“No cocktail (and this includes the martini) gets people as worked up about methodology as the old-fashioned. And that’s probably because the two major approaches really are quite different. One is starkly minimalist, prescribing nothing more than sugar, whiskey and bitters — maybe a few teardrops’ worth of water, maybe a twist of orange or lemon to finish it off. Like Hayworth, it’s streamlined, it’s today (even if it is one of the oldest cocktails on record). It’s certainly not the old-fashioned I was taught to make at a bar in small-town Vermont in the early 1990s. There, the first time a customer ordered the drink from me, I skulked over to the manager to ask what to do. She plonked a sugar cube, a slice of orange and a cherry in a glass, dug what looked like a small nightstick out of a drawer, handed it to me as if I had any idea what to do with it and told me to add whiskey, Angostura bitters and ice. I did figure out what to do with the muddler, and that drink — the sweet and fruity, eager-to-please, raised among the grasshoppers, strictly from corn, boisterous version — instantly became my old-fashioned.”

– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/magazine/the-great-old-fashioned-debate.html?ref=todayspaper