Hugo Ensslin, 1917. The last book before the lights went out.

If Jerry Thomas's 1862 book is the foundation of American mixology, Hugo Ensslin's Recipes for Mixed Drinks (first edition 1916, expanded 1917) is the closing chapter. It is the last cocktail book published before Prohibition shut the bars in January 1920, and the most modern-feeling document of the entire pre-Prohibition era. Free PDF inside: The Lost Cocktail Codex, 50 hand-transcribed recipes including Ensslin's originals.

This piece is a deep read on the 1917 manuscript. Who Ensslin was, what is in the book, why it remains the single most important source for the modern Aviation, and which of his recipes have survived 109 years intact. The figure most cocktail nerds know him for is the original recipe with creme de violette. The book is much more than that one drink.

The man and the bar

Hugo R. Ensslin worked as the head bartender at the Hotel Wallick in Times Square in the years leading up to Prohibition. The Wallick was a working hotel bar, not a destination temple like the Waldorf or the Plaza, which makes Ensslin's documentation more representative of what was actually being served in Manhattan in 1916. He was not writing a luxury menu. He was writing the working repertoire of a busy New York bar in the last gasp of legal cocktailing.

Biographical details about Ensslin himself are thin. He published the 1916 first edition with the Fox Printing House in New York, expanded it for a second edition in 1917, and the trail goes cold after Prohibition. Like many of his peers, he disappears from the cocktail record once the bars closed. The book outlived him; he did not.

The publication context

By the time Ensslin published in 1916, the cocktail had matured into a robust standalone category, no longer the small section it occupied in Thomas's 1862. The book contains around 400 recipes, organized by spirit base and dominant flavor profile rather than by category form. This shift in organization, from "cobblers / juleps / sours / cocktails" (Thomas) to "gin drinks / whiskey drinks / brandy drinks" (Ensslin), is itself a signal of how mixology had evolved over those 54 years.

The 1917 expanded edition is the version most cited today. It added recipes that had circulated in the trade between 1916 and 1917, including some that Ensslin attributed to other working bartenders. The expanded edition is what survives in most reprints.

The Aviation, and the missing creme de violette

This is the recipe most readers come to Ensslin for. The Aviation cocktail appears in the 1916 edition. The original formula:

The "Aviation" name was a period reference to early aviation, which was still novel and futuristic in 1916. The pale-blue color of the drink was supposed to evoke the sky. With the de violette, the color and the name match. Without the de violette, you get a hazy yellow drink that has nothing to do with aviation visually or thematically.

How the de violette went missing

The Aviation appeared in Harry Craddock's The Savoy Cocktail Book in 1930. Craddock's version omitted the creme de violette. The most likely reason is supply: creme de violette became hard to source after Prohibition began, and was effectively unavailable in the United States for decades. By the time American bartenders rediscovered the Aviation post-Prohibition, the only published reference most of them had was Craddock's truncated version, and the de violette had vanished from the recipe.

The original was rediscovered in the early 2000s when Robert Hess and other cocktail historians went back to Ensslin's source text and pointed out the missing ingredient. Around the same time, the Austrian distillery Rothman & Winter began producing a credible creme de violette for the American market. Once both the recipe and the bottle were available, craft bars across the country reverted to the 1916 version. By the early 2010s, ordering "an Aviation" in a competent craft bar would yield Ensslin's original by default.

This is a small story but a representative one. It is what got lost during the 14-year Prohibition gap and what the craft revival had to reconstruct from primary sources.

What else is in the 1917 edition

Beyond the Aviation, Ensslin's manuscript contains:

• The Tuxedo No. 2 (gin, dry vermouth, maraschino, absinthe rinse, orange bitters), one of the most refined gin cocktails of the period.
• The Income Tax cocktail (gin, dry vermouth, sweet vermouth, orange juice, bitters), named for the new federal income tax of 1913.
• The Bronx (gin, sweet vermouth, dry vermouth, orange juice), at peak popularity in 1916, on its way to obscurity by the 1950s.
• Numerous variations on the Manhattan, Martini, and Old Fashioned, each with the small recipe-by-bartender variations that working bars used in 1916.
• A robust section of fizzes and rickeys, including a citrus-heavy New York Sour with red wine float that long predates the modern bartender's "discovery" of the form.
• Pre-Prohibition gin sours, brandy sours, and Whiskey Daisies that establish the proportions that Sasha Petraske and the Milk & Honey school revived in the early 2000s.

The 1917 edition is the single best source for "what was a working New York bar serving in the last year before Prohibition." If you wanted to recreate that bar with an evening menu, you could pull 12 to 15 drinks straight from Ensslin and have a credible historical experience.

Five Ensslin recipes worth making in 2026

The Aviation lost its color for almost a century because the man who reprinted it did not have the bottle. Recipes are fragile when their ingredients are.

How to read Ensslin today

The 1917 edition is in the public domain. Cocktail Kingdom published a facsimile reprint that includes both the 1916 and 1917 editions, with introductory commentary from Robert Hess. Internet Archive hosts free scans of multiple printings. For modern transcriptions with measurements converted to fluid ounces and notes on substitutions, The Lost Cocktail Codex includes seven recipes drawn directly from Ensslin, including the original Aviation, the Tuxedo No. 2, and the Income Tax.

Why this is the closing chapter

Ensslin published in 1916 and 1917. The Volstead Act passed in October 1919. National Prohibition began on January 17, 1920. American bartenders had less than three years between Ensslin's manuscript and the closing of every bar in the country. When repeal came in December 1933, almost 14 years had passed. The bartenders who could have built on Ensslin's foundation were dispersed; the apprenticeship lineage was broken; the de violette was hard to find.

Ensslin is the closing chapter because the conversation he was part of did not resume in any continuous way. The post-Prohibition cocktail era starts essentially from scratch (with imports of European bartenders trained in London, Paris, and Havana, who had been in continuous practice during the American gap). The American thread of Thomas, Johnson, Boothby, and Ensslin ends in 1917.

The craft revival of the late 1990s and 2000s was, in important respects, a project of returning to that thread and continuing it. Ensslin is the bookmark.