A number of readers have written to ask where that most essential of American institutions -- the cocktail party -- got its start. In particular, I've been asked whether I can verify the Wikipedia claim that Alec Waugh -- once a popular British novelist and essayist on the good life, but now best remembered as Evelyn's older brother -- "invented" the cocktail party sometime around 1925 in London. Alas, for all the things Wikipedia manages to get right, this is not one of them.

Alec Waugh himself noted that the first cocktail party in England was hosted in 1924 by painter C.R.W. Nevison, who was looking for some diversion between tea and dinner. (If you've ever seen Nevison's harrowing World War I trench-scapes -- paintings populated with contorted corpses -- you'll understand why he would want a compensatory drink or two.) But for all the claims that it started on the London social scene, the cocktail party is a decidedly American invention. Indeed, by 1930, Brits appalled at the Americanization of England would cite the insidious, invidious influence of talking pictures, jazz bands and cocktail parties.

Credit (or blame, depending on your point of view) for the first "cocktail party" ever thrown can be assigned to Mrs. Julius S. Walsh Jr. of St. Louis. In May 1917, the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported that "Positively the newest stunt in society is the giving of 'cocktail parties.' " The paper credited Mrs. Walsh -- "a leader in society activities" in St. Louis -- as being "responsible for the innovation."

Mrs. Walsh had invited 50 guests to her house -- a mansion "equipped with a private bar" -- on a spring Sunday at high noon. Some guests came to the party straight from church; some had spent the morning in "a motor promenade of the boulevards." The party lasted one hour, the "interregnum preceding 1 o'clock dinner."

The Walshes were not the first to organize a party around an alcoholic beverage (and even before the first cocktail party so-called, the Walshes themselves had hosted a "baby party" at the St. Louis Country Club at which they and their friends dressed as toddlers and sucked cocktails out of baby bottles). The principal antecedent for the cocktail party comes from September 1890, when Mrs. Richard S. Dana introduced the concept of an "egg-nog party" in the society resort of Lenox, Mass., parties she would throw every autumn for years, when the goldenrod was in blossom. Following the lead of the Lenox "cottagers," it became the height of Gilded Age fashion to host a party around a bowl of eggnog. By the aught years, such parties were popular in St. Louis, and the memory of them provided the inspiration for the Walshes' cocktail party. But by the time they hosted their Sunday afternoon gathering in 1917, eggnog was hopelessly old-fashioned. Cocktails were the thing. But what cocktails?