What is "cocktail" and from where this word generated?

Answer 1

I have always thought that a highball is a spirit but not liquor (vodka, rum, rye, gin, whisky) mixed with only with soda pop.
A cocktail is any other mixed drink (if you mix any juice into a highball you have a cocktail).


http://www.drinkfocus.com/cocktails/cocktail-history.php The true creation of a popular cocktail can be traced to the nineteenth century. One early written reference to the term "cocktail" (as a drink based on spirits with other spirits and additives) can be found in an American magazine, The Balance, published in May 1806. It stated that a "Cocktail is a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters..."


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail The earliest known printed use of the word "cocktail," as originally determined by Dr. David Wondrich in October 2005, was from "The Farmer's Cabinet", April 28, 1803, p [2]: "11. Drank a glass of cocktail--excellent for the head ... Call'd at the Doct's. found Burnham--he looked very wise--drank another glass of cocktail."

Answer 2

The earliest known printed use of the word "cocktail," as originally determined by Dr. David Wondrich in October 2005, was from "The Farmer's Cabinet", April 28, 1803, p [2]: "11. Drank a glass of cocktail--excellent for the head ... Call'd at the Doct's. found Burnham--he looked very wise--drank another glass of cocktail."

The second earliest and officially recognised known printed use of the word "cocktail" (and the most well-known) was in the May 13, 1806 edition of the Balance and Columbian Repository, a publication in Hudson, New York , where the paper provided the following answer to what a cocktail was:

"Cocktail is a stimulating liquor composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters--it is vulgarly called a bittered sling and is supposed to be an excellent electioneering potion, inasmuch as it renders the heart stout and bold, at the same time that it fuddles the head. It is said, also to be of great use to a Democratic candidate: because a person, having swallowed a glass of it, is ready to swallow anything else."

The first publication of a bartenders' guide which included cocktail recipes was in 1862: How to Mix Drinks; or, The Bon Vivant's Companion, by Professor Jerry Thomas. In addition to listings of recipes for Punches, Sours, Slings, Cobblers, Shrubs, Toddies, Flips, and a variety of other types of mixed drinks were 10 recipes for drinks referred to as "Cocktails". A key ingredient which differentiated "cocktails" from other drinks in this compendium was the use of bitters as an ingredient, although it is not to be seen in very many modern cocktail recipes.

During Prohibition in the United States (1919-1933), when alcohol possession was illegal, cocktails were still consumed in establishments known as speakeasies. The quality of the alcohol available was far lower than was previously used, and bartenders generally put forth less effort in preparing the cocktails.

ETYMOLOGY

here are several plausible theories as to the origin of the term "cocktail". Among them are:

* Colonial taverns kept their spirits (rum, brandy, whiskey, gin, applejack) in casks, and as the liquid in the casks lowered, the spirits would tend to lose both flavor and potency, so the tavern keeper would have an additional cask into which the tailings from the low casks could be combined and sold at a reduced price, the patrons requesting the "**** tailings" or the tailings from the stop **** of the cask. This was H.L. Mencken's belief.
* Cocktails were originally a morning beverage, and the cocktail was the name given as metaphor for the rooster (cocktail) heralding morning light of day. This was first posited in 2004 by Ted Haigh in "Vintage Spirits & Forgotten Cocktails", and can be distinguished from the theory "take two snips of the hair of the dog that bit you", which refers to consuming a small bit of alcohol the morning after a "binge drinking night" to curb the effects of the symptoms of the hangover, which symptoms are actually the result of a mini-withdrawal/down-regulation effect.
* Some say that it was customary to put a feather, presumably from a ****'s tail, in the drink to serve both as decoration and to signal to teetotalers that the drink contained alcohol.
* Another etymology is that the term is derived from coquetier, a French egg-cup which was used to serve the beverage in New Orleans in the early 19th century.[1]
* The beverage was named for a mixed breed horse, known as a "****-tail" as the beverage, like the horse, was neither strictly spirit nor wine - it was a mixed breed.
* The word could also be a distortion of Latin [aqua] decocta, meaning "distilled water".

Answer 3

The Origin of the Word "Cocktail"
The origin of the cocktail is a contested story whose truth may never fully come to light. For centuries, all over the western world, people have been experimenting with mixing drinks, both alcoholic and non-alcoholic. The origin of the name "cocktail" itself is not certain. Some of the more common (and amusing!) explanations are…

An Englishman's Misfortune
In 1779, after her husband was killed in the American War of Independence, innkeeper Betsy Flanagan opened an inn near Yorktown that was frequented by American and French soldiers. An English chicken farmer lived nearby. Due to the political climate at the time, Betsy was probably not too fond of her neighbor, prompting her to promise her American and French customers that she would serve them a meal of roast chicken one day. Her guests occasionally mocked her boasts saying she would never go through with it. One evening, an unusual number of officers gathered at her inn, so Betsy served a lavish meal of chicken, stolen from her English neighbor. When the meal was over, Betsy moved her guests to the bar, where she served up drinks decorated with a tail-feather from the chickens. The officers drank until morning, periodically making rowdy calls for more "**** tails."

A Ceramic Rooster
The owner of an American bar had a large ceramic container in the form of a rooster. The container was filled with the leftovers from drinks. The less affluent could get a drink from this container, served from a tap at the tail. Hence, the name cocktail became associated with a mix of drinks. Some say the quality was always high after English sailors had been in, as there was a good mixture of rum, gin and brandy in the cocktail.

Virginian Dregs
In nineteenth century America, a **** was a tap, while its tail was the last, muddy dregs of the tap. Colonel Carter, of Culpepper Court House, Virginia, was served the tail at his local tavern. Seeing it as a disgrace, he threw it to the floor and said from then on he would only drink "**** tails" of his own design. His concoction was a mix of gin, lemon peel, bitters and sugar, and is possibly the ancestor of modern cocktails.

Night-mare-ish Strength
A "cocktailed horse" was a term for one whose tail has been bobbed, giving it a flamboyant and jolly appearance. As the mixed drinks served in the bars and inns had a very high alcoholic content, the name "cocktail" possibly came from its ability to "**** the tail", or get a careless customer drunk very quickly.

There Once Was a Girl in Mexico…
In the early 1800s, the southern states had reached a peace agreement with King Axolot VIII of Mexico. At peace ceremonies, a drink was served to seal the agreement. At one ceremony, a pretty young woman brought forth the drink (she was also the one to concoct the drink) in an intricately decorated gold cup. As she was approaching the king and the general who represented the states, she realized that with only one cup, she would have to serve one before the other, causing embarrassment for one of the men. So instead of committing the social faux pas, she quickly drank the contents of the cup. The general asked the king who the girl was. The king replied "My daughter, Coctel."

http://www.drinkfocus.com/cocktails/word-origin-cocktail.php

Answer 4

The New York World, 1891, tells us that this is an Aztec word, and that “the liquor was discovered by a Toltec noble, who sent it to the king by the hand of his daughter Xochitl. The king fell in love with the maiden, drank the liquor, and called them xoc-tl, a name perpetuated by the word cocktail.”

Cocktail is an iced drink made of spirits mixed with bitters, sugar, and some aromatic flavouring. Champagne cocktail is champagne flavoured with Angostura bitters; soda cocktail is sodawater, sugar, and bitters.

cocktail, short mixed drink originating in the United States and served as an appetizer. It generally has a basis of gin, whisky, rum, or brandy combined with vermouth or fruit juices and often flavored with bitters or grenadine. It is blended by stirring or shaking in a vessel containing cracked ice. The term is also applied to nonalcoholic beverages served as appetizers, e.g., tomato juice cocktail, and also to mixed, cut-up fruits and to shellfish and oysters served with a sharp sauce.

Answer 5

Amixture made of alcoholic drink is termed cocktail. The word has a Fremch orgin . You can get the details from wikipedia

Answer 6

cocktail is a mixture of 5 drinks.

Answer 7

In 1806 a newspaper in Hudson, ny, defined it as "a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any form, sugar, water, and bitters--that's vulgarly observed as bittered sling, and is meant to be an innovations-blowing electioneering potion." The activities for eating a cocktail have greater advantageous previous political campaigns, and the recipe has distinctive ever on the grounds that, constrained purely by using the mind's eye of the bartender and the provision of liquor reachable. interior the mid-twentieth century H. L. Mencken defined cocktail in basic terms as "any annoying liquor, any milder diluent and a splash of any stinky flavoring." by using then it had grew to grow to be so sought after that, with tongue purely fairly in cheek, Mencken ought to declare that "to multitudes of foreigners" the cocktail "seems to be the wonderful image of yank existence." the place the call cocktail got here from is every physique's wager, yet that has no longer stopped its devotees from imagining. in step with risk its source is coquetier, French for "egg cup." in step with risk its source is **** ale, an English drink suggested to incorporate ale and poultry broth. in step with risk no longer. the numerous varieties of cocktails have won their own names. The long island (1890) replaced into named for a inn interior the middle of ny city. The Martini (1894) reportedly gets its call from the nicely-prevalent Martini style of vermouth. And the previous type (1901) makes use of the unique (1806), now "previous formed" cocktail recipe. interior the 20 th century, cocktail won wider use in compounds like cocktail hour (1927), cocktail social gathering (1928), cocktail gown (1935), and cocktail residing room (1939). The be conscious additionally prolonged its intending to embody any stimulating combination, evidenced by using words like fruit cocktail (1928), shrimp cocktail (1960), and the explosive Molotov cocktail (1939). on the fewer annoying-eating end of the century, that's in step with risk in such nonalcoholic combos that the be conscious will proceed to exist.

Answer 8

A cocktail is a drink that has different flavors of liquor, and honey, spices, milk and fruit.

But for where it generated:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail#Etymology

Answer 9

" It is a mixed drink madw of spirits, bitters, flavouring and sugar syrups with ice, garnishes etc"
These were called cocktails in American bars after 1914-1918 war.
They are taken to stimulate appetite and aid in digestion.

Answer 10

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