Why I started a library of vintage hosting guides
A few of my favorite books from my library of women-authored cocktail and hosting guides. Photo by Brittany Newman.
When I first moved from my native London to New York City in 2007, I immediately fell in love with the hospitality and cocktail culture of the city. New York was in the midst of what would later become known as the craft cocktail renaissance, a trend in culture and hospitality that would spread (for a second time) all over the country and all over the world. While the invention of the cocktail the first time around may or may not have happened in New York City (let’s face it, no-one really knows for sure), the city can certainly lay claim to being the place that made it famous, not once but twice.
At the same time as I was exploring the city through cocktails in my social time, during my professional time I started to pick up more work from alcohol companies looking to explore consumer trends in drinking behavior. So, naturally, I needed to know everything there was to know about the cocktail, Where did it come from, how has it evolved, and what are the social rituals that have defined it? And I did what any researcher would do at the start of a project: I typed “history of the cocktail” and “best books on cocktails” into Google to see what would come up.
What the search revealed was an oddly one-sided story: books about men, written by men, about the legacy of male bartenders who had served cocktails in bars 100 years ago to mostly male-only patrons. Yet when I tried the alternative search string for “history of women and the cocktail”, or “books about women and drinks”, the results came up frustratingly short.
It seemed to me during my daily observations of drinks and drinking culture - especially the culture at home where up to two-thirds of our cocktail consumption usually takes place - that more often than than not, women have had something to say about drinks. Certainly, the hostess was the one who was deciding the drinks menu at most of the book clubs, barbecues, parties, and showers that I was attending at the time. If this was the case today, then might this have also been the case in the past? So, I asked myself, Where might our mothers, grandmothers and great grandmothers looked for their inspiration on the cocktail?
This set me off on a very personal journey to collect every vintage hosting guide I could find that was written by women and contained advice on recipes on drinks. In the years since, I have collected more than 200 household management guides, etiquette guides, cookbooks, and entertaining books written by women that proved unequivocally to me that the hostess has had an indelible impact on the cocktail.
My hobby soon turned into a passion, and the passion into a mission - the mission to retell the story of the cocktail as told by women. So, it is my pleasure to invite you to learn more about the stories of these women and their fascinating lives and to continue the research in The Hostess Diaries.