Cocktail of the Week: The Old Tom Old Fashioned

You don’t need me to tell you that the Old Fashioned has made a roaring comeback. You’ve got lifestyle blogs and magazines illustrated with Mad Men stills for that.

You don’t need me to tell you that the simpler the preparation of your Old Fashioned, the better off you are. You’ve got Old Fashioned 101 for that.

I will say this of the “fruit salad” that used to litter this cocktail: I bought a muddler solely for the purpose of making Old Fashioneds, and I never use it anymore. What a waste of money. On an unrelated note, be sure to pick up my new children’s book Morty The Mournful Muddler, the heartwarming tale of a lonely discarded bar tool that finds redemption through bird watching and community service.

What do you need me to tell you about a drink that’s been analyzed to death? Let me check my notes ... one of David A. Embury’s six basic cocktails ... born in Louisville, Kentucky’s Pendennis Club in the 1880s ... toss in an authentic maraschino cherry if you feel like it ... rye’s really your better option, but you knew that ...

Oh, here you go. Have one with gin. Specifically Old Tom gin.

I’ve raved before about the return of this sweeter variety of gin, closer to the pre-Prohibition incarnation of the spirit. Ransom Old Tom is barrel-aged, resulting in a highly distinctive taste that’s a bit like gin, a bit like whiskey, and very much its own. It makes for a satisfying Old Fashioned, lighter than one made with brown liquor.

A rare warm day put me in the mood for one, so I stopped by the Zig Zag Café. I asked stalwart bartender Ben Perri for an Old Tom Old Fashioned, and he stalwartly asked which brand I preferred, Ransom or Hayman’s. I was poised to reply Ransom, but hesitated. Hayman’s, a U.K. product based on an archival recipe, has become a Chez K staple, my go-to for a Tom Collins. But I’d never considered it in an Old Fashioned. It’s closer to London dry gin, and far sweeter. I was torn, and did what I always do when faced with such conundrums: I asked my bartender for his opinion.

Ben said both make excellent, very different Old Fashioneds. His default choice for Old Tom was Hayman’s, because it was a) English, where Old Tom came from, and b) more gin-like in flavor.

I was torn. Ransom seemed a better fit for an Old Fashioned, but it always tasted like Ransom. The prospect of Hayman’s intrigued, but it was already fairly sweet. What’s a smart man to do?

I have no idea. I only know what I would do, and that’s have Ben make both versions so I could subject them to an on-the-spot taste test.

During this preparatory phase, a dark horse came onto the track. Ben pointed out that Dutch genever, the rich juniper liquor that was an original Old Tom contemporary, is available again from Bols – and is also well-suited to the Old Fashioned. What the hell, said I, let’s have one of those, too. I’m nothing if not thorough. Thus, when Rosemarie arrived at the bar to find multiple cocktails, pony glasses and bottles before me, I got to utter the three words that have been a refrain throughout our marriage: “I can explain.” At least she got to participate in the experiment as well.

The result was a three-way photo finish. There were no losers that night, only winners, with me the biggest winner of all. Ben was right about Hayman’s. Its sweetness was no impediment, Ben’s rendition of the drink beautifully balanced. It took the title by a nose over the Bols genever, which held the middle ground between a more classic gin style and the robust iconoclasm of Ransom. I’ve made Old Fashioneds with Hayman’s since, but still find myself craving the idiosyncratic notes present only with Ransom. I’m not worried, though. I’ve got all summer to wrestle with the problem.

Old Tom Old Fashioned

2 oz. Old Tom gin
¼ oz. simple syrup
3 dashes Angostura bitters

Stir. Strain into an Old Fashioned glass over ice. Garnish with a nice, thick lemon peel and a cherry for old times’ sake. Don’t let your muddler see what you’re doing. You’ll hurt its feelings.

Cocktail of the Week: The Stork Club

Swells of all stripes, denizens from every destination demimonde, regularly assembled at the Stork Club. Columnist Walter Winchell, who had his own table there, dubbed the East 53rd Street nightspot “New York’s New Yorkiest place.” The club was the domain of former bootlegger Sherman Billingsley, who started the joint with the not-entirely-secret backing of organized crime figures and bought them out after some minor difficulties including his being kidnapped by their rival Mad Dog Coll. In his history Gangsters & Gold Diggers, Jerome Charyn brands Billingsley “a nebbish from Enid, Oklahoma” and “a snob” who cribbed everything he knew about the nightlife business from legendary hostess Texas Guinan – except for her democratic attitude toward her guests. Billingsley could only abide the rubbing of A-list elbows, and his velvet rope mindset helped to make him a celebrity in his own right; he turns up as a character in the Betty Hutton comedy set in his club as well as the novel The Murder in the Stork Club written by Laura author Vera Caspary, and hosted a TV show in the 1950s.

1946 saw the publication of The Stork Club Bar Book, penned by society journalist, clotheshorse and gourmand Lucius Beebe, who coined the term “café society.” I don’t have a copy of Beebe’s book, but reports indicate it includes the recipe for the club’s namesake cocktail and credits it to the Stork’s service captain Eddie Whittmer. I do have Dale DeGroff’s The Craft of the Cocktail, in which he hails chief barman Nathaniel Cook as the drink’s champion.

There’s a hint of the speakeasy about this drink owing simply to the amount of orange juice; during Prohibition, many a bad batch of gin was made palatable with an abundance of citrus. Then again the Bronx cocktail, also heavy on the OJ, predates the Stork Club and Prohibition by many years. There’s also some similarity in terms of ingredients to the Pegu Club.

That big jolt of juice pushes the Stork Club into its own spotlight. It’s a show biz level of excess, the kind of flash Billingsley himself no doubt appreciated. It gives the cocktail a bouncy buoyancy that would play well at brunch. The original recipe called for the juice of half an orange, which is typically read as one ounce. The same recipe also uses gin but I substituted the sweeter and more substantial Old Tom variety, which matched up better with the citrus. Sip this cocktail and you can pretend you’re a Stork Club regular like J. Edgar Hoover, who probably never drank one of these.

The Stork Club

1 ½ oz. gin (Old Tom if it’s available)
1 oz. orange juice
½ oz. Cointreau
¼ oz. lime juice
dash of Angostura bitters

Shake. Strain. Garnish with an orange twist.

Cocktail of the Week: The Tom Collins

Maybe it’s the drink’s name that accounts for its decline in popularity. Tom Collins. It’s an actual name, like Shirley Temple, and we all know what that means. No booze.

The irony is that the Tom Collins isn’t named after a real person. Except that it is. Cocktail historian David Wondrich, in his book Imbibe!, traces the drink back to some doggerel composed by descendants of the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. It venerated one John Collins, a waiter at a London hotel famed for its gin punch. That concoction made its way to America, odds are brought here by British soldiers. But the drink that turns up in “Professor” Jerry Thomas’ canonical 1876 Bar-Tender’s Guide is a Tom Collins. The reason why is most likely an unrelated craze that swept the nation, as crazes are wont to do, two years earlier. You meet a friend, ask him if he knows “Tom Collins,” and when he says no – unless he does know a Tom Collins; then I suppose the bit falls apart – you say, “Well, he knows you, and he was just around the corner sullying your good name!” Hilarity allegedly ensues when your friend goes, to use one of my mother’s favorite words, gallivanting all over town.

I know times were simpler then. But honestly? I’d rather watch the Kardashians than put up with that kind of crap. And I hate the Kardashians.

I like to think some enterprising barkeep served this drink to every benighted fool who stumbled into his tavern in search of phantom malefactors. The sheer simplicity of the recipe, probably not far removed from John Collins’ original U.K. rendition, is one of the reasons why the Tom Collins was for decades among the most popular of cocktails. It’s also a remarkably adaptable one, suited to any base spirit since in essence it’s your basic sour. Make it with bourbon and you have a Colonel Collins. Irish whiskey and it’s a Michael Collins. Scotch is Joe, rum is Pedro, rye is ... hell, I don’t know, Cletus.

What ultimately hurt the Tom Collins was the era of convenience. Many bars began relying on ready-made Collins mixes, some of them, God help us, in powdered form. Shades of The Simpsons episode in which Bart and his buddies venture into neighboring Shelbyville to recover their stolen lemon tree. Egghead Martin Prince, drunk on camaraderie, braces a kid with his own beverage stand who says, “This is Country Time lemonade mix. There’s never been anything close to a lemon in it, I swear!” It’s one of those time-savers that’s no savings at all.

David A. Embury, in The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, says of the Tom Collins: “This is a long drink, to be consumed slowly and with reverence and meditation.” He also observes that, “strictly speaking, a Tom Collins is not a Tom Collins unless it is made with Old Tom gin.” (Another reason, perhaps, for the drink’s Stateside rechristening.)

I have rhapsodized before about the miracle that is the now-available-again Old Tom gin. And I am here to tell you, brothers and sisters, that Reverend Embury is right on all counts. I have had a Tom Collins made with London dry gin. And I can testify that a Tom Collins prepared with Old Tom is a different beast entirely. The fuller, sweeter flavor not only gives the drink a spine but a body. Made for languorous afternoons, this traditional version belongs on any list of classic summer coolers. I’d put it ahead of the Dark and Stormy (dark rum and ginger beer) and just behind the Caipirinha (the national cocktail of Brazil, and who’d know better about cooling drinks?). Don’t listen to what other people are saying about you. The dog days are coming. And once you have a Tom Collins done right, you’ll pray for temperatures to rise.

The Tom Collins

2 oz. Old Tom gin
¾ oz. lemon juice
½ oz. simple syrup
2 oz. club soda

Shake the first three ingredients with ice. Strain into a tall chilled glass filled with ice. Add club soda. Garnish with a cherry and a lemon or orange wheel. If you’re making it with London dry gin, increase (read: double) the amount of simple syrup to taste.

Cocktail of the Week: The Martinez

During a conversation with a friend about cocktails – I have these conversations a lot – I relayed a theory put forth by Washington Post spirits columnist Jason Wilson. Namely, that “many Americans end up drinking what they enjoyed in high school or college” because of “the visceral experience of memory,” the familiar flavor conjuring up the good old days. I’ve found that the opposite is also true; people will avoid a beverage with negative connotations from their past, be it poor quality or, ahem, youthful excess.

“That’s why I can’t drink gin,” my friend said. “I never got over thinking it tasted like Scotch tape.” I love gin, and even I have to admit I see what my friend’s talking about.

For decades, gin didn’t taste like Scotch tape at all. What’s consumed now under the name would have been unrecognizable to pre-Prohibition tipplers. Gin then came in two styles: the lightly sweetened Old Tom and the richer Dutch genever. In cocktail historian David Wondrich’s essential 2007 book Imbibe!, he lamented the latter’s absence from the American marketplace and the fact that Old Tom’s taste could only be approximated by adding gum syrup to Tanqueray.

A mere five years later, genever is again available Stateside and several enterprising distillers have painstakingly recreated Old Tom gin. Ransom Spirits in Oregon even had Wondrich serve as a consultant. Rosemarie and I had a chance to sample it a while back and finally splurged on a bottle.

It took a while to crack the wax seal; ultimately I put the bottle in an apple crate with a rabid wolverine and stood guard. But the reward was worth the effort. Ransom Old Tom gin is slightly aged and made with malted barley as its base, giving it a dense taste and viscosity more akin to whiskey than contemporary London dry gins. Several bartenders suggested using it in traditional bourbon cocktails, with no less an authority than Murray Stenson telling me it makes a killer Old Fashioned. But the liquor also retains the becoming splash of botanicals that gin drinkers expect. It’s still a guess as to whether gin really tasted like this in 1885; in those days gin would have tasted completely different in saloons one block apart. But this replication is deeply satisfying.

My first experiment with the Old Tom was the Martinez. This predecessor of the Martini has a convoluted history and a host of more current variations that I’ve never tried. I held out for the original, cited in both O. H. Byron’s 1884 Modern Bartenders Guide and “Professor” Jerry Thomas’ Bar-Tenders’ Guide (1887): Old Tom gin, Italian vermouth, maraschino and bitters. (OK, it’s not the original original. That recipe calls for Boker’s Bitters, which like Old Tom vanished from the earth to be reconstituted a century or so later, but only in the U.K. And I didn’t go with equal parts gin and vermouth – or even with the alternate suggestion of a 2:1 ratio of vermouth to gin, because I had Old Tom. If I can taste history, I want it front and center.)

The resulting cocktail doesn’t just have a big, bold flavor. It has the kind of flavor that pulls a leather wing chair closer to the fire and settles in for a long evening. And it packs a punch like a lead weight in a feather pillow. The use of sweet vermouth and bitters makes it a kissing cousin to the Manhattan; in truth, despite its history it would appeal more to partisans of that drink than the Martini. I prefer to think of it as a bridge between those twin titans of the cocktail world. It may not be for everyone, but it’s certainly for me.

The Martinez (variation)

2 oz. Ransom Old Tom gin
1 oz. sweet vermouth
¼ oz. maraschino
2 dashes Fee Brothers old fashion aromatic bitters

Stir. Strain. Garnish with a lemon twist.