by Rishidev Chaudhuri
The making of cocktails often falls unhappily into one of two extremes. If you have previously been subjected to the sickly sweet frozen neon drinks, so beloved of chain restaurants and a certain kind of tourist, you probably think of cocktail making as a base practice that strikes terror into the heart of anyone remotely fond of alcohol. On the other hand, with the modern cocktail revival, it seems easy to be forced up against a bewildering variety of obscure ingredients and cacophonous combinations, surrounded by a subculture presided over by self-important bartenders. The making of cocktails is an art, true, but it is quite easy to make good cocktails at home, cocktails that are faithful to alcohol (rather than trying to disguise it) and that at the same time are simple to make and do not require the memorization of entire recipe books.
There are general principles underlying many mixed drinks, and understanding them makes making and drinking them a lot more fun. Like those underlying any good explanation, these principles are both structural and historical and, of course, structures are historical entities as much as history unfolds within structural confines. All this is to say that this is one possible means of making sense of mixed drinks, but one that hopes to cut reality at some set of natural-seeming joints.
Historically, the cocktail was a combination of liquor, sugar and bitters (and was preceded by a sling, which was a combination of liquor and sugar) and, while the modern cocktail is generally more complex than this, this formulation already gives us structural insight. The Old-Fashioned is a straight-forward instantiation of this principle: take rye or bourbon, a little sugar or simple syrup and a few dashes of bitters and mix them together. Why? At the very least, mixed drinks add a new discursive dimension to alcohol and, like with sex or politics, talking about drinking is almost as much fun as drinking. But there’s much more. Even this simple combination tastes surprisingly good. The sugar, as long as it isn’t enough to overpower, rounds out and softens the alcohol, and the bitters give a herbal complexity and depth. This is admittedly vague and, if you haven’t tried this before, you should compare a rye and sugar drink against an Old-Fashioned and you’ll see what I mean. Even if you have, if the ingredients are available, make one up and sip it while you read this.