Old Fashioneds, page 2
26 recipes, page 2 of 2
Base Spirit
Difficulty Level
Whisky Mac
The Whisky Mac is Britain’s medicinal handshake: Scotch and green ginger wine at two to one, named by tradition for Colonel Hector Macdonald of the Raj, and prescribed against cold, damp and golf since the Victorian bottles first met. No ice historically, and no garnish ever. The build is the two-bottle canon at its most direct. The ginger wine’s fermented fire and raisin sweetness fold into malt as though the two had been cellared together, which in British households they effectively were. The ratio flexes with the weather: two to one as standard, equal parts for a genuine emergency. It sits in the ginger-and-whisky wing beside the Presbyterian’s dry sparkle, offering fortified intimacy where that one offers length, and it is the reason a bottle of green ginger wine is worth buying at the first cold snap and finishing before spring. Nobody drinks one in July, which is not a limitation so much as the whole design: a drink with a season, poured for weather that Britain reliably supplies.
White Russian
The White Russian is the Black Russian’s creamier child, appearing in print by 1965 as the era’s dinner-party update of the Brussels original: vodka, coffee liqueur and a float of cream, with dessert and nightcap negotiating in one rocks glass. It spent the health-conscious decades in exile, remembered as a period piece. Then 1998 happened. The Big Lebowski gave the drink to the Dude, who mixes White Russians with whatever is to hand throughout the film, and the cocktail became a cult object: ordered in his honour nightly ever since, half-ironically at first and then simply because it is very good. Built properly it justifies the devotion. The cream is floated rather than stirred, so the drink starts black and finishes white, marbling as it goes. It is the gentlest landing the coffee-vodka family offers, and the right call when an evening wants something that behaves like a dessert without quite being one.