A year later and we still can't resist an Old Fashioned, though the name of this whiskey drink still conjures up images of a church bingo game. This cocktail offers the sophisticated connoisseur a chance to indulge the senses and rekindle long-lost memories, especially for those distant relatives you endure only around the holidays. Old-fashioned, yes, but not weak. It's strong enough to cut through three helpings of Thanksgiving dinner.
First, we combine a teaspoon of sugar with a splash of water and two dashes of Angostura bitters in the bottom of a large tumbler, and then we toss in a cherry and an orange wedge. After muddling the ingredients into a thick citrus paste, we add either 2 ounces bourbon or 2 ounces rye, and then fill it with ice and give it a good stir.
As our clan bickers over the sweet pickles and cranberry sauce at the dinner table, we contemplate this drink's supposed birth more than a hundred years ago, whether bourbon or rye was first used, and whether others along the way found it as soothing around the holidays as we do. The Old Waldorf-Astoria Bar Book of 1931 credits Colonel James E. Pepper, proprietor of the once-celebrated "Old 1776" whiskey, for introducing - or at least inspiring - the Old Fashioned at that bar (author Albert Stevens Crockett, historian of the Old Waldorf, can't quite recall which). The colonel was a member of the blue-blooded Pendennis Club in Louisville, where a young bartender actually mixed it first. Of course, that's only one version of the drink's story. Those familiar with the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 - in which Uncle Sam tried to enforce an excise tax in western Pennsylvania - insist that the region's rye whiskey producers fled to Kentucky with the Old Fashioned recipe in tow. We try to remain neutral on the matter, and like the Old Waldorf-Astoria Bar Book, tell the drink's tale but make a nonpartisan call for merely "whiskey" in the recipe.
Whether mixed with rye or bourbon, the first sip of an Old Fashioned suspends a slight hint of cold cherry and orange over our tastebuds. Eventually, though, the throat comes alive, and we smile as the home fire burns inside us ever so gently. At some point, the drink transforms from a bouquet of cherry and oranges into the brimstone and fire of whiskey. The Old Fashioned, with its layered taste, is an open invitation for both the whiskey lover and the froufrou cocktail drinker. It's frilly but disciplined: Our cocktail compadres compare it to a good old-fashioned spanking.
