What with the COVID-19 pandemic striking a century after the Spanish flu, there has been a little musing on matters centennial. How strange, then, that this week I had a pseudo-Prohibition experience, nearly 100 years after Volstead Act enforcement was getting up to speed. I had this little flavor of Prohibition as we’re living through a whole host of new prohibitions: bans on restaurants and bars, clubs and concerts. Many of us are wondering how it all happened so fast, just as the thirsty and bewildered of a century ago were perplexed at how quickly their world had changed.
Prohibition didn’t come out of nowhere: The drys had been pushing for a national ban on alcohol for decades. But though the heirs of Carrie Nation were highly organized, theirs was a niche cause. Easily counterbalancing them were some of the wealthiest families in America, the beer barons. Men with names including Blatz, Pabst, and Busch had money to spread around Washington and statehouses. And they had the support of a large population of German Americans with a taste for the brewers’ products. They kept the killjoys at bay.
That formidable political alliance evaporated on April 6, 1917, the day the United States declared war against Germany. The prohibitionists pounced. You could call it a teetotal war.
The drys accused the beer barons of doing the kaiser’s bidding. After all, beer not only corrupted the young men who were needed in the trenches, it used up the grain needed to feed the doughboys. Taverns, saloons, and beer gardens were vilified as the breeding grounds of sedition.
Congress passed the 18th Amendment, banning “intoxicating liquors,” in December 1917; it was ratified in January 1919. Prohibition began a year later, and, by the spring of 1920, a hundred years ago, the furtive business of bootlegging was already underway.
Which brings me to my strange experience.
Restaurants in Washington, as in most of the country, have been closed to customers. Many have managed to stay open for takeout. But there is a daunting difficulty for sit-down restaurants trying to make ends meet on a McDonald’s drive-thru model: The profit center for places with chefs instead of cooks isn’t in the food, however fancy. Their money is made on drinks. Happily, D.C. law allows them to sell wine from their cellars and six-packs of artisanal micro-brews.
But the odd innovation has been cocktails to go. Not canned, factory-produced, industrial-grade cocktails but drinks mixed up on-site by the house bartender.
A few such drinks, changing daily, are on the menu of Black Salt, an excellent seafood restaurant near my house. I thought I’d give the crazy cocktail-to-go concept a try. I ordered some calamari and key lime pie (I know that’s not really a proper meal, but the food was just pretext: District regulations seem to require some food be purchased if one wants takeout liquor) and then added an order for Brown Derby cocktails for two.
The cocktail is a combination of bourbon, grapefruit juice, and honey syrup.
I pulled up in front of the restaurant suitably bemasked. Out came the masked and gloved man with a brown bag for me. I got it home and opened the bag. Out came the calamari. Out came the key lime pie. And there, in the bottom of the bag, was a small, squat, plastic deli container full of brownish liquid. Legal as it all was, it was still a pure Prohibition experience: alcohol packaged like soup, hidden under pie and fried squid.
I shook it up with ice and strained it into cocktail glasses. It was delicious.
Now having had a Prohibition experience, I hope it won’t be too much longer before we can all have the modern equivalent of a 21st Amendment experience.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
