Fancy Free
4.2 450 ratings
Ingredients
How to make
Serve in a old-fashioned glass
Prepare
- 1 Select and pre-chill an OLD-FASHIONED GLASS.
- 2 Prepare garnish of orange zest twist.
Method
- 3 STIR all ingredients with ice.
- 4 STRAIN into ice-filled glass (preferably over a large cube or chunk of block ice).
Garnish
- 5 EXPRESS orange zest twist over the cocktail and use as garnish.
Flavour profile
33.6% alc./vol. · 1.8 standard drinks · 179 calories
History
Aromatised, tamed bourbon with complex maraschino notes. Essentially a Whiskey Old Fashioned with maraschino replacing sugar syrup. Surprisingly dry, aided by generous dashes of orange and aromatic bitters.
The earliest known mention of the Fancy Free is found within Crosby Gaige's 1940 publication, Cocktail Guide and Ladies' Companion. Fancy Free 1 jigger Fine Arts Whiskey Dash of Angostura Bitters Dash of Orange Bitters 2 dashes Maraschino Frost the rim of a cocktail glass with lemon juice and fine sugar. Shake the ingredients with ice and strain into prepared glass. As this extract shows, the Fancy Free began life as a shaken drink served in a stemmed cocktail glass with a sugar-frosted rim. This is also how the drink was first encountered in the 1990s. However, contemporary bartenders have adapted this cocktail into an "improved" Old Fashioned, where "improved" signifies the substitution of maraschino liqueur for sugar syrup. Consequently, the stemmed glass and sugared rim have been abandoned in favor of a stirred, on-the-rocks, old-fashioned style of preparation.
Created by Crosby Gaige