This proved to be a deadly supply-demand cocktail that set off panic buying, a price surge and food riots.
But in the early 1960s cocktail parties demanded cocktail dresses.
As proprietress of Femme du Coupe, the in-demand cocktail consultant runs around town during December like a holiday shopper on a Black Friday binge.
Small or boutique bars can more easily get away with demanding cocktail programs precisely because people who frequent such places expect to have to wait, and usually the type of food served is a simpler menu that suggests a more relaxed and cocktail-focused atmosphere.
That way, if your companions start demanding cocktails or wine, you have an immediate suggestion – rather than getting dragged into somewhere random.
For some people, clams or oysters on the half shell demand red cocktail sauce.
Cocktail, cocktail, cocktail, cocktail......
Today, for the first time in nearly a century, rye is popular again, mostly because American drinkers are demanding classic cocktails made according to their original recipes, and most whiskey cocktails (including the Manhattan) called for rye.
Today's cocktails demand more syllables, more mystery or both.
Despite the demands of the cocktail craze, a real swizzle stick is not easily found in New York.
"What's next, demanding scribbles on cocktail napkins?" says Andrew Rosenberg, a fisheries scientist who was deputy director of the National Marine Fisheries Service during the Clinton administration and is now with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C. "This is not a case of people saying, 'Sorry, we can't give you the data.' They're saying, 'You have the data,'" he says.
