Consider the classic whiskey old fashioned. You can count the necessary ingredients on the fingers of one hand.
Wrap those fingers around the drink, though, and you’re holding a cocktail with layers of history, deep resonance for personal tradition and even some synchronicity with the holiday season.
The drink is a crowd-pleaser. Anyone who likes whiskey can probably get behind an old fashioned.
But there’s something more that endears it to the season, something that goes beyond the blueprint recipe of whiskey, sugar, bitters and water.
The drink is strong and sweet, but mellowed and blended, like recollections of holidays past. When memories float closer to the surface in this most nostalgic time of year, the old fashioned helps coax them.
It was the first drink a lot of people were introduced to, and maybe it was a grandfather or aunt making the introduction. It can be imbued with remembrance.
I think about this every time I sip an old fashioned that Mandina’s restaurant across from a funeral home near the Canal Street cemeteries, a restaurant where many people do go after sending someone off to lift one in their honor.
The old fashioned’s name says it all. It dials back to the earliest ideas of what made a cocktail distinct from any other kind of drink. It’s a strong spirit sweetened with sugar, diluted with water and balanced with bitters.
As cocktails started getting more complex, back in the 19th century, the antidote for someone was to go back to the past and say “I want to have a cocktail the old-fashioned way.” The name stuck.
These days, you’ll find my favorite renditions at Revel, the cocktail lounge in Mid-City very close to Mandina’s, across town at Barrel Proof, the whiskey bar in the Lower Garden District.
You can try variations, making the same template with rum or tequila like they do with the new Freret Street hotspot, the husky.
But wherever you find one, in light of the holidays, I suggest just taking a moment before that first sip to bring someone important to mind, and then let the memories stir.
