Eggs
Shaking egg whites stiffens them, the longer the stiffer.
Folding (carefully and slowly pouring back and forth) separately shaken egg white and yolk creates a very interesting airy but more viscous texture.
Imbibe!
CHAPTER 1 - “PROFESSOR” JERRY THOMAS: JUPITER OLYMPUS OF THE BAR
Now, admittedly, mixed drinks are not paintings, sculptures, novels, or poems. They are disposable and, frankly, not a little bit disreputable, standing roughly in the same relation to the culinary arts that American motor sports do to automotive engineering or hot jazz to musical composition: they smack of improvisation and cheap effects and even the most august of them lack the cachet accorded to fine wines, old whiskies, and cognac brandies. They are easily abused; they can degrade lives and even destroy them. Even if appreciated in moderation, they are appreciated in surroundings that rarely lead to detached meditation on truth and beauty (if those are not the same thing) or constructive engagement with the great moral and social questions of the age. And yet neither are they contemptible. A proper drink at the right time—one mixed with care and skill and served in a true spirit of hospitality—is better than any other made thing at giving us the illusion, at least, that we’re getting what we want from life. A cat can gaze upon a king, as the proverb goes, and after a Dry Martini or a Sazerac Cocktail or two, we’re all cats.
CHAPTER 2 - HOW TO MIX DRINKS, OR WHAT WOULD JERRY THOMAS DO?
When to shake and when to stir? Modern orthodoxy dictates that one should shake any drink with fruit juices, dairy products, or eggs and stir ones that contain only spirits, wines, and the like. This is based partly on the fact that these last ingredients are harder to mix and partly on the fact that shaking clouds up liquids by beating thousands of tiny bubbles into them.
Whichever sugar you use, if you’re making an iced drink you’ll have to melt the sugar first in a little water, since both ice and alcohol impede its dissolution.
Nineteenth-century eggs were much smaller than the extra-super-jumbo ones we get today. Use the smallest ones you can find. When making drinks with egg white, you can get away with using one (modern) white for every two drinks.
In preparing cold drinks great discrimination should be observed in the use of ice. As a general rule, shaved ice should be used when spirits form the principal ingredient of the drink, and no water is employed. When eggs, milk, wine, vermouth, seltzer or other mineral waters are used in preparing a drink, it is better to use small lumps of ice, and these should always be removed from the glass before serving to the customer.