The first scene of the first episode of Mad Men opens with Don Draper sitting at a bar. He is studying his waiter. He is thinking about something.
«Old Fashioned, please.»
An order that is not a detail, as nothing in that extraordinary series ever is.
The Old Fashioned is the simplest cocktail that exists: sugar, bitters, whiskey, ice, an orange peel. Four ingredients, five if you want to be precise about the water. The first written reference to the word "cocktail" in 1806 defines it as "a potent concoction of spirit, bitters, water and sugar." Two hundred and twenty years later, the recipe is almost the same. In a world where every bar proposes its own smoked, spiced or artisanally iced variation, the Old Fashioned resists in perfect stillness. Nomen omen, one might say.
A drink, a character, an overlap
Mad Men aired from 2007 to 2015, seven seasons, ninety-two episodes, Madison Avenue in the 1960s. It is the series that told the story of American advertising cynicism better than any academic essay, and did so through a man whose past is a lie built brick by brick. Don Draper does not exist: Dick Whitman exists, a man who stole the identity of a fellow soldier killed in war to become someone else. Someone with more style, more power, more future. (Minor spoiler, but the series ended ten years ago and this detail alone will not ruin it for you.)
The Old Fashioned, in this context, is not a simple prop. It is the drink of a man who prefers things as they were, or at least as he imagines them to have been. It is the drink of someone who builds his identity on an idealised version of the past and defends it against everything that threatens to unravel it.
In the third season, episode "My Old Kentucky Home", Don Draper steps behind an empty bar and makes two Old Fashioneds. Sugar cubes, Angostura, maraschino cherries, an orange wedge, rye whiskey stirred with ice in a separate mixing glass and then poured into the glasses. This is the scene that set bartenders across the world arguing about the "right way" to make an Old Fashioned. But the scene is not a mixology lesson so much as a scene of seduction.
American whiskey, American dream
Whiskey is the most American spirit that exists. It comes from grain, from corn, from the frontier. In Mad Men it becomes something more: it is the symbolic blood of capitalism, the lifeblood of the American dream. It is drunk in the office, at business lunches, to celebrate and to console, to seal deals and to forget them. In the world of Sterling Cooper, drinking marks a power dynamic: who pours and who receives, who holds the glass with the same composure from the first drink to the fifth and who betrays cracks by the second.
The Old Fashioned is Don Draper's drink because it is, of all of them, the one that hides least. It has no fruit juices, no sweet liqueurs, nothing to soften the blow. The whiskey comes through completely. Only a man who has built his security on solid foundations, or who at least wants to appear so, orders an Old Fashioned in public without hesitation.
In drinking it, Don Draper celebrates and deceives himself at the same time: he celebrates an identity he has constructed, he fools himself into believing that construction is real. The drink is sweet and bitter, exactly like the fiction that contains it.
The history of the Old Fashioned (and of the glass)
The Old Fashioned takes its name from the glass it is served in, not the other way around. The cocktail was born in the second half of the nineteenth century as a reaction to the proliferation of increasingly elaborate variations on the basic whiskey cocktail: liqueurs, curaçao, absinthe. At some point customers began asking for the drink "the old-fashioned way", and the name stuck.
The first documented recipe by name dates to 1888, in Chicago. But the concept had been in circulation for at least a decade before that. The myth of the Pendennis Club in Louisville as the place of invention, often cited, was contradicted by history: the Chicago Daily Tribune was already discussing "old fashioned cocktails" in 1880, a year before the club even opened.
Prohibition did damage here too: with the scarcity of quality whiskey, recipes began adding muddled fruit, maraschino cherries, orange, even soda water, to mask poor flavours. The version Don Draper makes in the series is the post-Prohibition one, with fruit, faithful to the era in which the story is set. The version served in contemporary cocktail bars tends to be more essential: sugar or syrup, Angostura, whiskey, orange peel. No muddled fruit, no soda. The debate among bartenders has never quite closed.
Mad Men, the revival, the rankings
In 2007, when Mad Men first aired, the Old Fashioned was in a kind of limbo. Not forgotten, but not exactly at the centre of attention. Mad Men brought the Old Fashioned back into circulation with a force that few advertising campaigns could have matched, which has its own irony given what the series is about.
The close-up of Don Draper sipping the cocktail became one of the most replicated memes on the internet. Drinks International declared the Old Fashioned the most ordered classic cocktail in the world for six consecutive years from 2014. In 2015 Kentucky named it the official cocktail of the state.
A character who does not exist revived the oldest drink in the American repertoire. There is something perfectly coherent in this, for those who watched the series to the end.
How to make the Old Fashioned
The current IBA recipe calls for the following:
45 ml bourbon or rye whiskey, one sugar cube, a few dashes of Angostura bitters, a few drops of water.
Method: muddle the sugar with the bitters and water in the glass, add ice, pour in the whiskey, stir gently. Orange twist over the glass, optionally a cocktail cherry.
Bourbon or rye: beyond taking sides, bourbon is sweeter and rounder, rye is drier and spicier. The "My Old Kentucky Home" scene is set in Kentucky and Don uses rye, a curious choice noted by every commentator. Perhaps that was what he had to hand. Or perhaps the details in Mad Men are never entirely innocent.
The glass: low, heavy, the rocks glass. It is also called an Old Fashioned glass. Everything comes full circle.