Cocktail. A horse of mixed breeding functioning in the role of the thoroughbred. According to a 1769 British definition, cocktailing was used to mark these mixed horses.

The Old Fashioned Cocktail was not always called the Old Fashioned. When it was born it was simply the Cocktail: A word that has completely lost its original meaning as applied to beverages. It has become a generic term to cover just about any mixed drink, especially those served in a cocktail glass. But the term “cocktail” never referred to a single drink. Even as it was defined in The Balance & Columbian Repository (Hudson, NY) in 1806, it was a family of libations, defined as spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters. “Spirits of any kind” left the door open for Gin Cocktails, Whiskey Cocktails, Brandy Cocktails, even Vermouth Cocktails.

You could say it was this flexibility that made the Cocktail so universally popular. Shipping still depended upon wind and wooden boats, on wagons and cobbled streets, on people walking forested paths. So people mostly drank whatever was produced nearby. The most likely cocktail ingredient to be imported, because of its exotic ingredients and easy portability, was bitters. Yet, even this ingredient could be produced locally.  The great flexibility of that first recipe was quickly proven as many variations were quickly invented in America, Europe, and the Caribbean.

The earliest European definition of the drink appeared in James Edward Alexander’s 1833 book Transatlantic Sketches: “For the receipt-book let the following be copied:—First, Cocktail is composed of water, with the addition of rum, gin, or brandy, as one chooses—a third of the spirit to two-thirds of the water; add bitters and enrich with sugar and nutmeg: in sling, the bitters are omitted.”

Although Antoine Amedée Peychaud has long been discounted as inventor of the Cocktail (as he was born around the same time as the drink), there can be no question that it caught on quickly in his adopted city of New Orleans:

“Ah! I see; not acquainted with the mixture! Boy, bring up four glasses of brandy-cocktail immediately!”
The slave returned with four partially-filled tumblers upon a waiter, a spoon in each.
“Ah, this is it!” exclaimed the narrator, his eyes glistening with animation: “help yourselves, gentlemen; touch*—very fine. Now the difference between a brandy cocktail and a brandy toddy is this: a toddy is made by adding together a little water, a little sugar, and a great deal of brandy—mix well and drink. A Brandy cocktail is composed of the same ingredients, with the addition of a shade of Stoughton’s bitters; so that the bitters draw the demarcation. Boy, bring up four brandy toddies; you shall taste the difference.”
I declined the favor of a second glass.
“You are new to the city, sir? We all drink; must do it. Nothing like keeping up a heat within, to counteract the heat without…”

[* NOTE: A late distinguished representative in the national councils from the state of Mississippi nearly lost his life in complying with this Southern custom; his glass broke in his hand, and he swallowed one of the fragments. — New Orleans as I Found It by Edward Henry Durell, mayor of New Orleans, 1845]

By 1842, even Charles Dickens had noted this drink in his American Notes for General Circulation with a footnote to the word cocktail that read: “Cocktail—spirits, bitters, sugar, etc.”

Another Londoner had more to say about it. William Terrington’s 1869 book Cooling Cups and Dainty Drinks. Cups, Punches, Smashes, Slings, Daisies, and many other drinks would eventually be grouped under the heading of “Cocktails”, but this had not yet occurred. At the time, Terrington said, "Cocktails are compounds very much used by 'early birds' to fortify the inner man, and by those like their consolations hot and strong. 'Cocktail' is not so ancient an institution as Juleps, &c., but, with its next of kin, 'Crusta', promises to maintain its ground."

So many other drinks had emerged by this time that the original was a bit out of date. It had reached the status that would immortalize it. It was old fashioned.

Albert Stevens Crockett wrote in his 1931 book Old Waldorf Bar Days, that the Old Fashioned was invented (or presumably at least named) in the 1880s at the Pendennis Club in Louisville, Kentucky. The great southern writer Irvin S. Cobb said the same in his 1934 recipe book. Granted, there were a few uses of the name prior to the opening of the Pendennis Club, but it is still likely that it was popularized there. The most famous Pendennis Club bartender, Tom Bullock, included the following recipe in his 1917 book, The Ideal Bartender:

OLD FASHION [sic] COCKTAIL
Use a toddy glass.
1 lump of Ice.
1 lump of sugar and dissolve in Water.
1-1/2 jiggers of Bourbon Whiskey.
Twist piece of Lemon Skin over the drink and drop it in. Stir well and serve.

Sadly, the drink was over-garnished during the mid-twentieth century. The muddling of a cherry and an orange slice with the sugar seemed to be the final blow for the original Cocktail. Then, in the 1980s in London, bartender Dick Bradsell created a flamboyant serving method for the Old Fashioned, which he based on a recipe found in David Embury’s Fine Art of Mixing Drinks.

He begins with gum syrup and whiskey, plus an ice cube or two. He stirs. He adds a bit more whiskey. He stirs fervently. He adds more whiskey. He stirs yet again to reach the desired dilution. His Old Fashioned has flavour. It has drama. It has no cherry.

[This article was originally published in German in 2009 in Mixology Magazine.]