Sherry Cobbler

“We are the cheapest book house in the United States,” declared an 1896 ad for the firm of I. & M. Ottenheimer. “You don’t need a stepladder to reach our prices.”

The newsletter was “The Bookseller and Newsman,” a trade journal of publishers and bookstores. News of the publishing firm appeared throughout, from a front page profile of the Ottenheimer brothers, letters to the editor, ads, and a successful push for the trade organization to hold their next conference in Baltimore.

Pretty impressive for a publisher in its fifth year of existence. What’s more, Isaac Ottenheimer was 24 years old. Moses was 19.

Legend has it that an aunt loaned the teenagers money to start a business, with the condition that they observe the Sabbath. That left Saturday retail out of the question so they went into books and postcards.

I. & M. Ottenheimer publishing was prolific. Magic trick books; Fortune telling books; Language guides; Adventure stories. As a sideline, they produced postcards using a color process that originated in their parents’ native Germany. Above all, I. & M. Ottenheimer published joke books, and lots of them.

It was said that the boys would attend touring burlesque and vaudeville shows, copy down the jokes, and publish them as authors “Irv & Moe Ott.” Vaudeville and burlesque comedians, in turn, sourced jokes from the affordable Ottenheimer publications.

When there was a demand for a certain type of book, you could count on I. & M. Ottenheimer to meet that demand. And so they published at least one bartending manual, the “New Bartender’s Guide” in 1910, with several reprint editions to follow.

The drink recipes in the Bartender’s Guide were probably collected in a similar manner to the jokes – copied from other sources. As far as I could determine, the author, “Harry Montague,” was the name of a British entertainer who had nothing discernable to do with mixology, long dead by the guide’s publication date.

Also long passed was the heyday of the Sherry Cobbler. Introduced in the 1820s or 30s, the Sherry Cobbler enjoyed a good run. Its most glorious moment was the worldwide exposure received at the “American” bar at the 1867 Paris Universal Exposition. The exhibition ran from April through November. One day, 500 bottles of sherry were consumed. An 1888 bartender’s manual referred to the drink as “without a doubt the most popular beverage in this country, with ladies as well as with gentlemen.”

The bar-tenders’ guide, Jerry Thomas, 1865, hathitrust

Historian David Wondrich’s book “Imbibe!,” the canonical cocktail history, refers to the Sherry Cobbler as “The basic trunk from which all other Cobblers branched.” Wondrich notes the ascent of the Sherry Cobbler happened in tandem with a possible innovation: the drinking straw.

Also essential to Cobblers was the availability of ice, whose appearance in “cobbles” possibly lend the beverage its name. “Along with the Mint Julep,” Wondrich wrote, Sherry Cobbler was “one of the two drinks that introduced America and the world to the pleasures of taking ice in your alcoholic beverages.”

By 1906, it seemed that the Sherry Cobbler’s claim to fame was a mention in Charles Dickens’ novel Martin Chuzzlewit. “I don’t know as I ever heard of a man ordering a sherry cobbler these days,” a member of the Chicago Dickens club stated. A confused bartender referred to a manual in order to recreate the drink.

The Sherry Cobbler’s reliance on an imported ingredient may be the reason it hasn’t enjoyed as enduring reverence as the Julep. I thought this would be a great beverage to get better acquainted with the wine. Sherry features heavily in Maryland dishes like Olney Inn Sweet Potatoes, and is often splashed into Terrapin Stew (and its imitators) or Muskrat Stew. Over-reliance on distinctively-flavored Taylor sherries have colored our understanding of these recipes with a flavor profile that could be wildly different from how they were originally enjoyed.

*Jim Meehan’s edition of the Bartender’s Guide published by the Ottenheimers*

According to Jim Meehan in “Meehan’s Bartender Manual, “if you use a richer style [of sherry] such as the cream sherry and East India bottlings… you can omit the sugar” from Sherry Cobbler. Meehan is my go-to for all questions cocktail-related and has been sharing some lovely thoughts on beverages and other things in his newsletter The Iceberg. He pointed me towards Wondrich’s research in the Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails. I chased down the context of the 1906 Dickens interaction.

In case any further Dickens readers felt the need to try the “glorious amber-colored liquid” that revived a downtrodden Martin Chuzzlewit, Sherry Cobbler was included in Ottenheimer’s 1910 book alongside cobblers made with brandy and claret.

In the back of the book is a section of toasts, some sentimental, many humorous (or trying to be).

Here’s to champagne, the drink divine,
That makes us forget our troubles;
It’s made a dollar’s worth of wine
And three dollars’ worth of bubbles.

I. & M. Ottenheimer celebrated its 50th year of operation in 1940. Well-wishers from all over the country sent congratulations via cards and telegrams. These are kept in a scrapbook now held at the Jewish Museum of Maryland. My favorite came from Mrs. and Mr. William G. Mechanic, brother of theater owner Morris A. Mechanic. “Congratulations,” wrote the Mechanics, “The first half-century is always the hardest.”

*Isaac Ottenheimer in the Baltimore Sun, 1953*

Moses died in 1952. In April of 1953, the Baltimore Sun profiled Isaac and the history of the business. By then, many of the Ottenheimer books had become collectors’ items. A man named Joseph Katz had “the largest set in Baltimore.”

After Isaac’s death in November of 1953, I. & M. Ottenheimer lasted nearly another 50 years, with some changes in business model along the way. Copies of the Bartender’s guide fetch high prices, but the book is scanned and available online. Many of Ottenheimer’s publications may be lost to time and to the cheap and brittle paper and stapling process used in the early 1900s. Isaac himself told the Sun that he didn’t have copies of his old publications, and that the printing plates had been melted for scrap during World War II.

It seemed that none of the publications held sentimental value for Isaac Ottenheimer— not the jokes, magic tricks, fortunes, games, stories, or even the cocktails. “How many copies were sold[?],” he mused “nobody’ll ever know.”