The Spirit World

We haven’t looked at any fun mixology books in some time so before the summer leaves us I wanted to tell you about a fun book devoted to Tiki Culture.

The Great Tiki Drink Book, by Jennifer Trainer Thompson, provides a look at tiki culture as well as numerous recipes.

The first chapter covers a quick history of tiki culture including a timeline starting in 1910 and ending in 2001. (The book was published in 2002.) It includes interesting facts such as “1915: The ukulele is introduced to American music lovers at the 1915 Pan Pacific International Expo in San Francisco.” and “1939: The Zombie is served at the New York World’s Fair.” Now I can’t say if the dates on this timeline were the most significant in the world of tiki but they do give you an idea of what was going on in the world and how the tiki culture may have been influenced.

The next chapter covers various tiki cocktails in all of their fluorescent and fruity glory. Tiki drinks have some of the best, most whimsical names! This chapter is followed by one that provides appetizer recipes, perfectly suited to accompanying the tiki cocktails!

The book closes with menu and cocktail suggestions, to aid in party planning, and a few resource pages devoted to helping you find the right ingredients, bar tools and tiki props to make sure you are properly outfitted.

Throughout the book little “notes” are sprinkled. These might cover some background information about the ingredients being used or about the items associated with tiki drinks. Take the time to read them and you might have some interesting chit-chat for your next tiki party!

A quick note - the cover of my book looks a lot different that the one pictured (from Amazon and other sources) above - and much more tiki-like, I must say! The release dates are the same so they must have changed covers at some point during printings. So if you are looking for this book it’s probably best to look for it by title and author and not by cover.