From the 1850s to the 1870s the Brandy Cocktail was America’s favourite drink, perhaps nowhere more so than in that greatest of all great drinking cities, New Orleans. The stimulating mixture of brandy, sugar, and bitters was the choice de jour for millions of Americans enjoying the dawn of the Gilded Age, a time when new-found wealth, the arrival of the railroads, the spread of industrialisation, and a gigantic influx of, mostly European, immigrants, invented, constructed and forged modern America.

The Old Fashioned wasn’t always called the Old Fashioned, and why would it be, when all around it the mixed drinks of the era had startling names like The Morning Glory Fizz, The Flash of Lightning, and The Stars and Stripes?

Compared to these the prosaically-named Old Fashioned sounded a bit, well, old fashioned, and with good reason, because by 1888 when we find the earliest recipe for an Old Fashioned Cocktail, the drink itself was already something of a relic from the past.