An Old Fashioned With Fernet

The first of many Old Fashioneds.

For the next several weeks, we are going to make Old Fashioneds. 

After all, the fundamental template—spirit, sugar, bitters—is so flexible that almost everything can be an Old Fashioned. And around this time of year, I often wonder if everything should be.

We’re not going to make just any Old Fashioneds, either. Rather, we are going to make Old Fashioneds that stretch the formula, either by adding an ingredient to the template or by making an unexpected substitution. 

These are Old Fashioneds—and just a little bit more. 

To kick things off, we’re going to make a Toronto, a minor classic that dates back about a century. It’s essentially a rye whiskey Old Fashioned but with some bitter, herbal, peppermint-tinged Fernet-Branca. It’s bracing, brooding, and bitterly complex. And it shows how big a difference even a small addition to the Old Fashioned template can make.

Even in its most palatable forms, it’s an aggressive cocktail, with an intensity that might put off some drinkers. The Toronto probably won’t be for everyone. 

For a while, it wasn’t even for me. 

It took me a long time to come around to Fernet—to its grumpy, black jelly bean, dare-you-to-like-me, gothic weirdness. What the hell was this stuff? Why did people like it? It seemed like an affectation, a put-on, not a real pleasure. I didn’t get it. I was not a Fernet Guy. Not initially.

During the time I was trying to understand Fernet’s appeal, I asked bartenders to make me drinks that might change my mind about Fernet. I had a few Torontos, none of which sold me on the stuff, at least not at first.

Yet as I came to appreciate Fernet, I also came to appreciate and even enjoy the Toronto, especially during cooler weather. 

And a big part of my appreciation came from coming to understand that the Toronto is, in fact, an Old Fashioned. 

Not everyone classifies it that way. As the Liquor.com entry on the drink notes. “depending who you ask, the Toronto is either a variation on the Manhattan or the Old Fashioned. Some of the early versions I tried treated it more like a slightly odd, extra-bitter, menthol-forward Manhattan. 

You can see why. It’s built on a base of rye whiskey. It’s named for a large North American city. It must be a Manhattan-like, right? 

Wrong—wrong conceptually, wrong historically, and wrong in the glass. 

The Toronto is an Old Fashioned with added Fernet. Treating it this way yields a superior drink, one that might even win over a few Fernet skeptics. (Yes, I know you’re out there.) 

So this week we are going to look briefly at the history of the Toronto, and my favorite, slightly unusual way to make it. 

Class(ification) Act

The earliest iteration of the drink we now know as the Toronto appeared in Robert Vermeire’s 1922 book Cocktails: How to Mix Them under a different name, as the Fernet Cocktail.

But my own sense of the drink was formed mostly by this newsletter’s favorite mid-century cocktailian, David Embury, in his 1940s-era home cocktail guide, The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks. 

Embury’s great contribution to the study of cocktails was the idea of classification, and his entry on the Toronto leaves no doubt as to how he understood its place in mixed drink taxonomy.