Episode 37: Knickerbockers Everywhere – Knickerbocker

The recipe goes essentially unchanged since the days that Jerry Thomas put the recipe in print in 1862. While many might attribute the recipe to Thomas because it shows up in his recipe book, we know that he, like many bartenders, were trying to fill out the books for publication. If you want to find the origin of the cocktail, you will have to look back before Thomas put the recipe down. Mentions of a Knickerbocker cocktail show up on the menu in Peter Bent Brigham’s oyster saloon in Boston, at the beginning of the 1840s. We know this thanks to 19th century temperance zealot, Charles Jewett writing down and publishing a list of all Brigham’s drinks as a way to expose and chastise the saloon owner. Unfortunately for Jewett, his attempt at striking a blow for the temperance movement proved to be a major advertisement for Brigham’s saloon. The saloon became so popular that Brigham made the menu larger. This list eventually got picked up in newspapers, and the saloon even spawned a poem featuring many of the drinks, including the Knickerbocker. In our search to find out just what a Knickerbocker is, we explore the history of the Dutch in New York, the evolution of what it meant to be a Knickerbocker through the 18th and 19th centuries, and how the Knickerbocker surname may not have actually existed in the Netherlands. None of this would have been possible without the Washington Irving satire A History of New York and the elaborate advertising hoax of Diedrich Knickerbocker. So grab your short pants and join us as we unravel this history of the Knickerbocker cocktail.