How's Your Drink?
Cocktails, Culture, and the Art of Drinking Well
by Eric Felten
Agate Surrey, 200 pp., $20

"How's your drink?" was, apparently, the cordial question asked of his guests by Frank Sinatra, who didn't like to think of anyone going short. "How's your glass?" was the equivalent question (and, later, book title) in the case of Kingsley Amis, whose domestic strategy later boiled down to telling his more favored friends that if they didn't have a full drink in their hands, it was their own bloody fault for not refilling without waiting to be asked.

That book was actually a quiz book, in which you could be asked "From what does Scotch receive its color?" or "What happens to a vintage port before and after bottling?" The answers were helpfully included at the end, often with a cheery wealth of extra detail, so the volume doubled as a guide and general adviser as well. But Amis also wrote two other drinkers-companion efforts, entitled Every Day Drinking and On Drink. (Interest declared: All these will soon be reissued in a handy single volume by Bloomsbury, with an introduction by your humble servant.)

Eric Felten doesn't write as well as Kingsley Amis, which is no disgrace (he is a jazz musician, an occupation for which Amis had a high regard) but he does have a feel for literature as it relates to booze, and he has been out there on our behalf and done an awful lot of homework. His book, which is a distillation, if I may put it like that, of his celebrated Wall Street Journal column of the same name, is by far the wittiest and the most comprehensive study of the subject since the author of Lucky Jim laid down his pen.

(By the way, a "Lucky Jim," according to Felten, is "3 oz. vodka, oz. dry vermouth, oz. cucumber juice: Stir with ice and strain into a cocktail glass. Float a slice of unpeeled cucumber on the top." A bit herbivorous when compared to its namesake, but there you have it.)

It's always a good plan to see how an author handles a topic with which you are yourself familiar. So I began by looking up "Negroni": a favorite tipple of mine either on sunny days or in Mediterranean countries (it won't work in cold or gray conditions). I had always been authoritatively told that this cryptically effective cocktail--gin, Campari, and sweet vermouth--was so named because a certain Count Negroni once found himself with unexpected guests and with only those three ingredients at hand. Thanks to Felten, I now know a good deal better. It seems that Count Camillo Negroni was a drinker of Americanos--the cocktail, you may remember, that James Bond actually asks for in Casino Royale. But one day he tired of the blandness of campari, vermouth, and a swoosh of soda, and asked the barman at the Caffè Casoni in Florence--a man named Fosco Scarselli--to put a spike of gin in it. Like so many improvisations of genius, this was simple and easily emulated. (Though I should leave out the soda if I were you.)