My wife and I usually enjoy a drink before dinner, often to the sounds of jazz or Rat Pack stuff on the stereo. Lately, however, she’s becoming bored with her usual white wine, and while she likes a standard liquor + mix highball (vodka/gin-and-tonic, rum-and-Coke, etc.) she has been asking me about traditional cocktails that were popular in the 50s and 60s. Maybe it’s the vibe generated by the music. 
Anyway, I can mix her a traditional Martini or Manhattan, and if I try hard to remember how, I can manage a Gin Fizz, or something approximating it. But she’d like to try more. It’s easy enough to get a cocktail recipe book, but so many of them seem to contain recent cocktail inventions–in other words, not the kind that would have been popular at cocktail parties and lounges and such in the 50s and 60s.
I know we’ve had threads on this in the past, but my search-fu doesn’t seem to be working well today. But maybe it’s time for another such thread anyway. So, Dopers, what are your suggestions (and recipes, if possible) for those old kind of cocktails that would have been popular when Frank, Dino, and Sammy were playing the Sands?
Old Fashioned
Dash of bitters
1 sugar cube or 1 tsp. of sugar
1 tsp. water
Cocktail cherry
Orange wedge
2 oz. whiskey or bourbon
Put bitters, sugar, and water in a glass and muddle. Toss in a cherry and orange wedge. Add enough ice cubes to fill the glass and add bourbon.
Sidecar
2 oz. brandy
1 oz. Cointreau
1/2 oz. lemon juice
Shake all ingredients with ice, strain into a cocktail glass, and serve.
No help whatsoever on ingredients or recipes. My drinking was mostly beer but an occasional Scotch-on-the-rocks or some simple presentation of bourbon or vodka. Wine, too. But I can throw out some names from the period whether I knew anything more than that. Maybe others can fill in the particulars.
Tom Collins
Screwdriver
Bloody Mary
Purple Passion
Mai Tai
Pina Colada
Margarita
Gibson
Mint Julep
Rob Roy
As for the Rat Pack, I recall Frank was partial to Jack Daniel’s and liked it straight.
silenus, how could you forget the gimlet?:2 oz. gin (or vodka)
1/2 oz. fortified lime juice (Rose’s or like)
Pour over ice in a rocks glass with a lime wedge, or serve straight up with a lime peel.
Not my favorite, but a Presbyterian is a lightweight drink:1 oz. Canadian whiskey or other blended whiskey (use something relatively cheap)
1/2 cola
1/2 ginger ale
Pour whisky into a Collins glass over ice and fill with half cola, half ginger ale.
Then there’s the whole range of Sours and Collins cocktails, the basics of which have been around since the 'Fourties if not before.
Of course, the Dude would have a White Russian:1 1/2 oz Vodka
3/4 oz Kahlua
3/4 oz Light Cream or Milk
Over ice in a rocks glass.
Personally, I just like my Irish whiskey (Black Bush, Jameson 1780, or Redbreast) neat, with just a drop or two of water to open it up, but I realize that’s not most peoples’ conception of a “cocktail”.
Stranger