The Sherry Cobbler is the cocktail that changed everything, and it almost never appears on modern bar menus. Jerry Thomas placed it first in the opening chapter of his 1862 guide, before the Juleps, the Smashes, the Punches, and the spirit cocktails — not alphabetically, but by prominence. The Sherry Cobbler was the most famous drink in America.

Charles Dickens, visiting the United States in 1842, wrote about the Sherry Cobbler with the enthusiasm of a travel writer discovering something genuinely new. His description in "American Notes" (1842) introduced the drink to British readers and cemented its reputation internationally. What transfixed Dickens — and thousands of American drinkers before and after him — was the cold. In an era before mechanical refrigeration, crushed ice in a glass on a summer afternoon was a genuine luxury and a minor technological miracle.

The ice came from Frederic Tudor of Boston, who had spent the early 19th century building the infrastructure to harvest, ship, and sell New England pond ice across the American continent and eventually to India and the Caribbean. By 1842, Tudor's network had made commercial ice available in every major American city, and the Sherry Cobbler was the drink of the moment — a direct beneficiary of the ice trade. David Wondrich, in "Imbibe!" (2007), argues that the Cobbler's popularity drove the ice trade as much as the ice trade enabled the Cobbler.

The drinking straw owes its existence to the Cobbler as well. The crushed ice format meant the drink was difficult to sip directly from the glass; thin hollow reeds of rye grass were used as straws in the 1830s–1840s, eventually standardized into glass tubes. The rye straw gave way to glass, then paper, then plastic — one of the more remarkable industrial lineages in food history, beginning with Jerry Thomas's favourite drink.

The Cobbler declined after Prohibition. Sherry fell out of fashion in American bar culture, ice became mundane, and the drink's low ABV made it an afterthought in the high-proof post-Prohibition landscape. It has never fully recovered its historical dominance, though craft cocktail programs occasionally revive it as a summer special.