America Eats and Drinks, and Drinks, and Drinks

Sanborn C. Brown. Wines and Beers of Old New England: A How-to-do-it History, Hanover, N.H.: The University Press of New England, 1979. 157 + xxx pp. Lowell Edmunds. The Silver Bullet: The Martini in American Civilization. Westport, Conn.: The Greenwood Press, 1981.149 + xviii pp. Lewis A. Erenberg. Steppin ' Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890-1930. Westport, Conn.: The Greenwood Press, 1981. 291 + xix pp. Martha Washington's Booke of Cookery, with an introduction and commentary by Karen Hess. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981. 518 + viii pp. These four volumes are each in their different ways significant contributions to the history of American popular culture. They provide interpretations of the ways in which Americans used and then modified their European cultural heritage in the face of different physical and social conditions in the New World. To misquote Napoleon, a nation progresses on its stomach, although a historian surveying the drinking habits of Americans from the imbibing of spruce beer in the seventeenth century to the consumption of Martinis in the twentieth might well question, once again, the whole idea of progress

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