Old-Fashioned; or, What is a Classic?
To presume that one can excel at a practice without a rigorous study of that practice’s history is to swill the wine of delusion. One fancies oneself to be advancing the discipline when merely repeating the achievements—more often, the mistakes—of one’s forerunners.
In fairness to bartenders and mixologists, however, the sense in which their arts have had a history is not immediately clear.
To be sure, these arts have had a past. (Their origins stretch into prehistory.) They’ve had a kind of mythology as well. No bar worthy of its name can be without its teller of tales. But until rather recently, these tales of the cocktail have been more akin to folklore, largely an oral tradition, its written record limited to newspaper articles and practical guides. History with a capital H—history as an academic discipline distinct from narrative art, approaching social science in its methods—is roughly as old (or as young, we should say) as the cocktail itself, both children of the nineteenth century. Not until the present-day work of David Wondrich were cocktails accorded this kind of history.
You will not find a great deal of the latter history on this Substack. That’s not because I don’t find it enriching. Nothing could be further from the case. I simply have nothing to add. Pick up a copy of Wondrich’s Imbibe! and Punch. For that matter, begin with some primary sources and pick up a copy of “Professor” Jerry Thomas’ Bon-Vivant’s Companion. They’re a joy to read. It’s with a similar attitude that I limit myself from dwelling on the subtleties of bartending technique when doing so fails to serve a more meditative end—when doing so is not a “preparation for saying something,” as Stanley Cavell once put it.1 A professor of neither history nor bartending, I do not lightly claim the authority reserved for those who devote their lives to the practice.
Now, with those disclaimers out of the way, get ready for some historical and technical description!
Truly, though, my instigating question is rather one of hermeneutics or philosophy of history: what does it mean for the practices of bartending and mixology to be or become historical?
Our route into this inquiry runs via the Old-Fashioned—more specifically, via the Old-Fashioned as the prototype of a “classic cocktail.” The drink’s very name, after all, enfolds a background. The Old-Fashioned was born (curious phrase!) hearkening back to the first class of drinks called cocktails. When cocktails entered the scene, they had to distinguish themselves as a category among many others: punches, juleps, cobblers, slings, and toddies, to recall just a prominent handful. Moreover, like many of these categories, cocktails began as one specific drink, “The Cock-Tail.” Referencing the practice of gingering the tail, its formula—“spirits of any kind, sugar, bitters, and water”—was invented as a stimulant, to be taken as a shot on "sporting parties" or as a “morning tonic.”2 No doubt, maturation in mixology is inextricable from maturation in manners: dispensing with the feaguing of horses and the promotion of alcohol as a neurological stimulant—that’s a civilizing process that I for one can get behind.
Maturity is indeed the key word here. It is T. S. Eliot’s criterion for discerning a literary classic, insofar as “it is only by hindsight, and in historical perspective, that a classic can be known as such”:
The maturity of a literature is the reflection of that of the society in which it is produced: an individual author—notably Shakespeare and Virgil—can do much to develop his language, but he cannot bring that language to maturity unless the work of his predecessors has prepared it for his final touch. A mature literature, therefore, has a history behind it: a history that is not merely a chronicle, an accumulation of manuscripts and writings of this kind and that, but an ordered though unconscious progress of a language to realize its own potentialites within its own limitations.3
Drinks and their mixture are not a language or a literature, but they do constitute a medium. As a medium, drinks and their mixture give rise to form and communication. They involve our powers of understanding and judgment. And to the point at hand, they admit of evolution.
The Cock-Tail in time diversifies into the Brandy Cocktail, the Whiskey Cocktail, the Champagne Cocktail, etc.; then into “Fancy” and “Improved” versions of each (adding respectively a twist of lemon, or a touch of maraschino, absinthe, or curaçao). All of these variations come to benefit from ice as its use becomes more widely available. Then it’s just a matter of time before mixologists begin to play with vermouth, creating further classics—most famously, the Manhattan and the Martini. Eventually the cocktail becomes so expansive as a genre that it can encompass “any short, iced drink”: “Art is no respecter of boundaries, and once the humble Cocktail [becomes] a work of art, it [finds] itself harboring all kinds of ingredients that it had once rigorously excluded (citrus, eggs), and exluding ones that had once defined it (spirits, bitters).”4 Such are the circumstances in which a mature patron can come to order a Whiskey Cocktail, “Old-Fashioned.”
As the subtitle of this post signals, Eliot’s essay on the concept of a classic (and that concept’s embodiment in Virgil) has been close to hand in these reflections. Wary as I am of overstating the analogical connections between literary and mixological history, Eliot's essay does turn up a series of insights that warrant rumination: to wit, that a classic merges multiple courses of development (the maturation of a culture, the maturation of a medium, the maturation of a mind); that there are additional criteria for a universal classic, as opposed to a classic of any one age or language; that the ways in which a classic attains universality can show us in turn what provinciality can mean; that a classic, universal or provincial, is not necessarily or by definition created by the greatest, the most gifted or the most skilled of composers; that the composer of a classic cannot consciously set out to create a classic, however lucid his or her intentions may be; that the consummation or comprehensiveness of a classic may mark the exhaustion or exhaustibility of a form or medium, even as it remains a criterion for forms and media to come; that a classic, consequently, can become a burden or an impasse to the creators who work in its shadow.
It is not just for becoming famous or for being delicious that a cocktail achieves the status of a classic. A classic cocktail is a formal culmination. The Old-Fashioned is an early, if not the original such crystallization in the emergence of cocktails as a medium. Spirits, sugar, bitters, stirred on ice—it is at once a template and a limit, terminus a quo and terminus ad quem. “In my beginning is my end. / . . . / In my end is my beginning.” One can riff or build on it. One can, to a point, refine it. One can recover or revive it, as in fact happened with the Old-Fashioned during the “Cocktail Renaissance” (after the dark ages of muddled “maraschino cherries” and orange wedges). But one cannot, sensu stricto, improve upon it. It is a species of perfection.
When a classic cocktail comes into being, an order is revealed—many hands, many mouths, many minds, all contributing to a process of development that has exceeded the foresight of any one person. To savor a well-made Old-Fashioned (or Martini, or Highball, etc.) is to know it as the realization of such a process. And it is nothing short of glorious. Yet the development or maturation of a classic remains a double-edged sword. What matures, what lives and ripens, peaks. Fruition is a kind of end, presaging a kind of death. The form is there. Now it can only be fleshed out. In this actualization of potentiality, a limitation of the medium has been encountered.
But, again, and this is the larger claim that I aim to press here, the fulfillment of a classic cocktail generates a medium in itself—a class in itself (classical, classic, and class all being derivatives of the Latin classis). That is its critical feature. Its formation is a figura: a shadow and foretoken of further fulfillments.5
This claim may be somewhat controversial, as there are many drinks called “classics” or “modern classics”, drinks that are famous, drinks that are delicious, but that do not always manage to meet this criterion—this capacity to call forth drinks in its image. Whether there are subtler aspects of these drinks that allow the designation to still be fitting has to be judged on a case-by-case basis. Perhaps a drink reanimates a form, demonstrating a dynamism within it that previous practitioners had overlooked. Phil Ward's Oaxaca Old-Fashioned is among the first to leap to mind. But in a way, even this example recalls a counterpoint: many drinks that receive the honorific of “classic,” be they modern or quite old, are exceptional riffs on, well, the classics!
Take the Sazerac. It is among the most venerable of cocktails. Indeed, I tend to prefer it to an Old-Fashioned. But it is not a classic in the same way that an Old-Fashioned is a classic. The Sazerac is an Old-Fashioned, with New Orleans nuance—namely, with an Absinthe rinse and Peychaud's bitters.6 The Big Easy's stronger claim to a classic cocktail, as we shall see, is embodied in the Vieux Carré: by incorporating Bénédictine, a high-proof liqueur, it constitutes a discrete schema from that of the Old-Fashioned, similarly to how Daisies such as the Sidecar and Margarita distinguish themselves from Sours by incorporating triple sec or dry curaçao.
Consider also Sam Ross’ Paper Plane and Joaquín Simó’s Naked and Famous. Each is a minor triumph. And neither bartender would dream of denying the drinks’ mutual source in the Last Word. (Naturally, Phil Ward beat them both to it in his Final Ward.) Murray Stenson of the Zig Zag Café, who resurrected the Last Word in 2004 after rediscovering the recipe in Ted Saucier’s Bottom's Up!, would in turn never dream of denying the drink’s Prohibition-era provenance.
Mixologists with the wisdom of humility acknowledge: while there are over 100 drinks that an experienced bartender should know how to make, there may not be more than 10 kinds of drinks that s/he can make. Creating a new recipe is ever within reach. Creating a new genre of recipes is another story entirely. Again, one finds this wisdom shining in Phil Ward: not a whiff of grandiosity in his “theory” on making cocktails—he’s just playing Mr. Potato Head.
So, if we accept these criteria, just what are the classic cocktails? While a definitive list cannot be settled once and for all, certain candidates are beyond dispute. Toby Maloney in The Bartender's Manifesto calls these exemplars the “Mother Drinks” (a nod to Auguste Escoffier and the mother sauces of classical French cuisine).7 Alex Day, Nick Fauchald, and David Kaplan in Cocktail Codex call them the “Root Recipes,” and provide a more genealogical or networked taxonomy for tracing their development.8 Tellingly, the Mother Drinks and the Root Recipes do not overlap fully or evenly. The Mother Drinks comprise the Old-Fashioned, the Sour, the Martini/Manhattan, the Vieux Carré, and the Negroni. The Root Recipes comprise the Old-Fashioned, the Martini, the Daiquiri, the Sidecar, the Whiskey Highball, and the Flip.
I don’t imagine that the bartenders who constructed these classification systems are racing to die on any hill here: these arrangements are heuristics for making good drinks, plain and simple. That said, I’m betting that the juxtaposition of these frameworks could provoke some lively discussion. To touch on some of the more striking issues:
Is it more accurate to regard the Negroni as a class in itself (à la the Mother Drinks), or to slot it under the heading of the Martini (à la the Root Recipes)? The case for the former approach is more cogent, in my view. Whatever emphasis one places on the balance between a distillate and an aromatized wine, this is not a principle that the Negroni owes exclusively to the Manhattan, Martini, and Martinez. If anything, the Negroni is liable to confound conventional distinctions between a base spirit and a modifier: as many hot-takers have taken to reciting, the Negroni is a Campari cocktail, not a gin cocktail. (But, but, but—is a Kingston Negroni a Campari cocktail? Not if you're using Smith & Cross, my friend!)
The Vieux Carré and the Sidecar seem to perform similar functions in each system—specifically, registering the inclusion of liqueur. Yet the former works in the stirred and bitters family (branching out of the Old-Fashioned), while the latter works in the shaken and citrus family (branching out of the Sour). Perhaps it’s more sensible to treat each as a separate category.
I frankly can’t see a good reason for omitting the Highball and the Flip from the Mother Drinks. (It’s just a case of forced analogy, as far as I can tell: there are five mother sauces., so I suppose there have to be five mother drinks.) On a tangential note, though, the Highball raises more complications for the Negroni as a type than does the Martini. There’s ample evidence that the Americano (and before that, the Milano-Torino) paved the way for the Negroni, not the other way around. Still I insist, the Negroni makes sense as a template in its own right, not just for its inclusion of an amaro, but above all for its three-equal-parts structure of distillate – vermouth – amaro, which has unquestionably served as a paradigm for subsequent cocktails.
Neither the Mother Drinks nor the Root Recipes elevate the Last Word as a class. This is regrettable. The Last Word’s four-equal-parts build is unique, not to mention its inclusion of both a bitter liqueur (Chartreuse) and a sweet liqueur (Maraschino) with citrus. And to reiterate that most crucial of characteristics: the Last Word has become a model for successive drinks.
Lastly, where exactly does Tiki land in all of this? Sure, call a Daiquiri a Sour, a Ti' Punch an Old-Fashioned, a Royal Bermuda Yacht Club a Daisy; I can accept that. But what of the Mai Tai, the Swizzle, the Zombie, the Jungle Bird? When orgeat, pineapple juice, and overproof pot still rums start taking the stage, do we not find ourselves in a different kind of play? At the very least, there has to be room in the cocktail pantheon for the Mai Tai: its roots run deep, and its variations are many. My personal favorite of the Tiki family, the Jungle Bird, would be fast on its heels.
To be clear, all of these drinks are called classics, and there’s nothing out of order in doing so at the level of ordinary language: a great deal can be meant and understood in this usage.9 What I’m urging, ultimately, is closer attention to the ways in which a few of these drinks, with time, rise from the rank of species to genus—closer attention to how the fruit or issue of these drinks gradually reveal forms, in the sense that Eriugena articulates in his Periphyseon: “that which is created and creates.”10
But let us end where we began, with the Old-Fashioned. It truly is the Virgil of mixological history—in this sense: poets and scholars need not situate the study and imitation of Virgil at the heart of their practice, but if they lack an appreciation of Virgil—of what makes The Aeneid a preeminent example of a classic poem—something profound will be lacking in their understanding of poetry. With this lack, even prodigious practitioners will end up recreating the classical virtues by accident. Likewise, to call the Old-Fashioned the prototypical classic cocktail is not to call it the greatest drink ever to be mixed. It is simply to say that it cannot be superseded. In its balance—its poise—the Old-Fashioned unfolds a primordial principle. No cocktail can at once be great and exclude all the qualities that make an Old-Fashioned great.
—Does this make Punch the Homer of mixological history? —Intriguing, but again, let’s not get too carried away with our analogies.
The history of the cocktail does not begin with the Old-Fashioned, but in the Old-Fashioned, the cocktail becomes conscious of its history. The historicity of bartending and mixology shows itself. And any composer that follows cannot reasonably hope to facilitate more than a kindred moment of awakening as this history deepens, thickens, and ramifies. Different temperaments will respond to this reality in different ways: for some, it will be a harbor and a beacon, guiding and protecting; for others, a shoal and a strait, breaking and constricting; for others still, a horizon, eluding and provoking.
Now let’s make an Old-Fashioned! And limber up: the recipe requires a bit of finesse. Akin to a Daiquiri, balance is all, and simplicity leaves one nowhere to hide. In some ways, the making of an Old-Fashioned can be an even more exacting dance than that of the Daiquiri. As the authors of Cocktail Codex rightly stress, a good Old-Fashioned is fundamentally a celebration of one’s base spirit, executed through restraint in one’s other ingredients.11 Too much sugar and the minute particularities of one’s distillate blur in a muddle of sweetness. Too much bitters and those particularities are tinctured with a medicinal herbaciousness. And overdilution, a mortal blow to any cocktail, is nowhere quite so instantly defeating as it is in an Old-Fashioned.
There are two schools of thought for making an Old-Fashioned. The more august approach, sustained by the disciples of Sasha Petraske, is to build the drink in the glass with a sugar cube. The more modern approach substitutes demerara syrup for the sugar cube and stirs the drink in a mixing glass. When I’m out at a cocktail bar, it’s a delight to observe the classic technique. When I’m in at home, I confess, I don’t much care to dissolve sugar in the process of making my drink. While listening to Eric Alperin and Richard Boccato wax poetic on the process has inspired me to attempt it on a few occasions, I can’t say I found the outcome to be superior to a good demerara syrup. (But then, I haven’t worked at the side of Sasha Petraske.)
At any rate, all you classicists out there, grab yourself a chilled Old-Fashioned glass and bring a large chunk of clear ice to temp. Place a sugar cube in your glass. (The Milk & Honey alumni insist on a Domino Dot.) Saturate your sugar cube with three dashes of Angostura bitters.12 Muddle it into a paste. Jigger 2 ounces of fine spirits into your glass—ideally, a full-bodied bourbon, rye, or cognac. Stir for 4-6 revolutions. Add your ice—gently, so as to prevent it from cracking. Stir for 8-10 more revolutions. Garnish with an orange twist (expressing the twist over the drink, then lightly rubbing it on the rim of the glass). Serve or sip.
One advantage of this method is that it’s very difficult to overdilute your drink. One disadvantage is that it’s very easy to end up with undissolved sugar at the bottom of your glass. Many drinkers can live with that limitation. After all, being served on the rock(s), the Old-Fashioned is a cocktail built to withstand a bit of change between the first and the last sip.
These (dis)advantages trade places when employing the modern technique. Stirring in a mixing glass, one must be more on guard against overdilution, but using a syrup ensures no grit. Plus, a rich demerara syrup brings welcome complexity to one's sweetener—molasses, caramel, and toffee notes—along with a silkier texture, especially when one has gum syrup on hand.13
So all you modernists out there, set your mise en place. Jigger 2 ounces of your base spirit into a mixing glass. Add a tsp of demerara syrup, and 3 dashes of Angostura bitters. Fill at least 2/3 of your mixing glass with ice. Stir and strain into a chilled Old-Fashioned glass over a single large cube. (Again, keep that cube in mind when stirring. For the drink to be good to the last sip, you’re aiming for some degree of underdilution.) Garnish with an orange twist (express, dab, place). Serve or sip.
Experimentation with one’s base spirit, sweetener, and bitters is encouraged. (Who doesn’t love Mr. Potato Head?)
But first, learn the classic!
Prosit.
“So many remarks one has endured about the kind and number of feet in a line of verse, or about a superb modulation, or about a beautiful diagonal in a painting, or about a wonderful camera angle, have not been readings of a passage at all, but something like items in a tabulation, with no suggestion about what is being counted or what the total might mean. Such remarks, I feel, say nothing, though they may be, as Wittgenstein says about naming, preparations for saying something (and hence had better be accurate)” (Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 36-37).
Jerry Thomas, How to Mix Drinks: or, The Bon-Vivant's Companion (New York: Dick & Fitzgerald Publishers, 1862), 49. See also David Wondrich, Imbibe! From Absinthe Cocktail to Whiskey Smash, a Salute in Stories and Drinks to "Professor" Jerry Thomas, Pioneer of the American Bar, Updated and Revised Edition (New York: Perigee, 2015), 210-250; David Wondrich and Noah Rothbaum, eds., The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 161-164, 510-511.
T. S. Eliot, "What is a Classic?" in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, Volume 6: The War Years, 1940-1946, ed. David E. Chinitz and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 670-671.
Wondrich, Imbibe!, 293-294.
See Erich Auerbach’s landmark philological study Figura, in Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach, ed. James I. Porter, trans. Jane O. Newman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 65-113.
Even chronology may be a secondary consideration here. For example, historical records of the Mojito appear to predate those of the Daiquiri, but I would go so far as to suggest that the Daiquiri, as a type, in its simplicity, precedes the Mojito, logically if not temporally—that a Mojito is essentially a Daiquiri, lengthened with crushed ice and seasoned with mint.
Toby Maloney and the Bartenders of the Violet Hour, with Emma Janzen, The Bartender’s Manifesto: How To Think, Drink, and Create Cocktails Like a Pro (New York: Clarkson Potter, 2022), 33-35.
Alex Day, Nick Fauchald, and David Kaplan, Cocktail Codex: Fundamentals · Formulas · Evolutions (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2018), passim.
See Robert Hess, “Classic Cocktail,” in Wondrich and Rothbaum, eds., Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails, 155-156.
Johannes Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon (The Division of Nature), trans. I. P. Sheldon Williams, rev. John J. O’Meara (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1987), 128-129.
Day, et al., Cocktail Codex, 6.
Ah, the “dash,” the most charmingly (or maddeningly) imprecise unit in bartending metrics, rivaled only by the “barspoon.” Many good-faith efforts to quantify it have been made. I've seen 0.92 ml, 1/32 oz, 1/8 tsp, and so on. More useful is the conversion of 11-12 pipette drops to a single dash. At bottom, however, a dash is better visualized than measured. Invert an Angostura bitters bottle (n.b., one that isn't full, that has some air in it) and give it a thrust. That's a dash. The design of those elegant Japanese bitters bottles affords better consistency in each dash, but not necessarily the same quantity: three dashes from a Japanese bitters bottle should equal one dash from an Angostura bitters bottle—roughly.
Gum syrup gets its name from gum arabic or acacia—a complex mixture of glycoproteins and polysaccharides used in the food industry as a stabilizing or thickening agent. Gum syrup can add viscosity to a cocktail. It can also soften sharp or bitter flavors, so use with care. If you have a sous vide or immersion circulator, you can make it at home. Measure 300 g demerara sugar, 150 g filtered water, 18 g gum arabic; blend until dissolved; heat under vacuum at 145°F for 2 hours; cool and store (see Day, et al., Cocktail Codex, 54). Alternatively, Liber & Co. produces an excellent demerara gum syrup, which you can purchase here.