M aking a martini is easy. Start with good, straightforward gin and avail yourself of a fresh bottle of dry vermouth, one that wasn’t opened three years ago and then left in the back of a cupboard to ferment itself into acetic acid. Stir with ice until very cold. And there you are.

The martini is not just the perfect drink. It is the perfect drink to make at home. It requires neither a Ph.D. in food science nor a post-graduate fellowship in the manufacture of bitters. But the age of COVID frowned on simplicity. Hunkered down at home, months of sequestered evenings stretched out to a vanishing point, and other than watching one more episode of Money Heist or Squid Game, what was there to do? Something busy-making, no doubt.

It was an imperative that shaped DIY cocktails as never before. The late teens saw no shortage of cocktail books presenting hyper-complex concoctions. But such books tended to be coffee table tomes, purchased more for the big glossy photos than for their intricate recipes. Pre-COVID, one left it to the professionals to actually do the biochemistry necessary to create the fancy and fanciful quaffs of the Post-Classical Cocktail Era.

But during the lockdown one was, for the most part, forced to make one’s own cocktails. Sure, we were able to get plastic containers of batched drinks delivered by bemasked Uber drivers. But those lacked the perfection of presentation we had come to expect from first-rate bars. Thus we have new, COVID-influenced books promising to teach the techniques needed to transform our own kitchen counters into artisanal night spots.

Take The Bartender’s Manifesto: How to Think, Drink, & Create Cocktails Like a Pro, published in June. “This is not a cocktail book that sits on your coffee table and gets nonchalantly regarded by friends and family while they wait for you to bring them a drink,” writes Toby Maloney, impresario of Chicago’s Violet Hour bar. One needs to learn the “beautiful orchestration” of drink-making. And if that isn’t daunting enough, Maloney cautions, “No detail is too small or insignificant.” Fussing over “every single little seemingly inconsequential f***ing detail in every one of your drinks, every time” is a fine mantra for the professional barman. But now that life is finally coming back into some semblance of balance, maybe we don’t have the time or inclination to make drinks at home as complicated as those found at the Violet Hour.

In fact, all of this super-serious complexity has me reaching for one of my favorite guides to drinking and eating, The Wolf in Chef’s Clothing, a comic 1950s cookbook by Esquire drinks writer Robert Loeb, Jr., with illustrations by ad agency art director Jim Newhall. The illustrations are not incidental. The recipes, whether for drinks or eats, are executed not in words but in cartoons. This conceit takes the edge off the politically incorrect portrayal of men as wolfish predators. The man may be making drinks with the goal of making time, but the book assumes men are such morons that they must be shown step-by-step drawings of how to cook a steak or assemble a cocktail.

This extends to the simplest of drinks. The wolf who wants to know how to make a scotch on the rocks is shown how. A cartoon scribble of a scotch bottle stands next to a drawing of an ice bucket. The next cartoon pane shows the liquid in the Scotch bottle being poured over the ice cubes, which are now in a glass.

Some of the illustrations are busy, with half a dozen bottles drawn in the act of emptying into a punchbowl. But none is more perfect than the cartoon rendering of a bottle and a can of beer nestled in ice cubes, followed by an image of a hand pouring the beer bottle into a tilted glass. The drink? “Beer.”

Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?