Vintage Mocktails: 1920s Non-Alcoholic Drinks and Older

Were there mocktails before the word?

Yes. The word mocktail is modern, but bar books, household columns and soda-fountain manuals printed mixed drinks without alcohol for well over a century before it, measured, iced, shaken or stirred and finished with a twist of peel, the way a cocktail was.

The Horse’s Neck began that way. In 1895 a home-drinks column for “hospitable housewives” explained that “‘Horse’s neck’ consists of lemon peel and ginger ale,” and admitted it was “not an attractive name.” When The Cocktail Book of 1901, a Boston sideboard manual for gentlemen, printed it, the drink sat in a section headed “Non-Alcoholic Drinks.” The whiskey came later.

The soda fountain made the alcohol-free sour. Its dispensers sharpened fruit syrup and soda water with a spoonful of acid phosphate from the druggist’s shelf, and shook whole eggs into some of them, so a cherry or lemon egg phosphate has the bite and the foam of a bar drink. The lime rickey crossed over too: a San Francisco druggists’ journal printed one without gin in 1912.

When National Prohibition began in January 1920, the hostess’s guides caught up. Bertha Stockbridge’s What to Drink, published that year, filed its recipes under “Non-Alcoholic Cocktails,” and its party bowl held weak tea, citrus and ginger ale.

Every recipe here is alcohol-free and made like a cocktail. Most come from a book of their time; a few are our own alcohol-free versions of period drinks, and the Shirley Temple is a modern recipe with no printed period source. Each page says which.