The lost cocktail ingredients, and how they came back.
Eleven ingredients pre-Prohibition recipes call for that no longer existed by 1970. Most of them came back between 2007 and 2012. This is the working glossary I built while transcribing The Lost Cocktail Codex, because half the recipes were written for a pantry nobody alive had seen.
If you have ever opened Jerry Thomas's 1862 How to Mix Drinks or Hugo Ensslin's 1917 Recipes for Mixed Drinks and hit the words gum syrup or old tom gin or creme de violette, you have run into the gap. The recipe was written for a bar shelf that did not survive Prohibition. Some bottles came back fast after Repeal in 1933. Some never did. A handful went extinct for forty or fifty years and were resurrected only after 2007, when the cocktail revival in New York and Portland created enough demand to justify importing them again.
This glossary is twelve pages, including this one. Each ingredient gets its own page with the history, the cocktails it made famous, what to buy today, and the modern substitutions that work and the ones that do not. The arc is roughly the same in every entry. Born in the nineteenth century or earlier. Killed by Prohibition or the world wars. Brought back by a small number of importers and distillers who kept asking the question why isn't this on shelves anymore.
The eleven ingredients
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Crème de Violette
A pale-purple violet liqueur from central Europe. Disappeared from the US market around 1960, which is why the Aviation cocktail in mid-century books drops the violette and the drink loses its sky color. Rothman & Winter brought it back in 2007 and the Aviation came back with it.
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Old Tom Gin
Lightly sweetened gin, the dominant gin style of the nineteenth century. Faded by the 1940s as London Dry took over. Hayman's, Ransom, and Anchor revived it in the 2000s. The Martinez and most pre-1900 gin recipes are written for Old Tom, not the gin in your cabinet.
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Falernum
A clove, ginger, almond, and lime spice syrup or low-proof liqueur invented in Barbados, name first printed in 1892. John D. Taylor's Velvet Falernum is the standard. Without it, the Corn 'n' Oil and a third of the tiki canon do not work.
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Orgeat
An almond syrup with orange flower water, originally made from barley before almonds replaced the grain in the eighteenth century. Without orgeat there is no Mai Tai, no Japanese Cocktail, no Army & Navy. The good brands are Small Hand Foods and Liber & Co.
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Peychaud's Bitters
The bitters Antoine Peychaud invented in his New Orleans pharmacy on Royal Street in the 1830s. Anise-forward, lighter and more floral than Angostura. The Sazerac uses Peychaud's, not Angostura, and it is non-negotiable.
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Gum Syrup
Sugar syrup with dissolved gum arabic. Pre-Prohibition recipes call for gomme because it gave the drink a silky body that plain simple syrup does not. Substitutable but not identical. Small Hand Foods and BG Reynolds make commercial versions.
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Calisaya
An Italian amaro built around cinchona bark, the same source as quinine. The category was almost entirely lost. Elixir Calisaya is the modern survivor. Calisaya shows up in Vermouth Bitter and a handful of pre-Prohibition manuscripts where it is called for by name.
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Maraschino Liqueur
Clear liqueur distilled from marasca cherries and their crushed pits, originally from Zadar on the Dalmatian coast. Luxardo is the brand most US bars use, founded 1821, refounded in Italy after World War II. The Aviation, the Last Word, and the Hemingway Daiquiri are all Maraschino drinks.
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Crème Yvette
A violet liqueur with berries, more complex than Crème de Violette. Discontinued by Charles Jacquin et Cie in 1969. Brought back by Cooper Spirits in 2009. The Aviation can be made with either, but the Pousse Café layered drinks were written for Yvette.
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Jamaican Rum
The pot-distilled, high-ester, funk-forward rum tradition centered on Jamaican estates like Hampden, Worthy Park, and Long Pond. Jerry Thomas's punches and his Jamaica Rum Sour are written for this rum, not for column-still light rum. Smith & Cross is the bartender's everyday bottle.
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Absinthe
The wormwood spirit banned in the United States from 1912 to 2007 on the basis of a thujone-causes-madness story that the science never supported. The Sazerac uses an absinthe rinse. The Corpse Reviver No. 2 calls for it. Pernod Absinthe and St. George Absinthe Verte are common modern bottles.
Why so many ingredients vanished at once
Three forces did most of the killing. Prohibition in the United States from 1920 to 1933 wiped out the domestic cocktail trade and bankrupted the importers who supplied it. The two world wars cut off European and Caribbean supply chains for almost a decade combined. And the cocktail style that came back after Repeal was a simpler, sweeter, lower-craft version of what had existed before, because most of the bartenders who remembered the older recipes were dead or had emigrated.
By 1960 the American cocktail menu was a flat list of vodka highballs and three or four classics with the bones missing. Gum syrup had been replaced by simple syrup. Old Tom had been replaced by London Dry. Creme de Violette had been replaced by nothing because nobody remembered what it tasted like. The recipes in Jerry Thomas's How to Mix Drinks and Hugo Ensslin's Recipes for Mixed Drinks sat on shelves and looked like instructions for cooking with ingredients that did not exist.
The 2007 reset
Two things flipped in the late 2000s. Eric Seed at Haus Alpenz started importing Rothman & Winter Crème de Violette and a series of other forgotten European products into the United States. And in 2007 the federal ban on absinthe ended after the FDA accepted what European chemists had been saying for thirty years, that thujone at the levels found in pre-ban absinthe was nowhere near a toxic dose. Those two events bracketed the revival. By 2012, almost every ingredient on this list was back on shelves in major US cities. By 2020, online retailers had made them available almost everywhere.
The work of cocktail historians like David Wondrich, whose Imbibe! traced the Jerry Thomas era in detail, and the writers at PUNCH, Difford's Guide, and Cocktail Wonk, gave the importers and distillers a paper trail to chase. Most of the bottles you can buy today exist because someone read an 1880s recipe, asked what's missing, and made a phone call.
How to use this glossary
If you are working from a pre-Prohibition recipe, find the unfamiliar ingredient on this list, read the page, and decide whether you need the real thing or whether a substitution gets you most of the way. The Sazerac without Peychaud's is a different drink. The Aviation without Crème de Violette is the gin-and-Maraschino sour the mid-century books printed and called an Aviation. Some of these substitutions matter. Some do not.
The other use is straight curiosity. These bottles tell the story of how a drinks culture forgets and remembers itself. The Cocktail Codex would not exist as a free PDF if any of these ingredients were still missing. Half the fifty drinks call for at least one bottle on this list.
50 cocktails hand-transcribed from five pre-Prohibition manuscripts. Every drink that uses Crème de Violette, Old Tom, Falernum, Maraschino, Calisaya, or Crème Yvette is in the Codex with the original specs and notes on modern substitutions. Drop your email below.