Midcentury Cocktails

“Cecelia Tichi writes about literature and culture with verve. At once a guide to vintage drinks and a brisk chronicle detailing the fashions and fissions of the Atomic Age, Midcentury Cocktails is Tichi’s best cocktail book yet.” - Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald, authors of America’s Founding Food: The Story of New England Cooking “A charming blend of 1950s consumer and media culture whose stories orbit around the whimsical cocktails of the times. At once nostalgic, informative, and delightful.” - Gary Cross, author of Consumed Nostalgia: Memory in the Age of Fast Capitalism “Illustrations and recipe lists accompany each chapter; these are visual, flavorful ways to engage with the book’s cultural history lessons. Some of the recipes assume access to special ingredients like orzata and falernum, but one imagines that, in the generous American spirit of adventurousness, mixologists can improvise as needed. Midcentury Cocktails is a delightful, nostalgic trip through the 1950s and 1960s with recipes for recreating Atomic Age intoxications.” (Foreword) “Some of the cocktails that we all know and love today—Moscow mules, sea breezes, gin fizzes—have their roots in midcentury America, when jets first crowded the skies and cars hit newly paved highways. Ahead of New Year’s, Cecelia Tichi takes us on an alcoholic tour.” (Air Mail) “Tichi portrays the postwar era and all its confidence and enthusiasm with recipes of drinks that fueled the times. … an entertaining, playful view of life in this era and how the drinks culture fed into it.” (Library Journal)

Cecelia Tichi is Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English and American Studies Emerita at Vanderbilt University. Her books include Jazz Age Cocktails, Gilded Age Cocktails, What Would Mrs. Astor Do? The Essential Guide to the Manners and Mores of the Gilded Age and Civic Passions: Seven Who Launched Progressive America. Her mystery fiction includes the “Val and Roddy DeVere Gilded” series, set in the Gilded Age.