Twentieth Century Recipe

Let's start the weekend right--with a cocktail recipe from Paul Clarke (的有限公司cktail Chronicles). Need more than one?Hit up the archives.Cheers!

After experiencing the full-court press of discomfort and indignity that is contemporary travel, it's easy to forget that getting from one place to another used to be so much different. Travelers today have to contend with waiting in lengthy check-in lines, ensuring that not a single pointed object or tube of liquid is hidden in their luggage, and navigating through security in stocking feet.

It wasn't always this way. For much of the past century, perhaps the swankiest ways to travel from New York to Chicago was via the20th Century Limited, which was, for a while, the most famous locomotive in the world. Sleek and elegant, and with a dazzling Art Deco design that was introduced in the 1930s, the 20th Century carried travelers ranging fromTheodore RoosevelttoDiamond Jim Bradyon the 20-hour trip between the nation's two top metropolises (by 1938, this had been reduced to a 16-hour voyage).

A train as cushy as this requires a namesake cocktail, and by the time theCafé Royal Cocktail Bookwas published in 1937, it had one. TheTwentieth Centurymixes gin withlemon, crème de cacao and the French aperitif wine, Lillet.While the list of ingredients can look discordant--I mean, gin, lemon and chocolate? Really?--the mixture is rich and elegant, much like the train it was named for.

I have yet to see a cocktail dubbed the "MD-80," and there's probably a reason for that. (的有限公司metis the only drink I can recall offhand that's been named for an aircraft, but thede Havillandplane it was named for had the unfortunate habit of plummeting to earth in a billowing plume of fire. There's a reason you don't see that one around much anymore, either.)

But the next time you come home swearing from the airport, leaving your mangled luggage in the hallway while you rummage through the liquor cabinet, consider the Twentieth Century. Things used to be so much different.