The first thing you should know is that there are actually no traditional Mennonite Cocktails. Given the Mennonite stereotypes out there, I'm betting this isn't much of a surprise to anyone.
Still, it's worth noting. We don't lack in Bibles of Mennonite cookery that celebrate the various branches of Mennonite ethnicity. Mennonites of Swiss-American extraction can look with pride to Food that Really Schmecks; those of us descended from Mennonites once living in lands now owned by Ukraine look to The Mennonite Treasury of Recipes; And all of us post-1960s Mennos have a well-worn copy of the More with Less Cookbook somewhere on our shelves. None of these tomes, however, have a cocktail section. I know - I've checked.
This is not, as is commonly supposed, because Mennonites are opposed to drinking. We trace our roots back to the sixteenth-century Anabaptists whose leaders, it is true, did speak out from time to time against alcohol, drunkenness and innkeepers who, according to one leader, were "unchaste, ungodly and decadent" (and he meant that as a bad thing) because of their involvement with drink. Still, there's a lot of evidence that the run of the mill Anabaptists and early Mennonites didn't take this stricture all that seriously. Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a number of Mennonites operated breweries and distilleries and most drank moderately, while preachers spoke only against drunkenness and excess. Even when the temperance movement first reared its head in North America, the Mennonites in Canada at least resisted it, forbidding their members from joining this non-Menno associations which judged those who drank even moderately. By the twentieth century, however, this battle was lost and most of the Mennonite congregations in North America made abstinence the norm and alcohol deviant. Not that it was ever universally gone.
At any rate, drinking is having something of a Renaissance in Mennonite circles. Ok, maybe not a Renaissance. A Reformation? No, not that either. But a lot of Mennonites now have the occasional glass of wine, a cocktail on special occasions, and frequent those public drinking establishments so disparaged by our sixteenth-century antecedents.
Still, it's worth noting. We don't lack in Bibles of Mennonite cookery that celebrate the various branches of Mennonite ethnicity. Mennonites of Swiss-American extraction can look with pride to Food that Really Schmecks; those of us descended from Mennonites once living in lands now owned by Ukraine look to The Mennonite Treasury of Recipes; And all of us post-1960s Mennos have a well-worn copy of the More with Less Cookbook somewhere on our shelves. None of these tomes, however, have a cocktail section. I know - I've checked.
This is not, as is commonly supposed, because Mennonites are opposed to drinking. We trace our roots back to the sixteenth-century Anabaptists whose leaders, it is true, did speak out from time to time against alcohol, drunkenness and innkeepers who, according to one leader, were "unchaste, ungodly and decadent" (and he meant that as a bad thing) because of their involvement with drink. Still, there's a lot of evidence that the run of the mill Anabaptists and early Mennonites didn't take this stricture all that seriously. Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a number of Mennonites operated breweries and distilleries and most drank moderately, while preachers spoke only against drunkenness and excess. Even when the temperance movement first reared its head in North America, the Mennonites in Canada at least resisted it, forbidding their members from joining this non-Menno associations which judged those who drank even moderately. By the twentieth century, however, this battle was lost and most of the Mennonite congregations in North America made abstinence the norm and alcohol deviant. Not that it was ever universally gone.
At any rate, drinking is having something of a Renaissance in Mennonite circles. Ok, maybe not a Renaissance. A Reformation? No, not that either. But a lot of Mennonites now have the occasional glass of wine, a cocktail on special occasions, and frequent those public drinking establishments so disparaged by our sixteenth-century antecedents.