Gilded Age Cocktails

A powerful shot of history, aesthetics, identity, and politics, this elegant volume chronicles the early libations of America’s most profoundly elitist hours—cocktail time in the Gilded Age. Tichi provides new (and tasty) insight into the lives and art of bartenders who labored to provide pleasure for a decadent citizenry. ~Alice Randall, author of Black Bottom Saints

This delightful and insightful tour of America’s long affair with cocktails could not be more welcome. With a sure hand and a light touch, Tichi guides the reader back into the Gilded Age to know Americans by what they drank—where, when, with whom, and why. This elegant cultural history of taste—literal and social—is rich with details, recipes, and little-known facts: a journey backwards that lands us in the present, gifting us both self-awareness and escape. ~Carla Kaplan, author of Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance

If you’ve ever wondered how historical nonfiction can be dry like a martini and not dry like a textbook tome, you need to pick up Cecelia Tichi’s Gilded Age Cocktails. Tichi brings to glittering life what it meant to drink from 1870-1910. Chock full of quotes from primary sources of the day with titles like 1890’s Society as I Have Found It, Tichi makes clear how much lubrication kept this period of history afloat, prior to the double blow of a first World War and Prohibition. ~California Review of Books