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So yesterday, after a grismal (that would be grisly and dismal at once) day at work, I went to a painfully upscale restaurant-bar for a quiet drink and twenty minutes with the new The Sun magazine. I'd been thinking of a beer or maybe a Hendricks G&T, but I ended up getting an Old-Fashioned, and it made me remember how I once (pre-LJ, pre-wikipedia, high days of late-college hubris) used the drink in a fic in a hilariously tone-deaf manner.
An Old-Fashioned is a drink that gives you an idea of how horrible Prohibition-era bathtub spirits must have been. It's bourbon, poured over ice and muddled lemon and/or orange, maraschino cherry, and sugar. Okay, and bitters, but there's a lot of fruit. I would hazard a guess that it's the girliest way there is to drink bourbon.
As a non-drinking twenty-year-old from a family of minimal-drinkers, I had never seen mixed drinks except the ones on menus in Chinese restaurants, and I knew of Old Fashioneds from a Jack Finney novel (The Woodrow Wilson Dime) in which the despairing New York advertising man makes them when he comes home from work. From that, I concluded that they were Serious Drinks for People With Sophisticated Palates, and were more mature and complex than martinis.
So. When I had a scene with a romantic dinner between a retired Navy captain (who in my personal canon had something of an anti-sweet-tooth) and a beautiful-yet-tough-a-la-Katharine-Hepburn multi-doctorate'd scientist... I had the Navy man make them Old-Fashioneds, thinking I was lending a serious-yet-sophisticated scotch-and-soda vibe to the scene, rather than a just-shy-of-paper-umbrellas vibe.
The story is mercifully not available to me right now, so I can't check to see if the disconnect is as obvious in the reading as it is to me in the remembering. But it makes me want to send an email to my younger self to say "psst! honey! get a liquor-picker to go over your stories, or get a cocktail book! ideally both!"
An Old-Fashioned is a drink that gives you an idea of how horrible Prohibition-era bathtub spirits must have been. It's bourbon, poured over ice and muddled lemon and/or orange, maraschino cherry, and sugar. Okay, and bitters, but there's a lot of fruit. I would hazard a guess that it's the girliest way there is to drink bourbon.
As a non-drinking twenty-year-old from a family of minimal-drinkers, I had never seen mixed drinks except the ones on menus in Chinese restaurants, and I knew of Old Fashioneds from a Jack Finney novel (The Woodrow Wilson Dime) in which the despairing New York advertising man makes them when he comes home from work. From that, I concluded that they were Serious Drinks for People With Sophisticated Palates, and were more mature and complex than martinis.
So. When I had a scene with a romantic dinner between a retired Navy captain (who in my personal canon had something of an anti-sweet-tooth) and a beautiful-yet-tough-a-la-Katharine-Hepburn multi-doctorate'd scientist... I had the Navy man make them Old-Fashioneds, thinking I was lending a serious-yet-sophisticated scotch-and-soda vibe to the scene, rather than a just-shy-of-paper-umbrellas vibe.
The story is mercifully not available to me right now, so I can't check to see if the disconnect is as obvious in the reading as it is to me in the remembering. But it makes me want to send an email to my younger self to say "psst! honey! get a liquor-picker to go over your stories, or get a cocktail book! ideally both!"
