Ralph Smith for The New York Times; Food stylist: Michelle Gatton. Prop stylist: Randi Brookman Harris. Glass from Baccarat.
There's a terrific mini-monologue in the 1942 film "You Were Never Lovelier" in which Fred Astaire's fast-talking would-be roué tells Rita Hayworth's ingénue: "As they'd say in Brooklyn, I can't bat in your league. I'm a plain, ordinary guy from Omaha, Nebraska. Just an old-fashioned, everyday Middle Westerner.. . . But you're streamlined. You're today. Sister, I was raised amongst the grasshoppers, I am strictly from corn." And then the duo breaks into song and dance, which is where Jerome Kern and Johnny Mercer's sublime ballad, "I'm Old Fashioned," debuted.
For me, the song and the drink (which predates it by a very long time; the name dates to around the 1880s, but the recipe's essentials go back to at least 1806) go together perfectly. And even Astaire's brief speech seems to telegraph the big question among old-fashioned drinkers: Which way are you going to have it — streamlined or strictly from corn?
No cocktail (and this includes the martini) gets people as worked up about methodology as the old-fashioned. And that's probably because the two major approaches really are quite different. One is starkly minimalist, prescribing nothing more than sugar, whiskey and bitters — maybe a few teardrops' worth of water, maybe a twist of orange or lemon to finish it off. Like Hayworth, it's streamlined, it's today (even if it is one of the oldest cocktails on record). It's certainly not the old-fashioned I was taught to make at a bar in small-town Vermont in the early 1990s. There, the first time a customer ordered the drink from me, I skulked over to the manager to ask what to do. She plonked a sugar cube, a slice of orange and a cherry in a glass, dug what looked like a small nightstick out of a drawer, handed it to me as if I had any idea what to do with it and told me to add whiskey, Angostura bitters and ice. I did figure out what to do with the muddler, and that drink — the sweet and fruity, eager-to-please, raised among the grasshoppers, strictly from corn, boisterous version — instantly became my old-fashioned.
I wouldn't encounter its austere twin for more than a decade, at an East Village bar, where at the time I assumed they had just run out of fruit. But as more years piled on, I noticed that this version had ascended. It had become to many the one, the true, the correct way to drink it. I get it. It's a lovely, restrained drink, so pared-down as to feel elemental. But I like the other, more gregarious kind too. And ultimately, what I've discovered I like best of all is essentially a hybrid — like the version from Kenneth McCoy, a bartender and owner at Ward III in TriBeCa (see recipe). At his dad's bar in Manhattan, they were made much as I was taught to in Vermont, and affection for that fruit-forward flavor abides, with a little adjusting.
After all, this year's fancies, the song tells us, are passing fancies.
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