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The ice quickly dilutes the balance of your concoction, so you must attend to enjoying it. Do not set it aside overlong while you mess with the grill. The Old Fashioned is the result of many ingredients, and multiple steps in a particular sequence. It is a drink of anticipation, made one at a time, side by side. Do not even think of a pitcher. It is like live performance: never exactly the same twice in a row but, when well-practiced, approaching perfection. Or pretty close.
The Old Fashioned is a strong drink demanding respect, but it is not just whiskey on the rocks. It is a patient gathering and transformation of ingredients from around the kitchen and liquor cabinet – a multi-sensory process, not a production. Stirring takes time and results in clinking. This is why you may not use bottled simple syrup, which is easier than granular sugar but far too quiet.
The lesson came to us, father-to-son. Perhaps such learning is also imparted mother-to-daughter, but we are, well, old-fashioned, and find it hard to imagine at least with regard to the bar: our mother, who certainly partook of a cocktail, never made one, and we have no sisters. The lesson came to us in a certain chronology. The elder of us was first introduced to the ritual after graduating high school in 1966. Underage yes, but safely at home. Though later a historian, he remembered the sequence, as he was recently reminded, out of order. The younger of us, who was also first introduced to the ritual at his high-school graduation seven years later, and who became a surgeon, remembered it with confident precision.
We both remember two other pegs. In 1995, before a dinner at Keen’s Chop House in New York City to celebrate our father’s 75th birthday, the younger of us arrived at our rooms equipped with all the ingredients for the homemade Old Fashioneds of yore. The Harvard Club supplied only the ice. Then, in 1997, near the end of our father’s life, as he sat in his chair in the living room listening to the clinking of his sons making cocktails, he was heard to say as if in valediction: ‘Hey, that sounds good!’
Remember those signs that used to admonish carefulness at every level crossing: Stop, Look, Listen. Don’t outsource your Old Fashioned to a bar. Learn to do it yourself. Then taste that very first sip. Whether or not it rewards you with a memory like ours, we guarantee that the experience will repay your patience. And then you too will have mastered a craft worthy of passing on.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s World edition.
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