The single best item I encountered while evaluating upward of 80 ABC stores wasn’t a bottle of liquor (although I did tote home a DeGroff Aperitivo and DeGroff Amaro, clearance priced in Gaston County at $46.22 for the pair.)
In the Scotland County ABC store, located in the small town of Laurinburg—best known in the 20th century for shipping out cantaloupes and bringing in tourists with the corpse of Cancetto “Spaghetti” Farmica, a carnival worker on view at a local funeral home for 60 years—there’s a slanted table near the front door. Atop the table is a beaten two-ring black binder, about the size of a roomy back pocket. It holds at least 100 alphabetized index cards, each featuring a handwritten recipe for a cocktail.
“How old is this?” I asked a millennial-looking employee behind the counter.
According to the employee, locals sometimes leaf through the former staffer’s homemade recipe book for inspiration, or when they can’t recall how to make a drink. But there’s of course no guarantee that they’ll find the ingredients they need: Galliano—essential to the Freddy Fudpucker, a tequila-based Harvey Wallbanger variation—isn’t currently available in ABC stores.
Freddy Fudpucker doesn’t date to the golden age of cocktails, but it’s a drink associated with an era before this one. Its inclusion in the book made me wonder whether someone deeply familiar with cocktail history could date its origin more precisely.
So, I forwarded my book snapshots to Dave Wondrich, the preeminent drinks historian who last month published The Comic Book History of the Cocktail: Five Centuries of Mixing Drinks and Carrying On.
“Interesting about the Cosmo, seeing as the first actual recipe I’ve ever found for it, in July 1987, is for a ‘Sands Cosmopolitan,’ with white rum,” Wondrich said of the Cosmo card, on which “rum” is struck out and “vodka” written in. “The vodka version was recorded a month later and that’s the last I see of the rum one, but that does sort of help date this list.”
The cards were giving off ‘80s vibes in other ways too.
“Some of the drinks are found in Stan Jones’ monumental 1977 Jones’ Bar Guide, although the ¾-ounce of dry vermouth got left out of the Boomerang (people had no respect for vermouth in the 1980s) and the almost-certainly unavailable Creme Yvette in the Angels Delight is replaced by sloe gin,” Wondrich wrote.
He concluded, “I’d say 1977-1987 for the collection, plus maybe a couple of years for North Carolina. I wouldn’t put the collection much past 1990, based on what you sent.”
For someone who just published a book that opens with prehistoric wassail, 1990 isn’t very long ago at all. But it means drinkers in Scotland County have been consulting it for 35 years, which isn’t too shabby for an ABC artifact.
I love this very much.
Ditto.