Andrew F. Smith

Manhattan

Appears in
Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America
Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America

By Andrew F. Smith

Published 2004

  • About
One of the most important drinks in the world of the cocktail-mixing bartender, the Manhattan, created by an unknown mixologist, probably in the 1870s, was one of the first cocktails to utilize vermouth as a balancing agent. Originally made with straight rye whiskey, sweet vermouth, bitters, and a dash of curaçao or maraschino liqueur, the recipe has changed, though not substantially, over the past century or more.

The first cocktail book to be printed, How to Mix Drinks; or, The Bon-Vivant’s Companion (1862) by Jerry Thomas, contained no mention of the Manhattan, but his next book, The Bar-Tender’s Guide; or, How to Mix all Kinds of Plain and Fancy Drinks (1887), contained a recipe for the drink, and this time span coincides with the growth of sales of vermouth in the United States. Sweet vermouth became popular before dry vermouth, to the point where many recipe books prior to 1900 called for “vermouth” without differentiating between the two types. After that time, cocktail books started to call for either vermouth or dry vermouth, thus indicating that the sweet variety was more commonly known.