CHARLES H. BAKER
1. Melanie De Biasio - Brother
2. Cee Cee James - Done Love Wrong
3. Joe Tossini - Un angelo per me
4. Howe Gelb & Arizona Amp and Alternator - Piano of Erosion
5. Cayetano - The Banshee
6. Shigeru Umebayashi - Je Suis Une Fleure
7. Maggie Bjorklund - Fro Fro Heart (Featuring Kurt Wagner)
8. Devastations - He Wasn't Like That When I Knew Him
9. Emilíana Torrini & The Colorist Orchestra - Mikos
10. Pete Alderton - Evil Was Her Name
11. Dirtmusic - Hum Hum
12. Brad Mehldau - Your Mother Should Know
13. Asaf Avidan - Bang Bang
14. The Real Tuesday Weld - Skeletons in Waiting
15. Graham Coxon - Wedding March
16. Massive Attack - Heat Miser (Live)
17. Aurelien Pontier - Waltz No. 7 in C-Sharp Minor, Op. 64 No. 2
18. Asaf Avidan - My Tunnels Are Long And Dark These Days
19. 2CELLOS - Cinema Paradiso
20. I Am Kloot - Sold As Seen
21. Camille - She Was (Acoustic)
CHARLES H. BAKER
He was born on Christmas Day in 1895 in Zellwood, Florida, to Jane Paul Baker (1859-1916) and Charles Henry Baker Sr. (1848-1924). Both of his parents were from Pennsylvania.[3] He later attended Trinity College. By 1918, he was working at Norton Abrasives as a grinder in Worcester, Massachusetts;[4] he later worked as a district sales manager.[5] He moved to New York City, where he worked as a magazine editor and submitted stories to small publications. In 1932, Baker met Pauline Elizabeth Paulsen, an heiress to the Paulsen mining fortune, on a world cruise where he had signed on as the cruise line's publicist.[6] After they were married they had built for them an art deco house called Java Head in Coconut Grove, Florida in which they lived for thirty years.[7] They built a second house in Coconut Grove called Java Head East, where they lived in the 1960s. They later moved to Naples, Florida.[8]
Baker spent much of his life traveling the world and chronicling food and drink recipes for magazines like Esquire, Town & Country, and Gourmet, for which he wrote a column during the 1940s called "Here's How".[1] Baker collected many of those recipes in his two-volume set The Gentleman's Companion: Being an Exotic Cookery and Drinking Book, originally published in 1939 by Derrydale Press.[9] John J. Poister in 1983 wrote, "Volume II of The Gentleman's Companion, by Charles H. Baker Jr., is the best book on exotic drinks I have ever encountered".[10] Condé Nast contributing writer St. John Frizell wrote, "It's his prose, not his recipes, that deserves a place in the canon of culinary literature ... at times humorously grandiloquent, at times intimate and familiar, Baker fills his stories with colorful details about his environment and his drinking companions — Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner among them".[1] While his culinary nonfiction garnered Baker much praise, he was less well regarded as a novelist. His only novel, Blood of the Lamb, was published in 1946 by Rinehart & Company. About it, a Time reviewer wrote in the magazine's April 22, 1946, issue, "Blood of the Lamb is not much of a novel, but it is long on local color, loud piety, snuff, 'stump liquor' and local talk"[11]
Words to the Wise No. VII. Offering up an earnest plea for recentness in all eggs to be used in cocktails or drinks of any kind, for that matter. A stale or storage egg in a decent mixed drink is like a stale or storage joke in critical and intelligent company. Eschew them rabidly. If really fresh eggs can't be had, mix other type drinks, for the result will reflect no merit round the hearth, no matter how hospitable it may be.[12]
Charles H. Baker Jr. in The Gentlemen's Companion: Around the World with Jigger, Beaker and Flask
Some of Baker's exotic and often esoteric drink recipes from The Gentleman's Companion are once again finding favor at modern cocktail bars specializing in classic drinks, such as Manhattan's Pegu Club, where Baker's "Jimmie Roosevelt"—a mixture of champagne, cognac, and Chartreuse liqueur—was found on the menu.[1]
He died on November 11, 1987, in Naples, Florida.[13][14]