SHAKER

n 1848, George Foster, a reporter for the New York Tribune who spent nights in the city's seedier neighborhoods looking for good stories, marveled at the way a bartender was making a drink: “With his shirt sleeves rolled up, and his face wrapped in a fiery glow, he looked like he was pulling long ribbons of Julep out of a metal cup.”

This was perhaps the first known description of a shaker. At the time, drinks were stirred with long-handled spoons or tossed back and forth between two glass tumblers, which certainly put on a show but didn't make for great mixing (not to mention making a mess). In the end, says David Wondrich, a cocktail historian whose books include “Imbibe!” and “Punch”, someone “came up with the brilliant idea of ​​attaching a metal cup over a glass which, when shaken with ice, seals it. By the 1850s they began building custom shakers made entirely of metal, alloy, brass and silver plated.”