“This book is being published...
in the hope that it will contribute at least a little to the standardization of drinks and to the promotion of that happy state of affairs where, when you order your favorite cocktail, you will get exactly the sensation your hopeful taste-buds have been anticipating, no matter what corner of this bright and beautiful land you happen at the moment to be inhabiting.” — The Official Mixer’s Manual, 1934 The Blinker is, ironically, one of those cocktails that everyone makes differently, in every corner of this bright and beautiful land you happen to be inhabiting at the moment. The one thing it always has is grapefruit—usually juice, sometimes zest, occasionally both—and beyond that, all bets are off.
Is it rye or bourbon? Do you add other citrus, like lemons or limes? There’s a red fruit component—is it raspberries or pomegranates (or Rose’s Grenadine, which is high-fructose neither)? Even structurally it’s up for grabs. Is it tall and juicy like a highball or short and snappy like a sour? The Blinker is all over the place. There’s no standard.
There’s irony in all this ambiguity. The book that introduced the Blinker—Patrick Gavin Duffy’s The Official Mixer’s Manual, quoted up top—was specifically designed to standardize the American cocktail canon. It was 1934; barely a year after the so-called “noble experiment” of Prohibition was deemed an abject failure and uniformly repealed.
Alcohol had been illegal for 1.