazing for a bar, but in eighteen sixty seven or I guess that was seventy two solid. But he spent more than he made all the time. He bought stuff on credit, constantly thinking he's gonna jush up the bar, somemore, and it all caught up to him. He and his brother tried things like they tried to rebrand the bar and have additional grand openings to try to like reinvigorate the business. They also added pool tables, and at one point they added a shooting range in the bar, which you know, what goes together rudder is alcohol and gun. I did not find any evidence that anything went horribly awry, thankfully, But the thing is, none of this worked because by eighteen seventy six he had to not only sell the business, he had been in business at this point for so long. He was literally the most famous bartender in the city. And it was suddenly like, but I can do it anymore because I don't know how to run a business, which he really needed a better business bar. Yeah, I'm going to travel back in time and I'm gonna make Jerry Tummas happen in a new way. I feeling today maybe he could make it go of like one of those axe throwing bars. Them seems similar to like a side range bar hoochin violence. Yeah, I feel like the story we've already told about him has had some very wild detours. There are also a lot of stories about Jerry Thomas that are difficult to substantiate. For example, allegedly, at one point he was planning to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a ballot. We're not done. He was going to be armed with a knife in case he went down in the water and had to fight off sharks. But this plan was sported because he couldn't get enough gas to fill the blue Also, he just he bolstered some of the false information himself. At one point, he told a journalist that he had invented the popular drink known as Tom and Jerry, which includes an egg, sugar, brandy, and sometimes also rum. He said he named this drink after his two pet mice, Tom and Jerry, and also after himself. Had it's just like exciting light. This makes yeah, so uh yeah, he said. He named this after his two pet mice, Tom and Jerry, also after himself, using that short version of Thomas. He said this came to him as an idea in eighteen forty seven when a patron just wanted an egg mixed with sugar, and he decided it just sounds yeah, yeah, and he decided to improve on that. And the thing is, though, this is a drink that has roots in the eighteen twenties, so it was not something that he thought of in eighteen forty seven. Yeah, it's a brandy slip. I mean it's not. He didn't. By the way, if you're not in the flips, come alone. It's good. There are plenty of things, though, that we do actually know and are verifiable about him. He was absolutely known every write up to be quite a dandy. He loved like super expensive slaxy jewelry, maybe this is where the money problems came up. But he really changed bartending forever because, in addition to writing down and sharing all of these recipes, if he had learned over the years, he is also considered the father of flare bartending. If you don't know what that is, that's the kind of bartending. Like if you ever saw Tom cruising cocktail, it's that kind where you're flipping the bottles and you're spinning things, and you're throwing a lemon and catching it in the lemon press and all of that, and it all goes back to Jerry. His most famous drench is a showmanship classic. It's called the Blue Blazer. It's terrifying. Yeah, I'm gonna tell you about it. If you've ever seen a woodcut of Jerry Thomas, it probably included the illustration of him making a blue blazer. This is a woodcut that was in the book. This drink, as written by Thomas, calls for one wine glass of scounch whiskey. Plus these were smaller wine glasses, so I still still glass and just when it's getting weirder's yet plus the same measure of boiling water. Okay, And then here's the instructions. Quote, put the whiskey and the boiling water in one mug, ignite the liquid with fire and wild blazing. Mix both ingredients by pouring them four or five times from one mug to the other, as represented in the cut. If well done, this will have the appearance of a continued stream of liquid fire, sweetened with one teaspoon of pulverized white sugar, and serve in a small bar tumblert when a piece of lit evant peel. The blue Blazer doesn't have a very phonious or classic name, but it tastes better to the palate than it sounds to the ear. Tamas also makes what maybe it's a good suggestion practicing this trick of pouring this boiling water and flaming stuff from one basel to another. Try that with cold water before you try it with stuff that's boiling or on fire. There are also people who make the blue blazer today. You can find videos of it online. It's terrifying. It's terrifying. And since we're talking about gin drinks tonight, I also want to make sure we mentioned some of the gin drinks that are in Jerry's book that are not the ones we've discussed, for example, the gin and pine, and this is made simply enough and is true to its name. Quote, split a piece of the heart of a green pine log and defined splints about the size. Oh, just wait of a cedar lead pencil, and take two ounces of the same and put into a quart decanter, and fill the decanter with gin. Let the pine soap for two hours, and the gin will be ready to serve. She likes some wood in your gin, delicious. There is also an entry for a gin straight that's exactly what it sounds like. The recipe is the same as a brandy strait, but it's gin instead. And those directions say, quote, in serving this drink, you simply put a piece of ice in a tumbler and hand it to your customer. Wish the bottle of brandy worth hurting. There some of Thomas's strength. They're just straight alcohol. He also does have a section, although it is brief that our temperance drinks, and most of these are based with lemonade. Yeah, some of those actually sound pretty good. Fight his fame and his showmanship and his influence, Jerry Thomas's last years were pretty low key. After he closed his final bar and was kind of out of money. He worked at various small bars around New York. He tried to restart his entrepreneurial efforts, including one that was also a minstrel theater, but nothing ever really got off the ground. This might be my favorite fact about Jerry Thomas and has nothing to do with cocktails. In eighteen seventy eight, he started an organization known as the Gord Club. This is exactly what it sounds like. It was a group of people who were really enthusiastic about gords and their cultivationship. Well, there's some great guards. I can see how you can't rise if you grew the best gourd. He was really excited and he got written up in the paper for this amazing club he had started. I think we need Gord Club t shirts. But he lost so much money on his business efforts that went awry, gambling, and then he speculated on the stock market that he lost absolutely everything. He even had to sell off his collection of art and curios. He continued, literally to the end of his days to talk in the press about plans that he had where he was going to start a new bar, where he was going to reinvigorate an old bar, but none of those ever really materialized. On de Zepber fourteenth, eighteen eighty five, Jerry had been working at the Hotel Brighton, which he was hoping to reinvigorate and turn into a proper bar. He left in the early afternoon to go home, and then shortly after he walked in the door, he died of what was officially recorded as vascular disease of the heart. He was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery at the Bronx. And we had just touched on some things about Jerry Thomas, but if you want a way more in depth look, as well as an examination and analysis of his work, which is pretty great. One of the best resources is a book called Imbibe. If you're into cocktails, you've probably seen it. It's written by David Wondrich, who is an amazing cocktail and spirits historian. It's such a good read whether you like drinks or not, but if you love cocktails and you want to know more about their history, especially, it's like the magic history book you always wanted. He cannot recommend it to us, so it was life was really one of ups and downs. It is safe to say that Jerry, with his flare for the dramatic and dress and service style, he'd be pretty pleased with the iconic stature that his name holds today among the drink of a shitados. There is in fact a speakeasy in Rome called Jerry Thomas. To loop back to the beginning of the show, though Jerry included recipes for the Tom Collins in an updated edition of The Bartender's Guide because it didn't exist when he first put it out. He actually had three versions. But he's an interesting thing because if instead of giving the drink a new name when it was made with a different spirit, he just called them all Tom Collins, but he would be like Tom Collins whiskey, Tom Collins Blandy, and that Tom Collins gin. So you know, full circle on gin cocktail history. Yeah, yay, thank you for that's Jerry Thomas and some of our favorite gin beverages, which you know, we had been asked when this live show initially started to do something potentially involving cocktail history, which is always fun to talk about, and so I was delighted when we got the chance to have a little little gin time. I have listener mail, listen, I may never, ever, ever, ever stop talking about pumpkins, because to me, it's Halloween year round. But here we are. This is from our listener Kristen, who writes, Hi, Holly and Tracy, Happy October. I just listened to the episode about jack o' lanterns. I liked the episode, but when Holly mentioned pumpkins sprouting up randomly in the garden, I just had to write in I love growing pumpkins and tell everyone with gardens if they want something that looks great all summer with no effort, pumpkins are your best friend. The big green leaves hide all the weeds, and then you get pumpkins in the fall. They are the best. For years, we have let our kids smash our jack of lanterns in the garden after Halloween. Every spring, new plants sprout from the random seeds left over. They bring me joy three out of four seasons of the year. Thanks for all your podcasts that bring me joy all year round. And here is a pick of our new family member, Mila. She is a Lab Retriever Husky mix. She is sweet, wild, and sassy. We just love her. She is beautiful. Oh my goodness, this dog is beautiful. I'm a little obsessed, so please kiss Mila right on the snoop for me if she's into that. I also wanted to mention the other thing that Kristen doesn't mention, that is great if you are growing pumpkins, you can eat those pumpkin blossoms. They're very delicious, especially the first The first series of blossom that you get are all going to be male and so you can't get any fruit from them anyway, so you may as well pluck them. You can put them in case ideas, you can deep fry them, you can do all the yummy things. I'm a fan. I'm telling you pumpkins year round. So thank you Kristin for reminding me that there was more about pumpkins to talk about, and thank you for sharing its beautiful pictures of my list. She's so pretty, and also just encouraging people to grow pumpkins because I agree they are very very fun to grow. I love them. I love them. If you would like to write to us, you can do so at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also find us on social media as Missed in History, and if you would like to subscribe and you haven't yet, you can do that easy as pie. You can do that on the iHeartRadio app, or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.