"The decades following the American Civil War burst with invention-the telephone, the motor car, electric lights, the airplane-and none more welcome than the new and novel beverage heralded as the cocktail. Known as the Gilded Age, these years became the Golden Age of Cocktails, including the classic Manhattan and Martini that persist to this day. Scores of whiskey drinks, cooled with ice chips or cubes that chimed against the glass, proved doubly pleasing when mixed, shaken, or stirred with special flavorings, juices, and fruits. The dazzling new drinks flourished coast to coast at sporting events, luncheons and balls, on ocean liners and yachts, in barrooms, summer resorts, hotels, railroad train club cars, and private homes. Celebrity bartenders rose to fame in New Orleans, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Virginia City, Nevada, among other locales. These Olympians of the bar invented drinks for "Ivy" colleges and concocted beverages for exotic locales, from Hawaii to the frozen northland of the Klondike, site of the Gold Rush of 1898. Fame and infamy alike qualified an "honoree" for a Gilded Age cocktail. Bartenders poured their liquid secrets for dance hall girls and industrial potentates, including William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper mogul, and "Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railroad king. The designated "cocktail hour" of the Gilded Age might begin early in the day, when under the influence of the "hangover" one needed the "hair of the dog that bit." It might continue unabated until, at last, the bottles were corked and set aside-ready for the following day. The Gilded Age cocktail went "underground" during Prohibition, but launched the first of many generations whose palettes thrilled to a panoply of "artistically mixed drinks.""-- Provided by publisher.
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