Simonson - The old-fashioned: the story of the worlds first classic cocktail, with recipes and lore

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Copyright 2014 by Robert Simonson
Photographs copyright 2014 by Daniel Krieger

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
www.tenspeed.com

Ten Speed Press and the Ten Speed Press colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Simonson, Robert.
The old-fashioned : the story of the worlds first classic cocktail, with recipes and lore / Robert Simonson.
pages cm
Includes index.
1. CocktailsHistory. 2. BittersHistory. I. Title.
TX951.S5835 2014
641.874dc23
2013037239

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-60774-535-8
eBook ISBN: 978-1-60774-536-5

v3.1_r1

To Doris June Pommerening Simonson,
Old-Fashioned drinker

CONTENTS

PREFACE

I never treated it as just a cocktail.

DORIS SIMONSON

MY MOTHER NEVER DRANK LIQUOR until she was twenty-one. She followed the rules. But when she embarked on what would become a long drinking life, she did so with purpose and not a little forethought.

The first order of business was to find her drink. In those postWorld War II days, when the cocktail hour was as inviolable a part of any day as sunrise and sunset, one had ones drink. There was none of this flitting about from cocktail to cocktail. You found a mix that delighted the palate and soothed the mind in the right proportions and stuck by it.

She began with Manhattans. She liked the way they looked, shining like liquid embers inside a long-stemmed glass. But, after a while, they gave her headaches, which she blamed on the sweet vermouth. (Vermouth is ever the scapegoat.) She then tried Martinis, but found them daunting and dangerous. Finally, she found her level in the Old-Fashioned. Some of her reasoning was spurious. Shed ask for as much accompanying fruit as the bar could furnish as well as a healthy spurt of soda water, because, even in those days, watching your weight was important. But the remainder of her logic is hard to fault.

A lot depends on why youre having an Old-Fashioned, she said, some sixty years after she sampled her first. If youre having one as a drink in the evening, youd probably rather have a strong one, because youre not going to have two Old-Fashioneds. If youre at somebodys home or visiting with people, its never just a cocktail. I never treated it as just a cocktail. To me, a cocktail was an avenue to socializing. Everyone did it. It was something we did while we were visiting and laughing and singing and talking. It was a tool to meet people and relax.

I treated it as an all-purpose drink. I never went through this thing where you say, Oh, its before dinner, so we need a before-dinner drink; or, its dinner, so we want something light; or its after dinner, etc. It was something I enjoyed drinking, and I could control what I wanted by telling the bartender not to put too much liquor in it, or to put a lot of fruit in it. You could almost make up the recipe for your Old-Fashioned.

You find peoples personalities coming out in Old-Fashioneds. A lot of men will drink Old-Fashioneds, but they will tell the bartender, in no uncertain terms, Very little, if anything, mixed in. Mostly, it turned out what they wanted was a bourbon on the rocks. They basically wanted a nice strong drink with plenty of ice cubes, so as it sat there it became a little more mellow. Whereas women basically wanted all the things that went with it.

And, she concluded, its so beautiful to look at.

THE STORY

THE GRANDFATHER OF THEM ALL

NOVELIST KINGSLEY AMIS called it the only cocktail really to rival the martini and its variants. His countryman, writer Alec Waugh, considered a bourbon Old-Fashioned or a very dry five-to-one Martini the best preludes to a good dinner. James Beard, the American culinary godfather, named a dry Martini, a dry Daiquiri, and an old-fashioned without any refuse in the way of fruit the best of cocktails. Drama critic and cultural arbiter George Jean Nathan deemed the Martini, Manhattan, and Old-Fashioned the inaugural cocktail trinity. The grandfather of them all, decreed newspaperman nonpareil H. L. Mencken.

The Martini and Manhattan have long been recognized as owning space atop the Mount Olympus of classic cocktails. But, not too long ago, the Old-Fashioneds footing on that mountain was shaky. Once an austere, perfectly balanced assemblage of whiskey, bitters, sugar, and watera cocktail at its most elementalit had taken on several decades worth of baggage. Those few who still ordered it in the waning decades of the twentieth century were handed a potion adulterated with cherries, orange slices, and soda, and made with weak whiskey and weaker ice.

Citizens who came of drinking age around the turn of the new millennium would have been hard-pressed to understand why intellectual leaders of the last centurynormally busy mulling headier mattershad taken time out of their day to signal praise for what seemed an exceedingly silly, unsophisticated drink. The Old-Fashioned? That tarted-up fruit salad slopped together at supper clubs and musty old saloons? That sickly sweet, imprecise concoction that, only by the most charitable stretch of imagination, could be called a whiskey drink? The Martini, another relic from parental cocktail hours of the Eisenhower years, at least retained some vestigial dignity, standing cold and clear in its sleek signature glass. But the Old-Fashioned had not weathered the years at all well. It looked like an adult version of a kiddie cocktail and seemed as stodgy and backward as its name.

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