(COCKTAILS). GROHUSKO, J. A. ~ Jack’s Manual on the Vintage and Production, Care and Handling of Wines, Liquors, etc. A Handbook of Information for Home, Club, or Hotel. Recipes for fancy mixed Drinks and when and how to serve. New York: [McClunn & Co for] the author, 1910.
8vo (185 × 120 mm), pp. [8], 5-87, [21] (adverts). Portrait and pictorial adverts. Original green cloth, gilt title to upper cover. Very slightly rubbed at spine ends and corners, small shelf label to front pastedown. Early pencil ownership inscription: ‘Valentine G. Johnson’. An excellent copy.
A classic pre-Prohibition American cocktail book. Jacob ‘Jack’ Grohusko was the head bartender at Baracca’s restaurant in New York, having been born in England to a Russian Jewish family and brought to New York as an infant. Jack’s Manual has 17 pages on the different types of wine (particularly champagne, sauternes and burgundies) and liquor, and 61 pages of recipes for cocktails.
Reprinted numerous times in the early twentieth-century, this scarce 1910 edition was preceded only by a very rare 1908 edition. Jack’s Manual was the first cocktail book to include the Brooklyn, perhaps his own creation, and several others which would be immortalised in the much later Savoy Cocktail Book (1930).