The Gentleman's Companion, by Charles H Baker Jr

In The Gentleman’s Companion, Volume II: An Exotic Drinking Book, Charles H. Baker Jr. offers something far more revealing than a conventional cocktail manual. Baker was a bon vivant, and spent much of his life traveling the world chronicling food and drink recipes for magazines like Esquire and Town & Country.

"If you ever wondered whose oyster the world is, meet Charles H. Baker, Jr.”

Esquire Magazine, 1954

His account of Southeast Asia unfolds as a drifting, alcohol-soaked ethnography of ports, people, and improvised drinks. From Siam and Cambodia through Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, North Borneo, and the Philippines, Baker's journeys were driven by a desire to find unique spirits and local flavors, often focusing on coastal cities with vibrant, expatriate nightlife.

Published in 1939, the drink recipes that he recorded in here are often undrinkable and the prose is usually unhinged, but there's no book that better captures the glamor of travel in the middle of the 20th century.

What becomes immediately clear is that Baker does not experience Southeast Asia evenly. Some places are fleeting impressions; others feel lived-in. Of these, the Philippines –particularly Manila – emerges as the center of gravity for his drinking. Here, more than anywhere else in the region, he encounters a bar culture that aligns with his own expectations. American influence runs deep, and with it comes a familiarity of spirits, technique, and service.

In Manila, Baker records more cocktails, more variations, and with greater technical confidence. The cocktails here are often linked to elite clubs like the Manila Hotel or Army Navy Club, where cocktails include the Pancho Villa (referencing Filipino flyweight boxer Francisco Villaruel Guilledo), Lintik, and the Manila Hoop Punch. Baker claimed that “the best julep of all” was the one he drank at The Manila Hotel in 1926. Interestingly, all those cocktails were attributed to American bartender Monk Antrim.

In Singapore, his encounter with the Singapore Sling at Raffles Hotel Singapore captures a drink still in flux. Baker describes it as “a delicious, slow-acting, insidious thing,” and based on the recipe he listed, was a significantly drier version of the cocktail we know today (he omitted the fruit juice).

Across the Dutch East Indies – Batavia and its surrounds – the pattern shifts again. Here, Baker encounters cocktails that are recognizable in name but fluid in execution. Ingredients are substituted freely; local fruits stand in for imported citrus, and spirits are adapted depending on availability.

Baker also made an unscheduled stop in Sandakan, which was a rough port town in British North Borneo, where he tried a Colonial Cooler (a refreshing drink of gin, vermouth, lime, bitters, and mint) at the Sandakan Club in the 1920s. This unofficially makes it older than the Junglebird.

Throughout the book, Baker includes hundreds of recipes, some tied to his travels, others collected along the way. Even he treats them with a degree of scepticism. Measurements are inconsistent, instructions occasionally vague, and the results, by modern standards, uneven. Yet this is precisely what makes them valuable. They function less as authoritative guides and more as field notes, capturing a moment when cocktail culture was still fluid, before the standardization that would define the post-war era.

Taken together, Baker’s journey through Southeast Asia forms a loose hierarchy of drinking experiences. What makes The Gentleman’s Companion endure is not its reliability as a recipe book, but its insight into how cocktails actually traveled.

Baker made his voyages during the period between the World Wars, and despite the economic and political hardships, it was a time when almost every place in the world was accessible, but it was also still an adventure to get there. So no matter where on earth Baker traveled, he always seemed to be able to indulge in a distinctively American invention: cocktails. While ingredients and presentation were indigenous to the locale, it demonstrated how cocktails were carried, altered, forgotten, and reinvented along the way.

In this sense, his work is less a guide to what people drank than a record of how drinking itself moved.