Urban Bar: Old Hickory

I turned fifty, quietly and profoundly, in a hotel bar in Solvang, California. It had been a day of special uncorkings in enviable wine cellars, of strolls through cinematic vineyards, of a legendary thick steak at The Hitching Post with no limit on glasses of their exemplary house-bottled Pinot Noir, of a slab of chocolate birthday cake with a candle in it. There had been the usual well-wishes from family and friends. Most of them arrived via social media, which certainly made me feel beloved. But other than my husband, no one remembered that it was a milestone birthday. No one even asked.

Spending the weekend in the Santa Ynez Valley had been my choice even though my birthday is in the dead of winter and John offered to use the timing and the milestone as justification for us to loll around a sunny resort in Hawaii or Mexico or Las Vegas. I write this at the declination of a SoCal summer of golden sunshine and sunburn heat, but winter days are gray and contemplative in Santa Barbara county, and contemplative, if not yet gray, was exactly how I felt last January.

Milestone birthdays are curious mileage markers along the highway of life. For the lucky, childhood birthdays are marked by parties along the way, by paper hats and silly games, by party favors and candles and cake. Milestones are celebrated at the first, the Quinceañera, the sweet sixteenth. Milestone Eighteen is recognized with a voter's card or a draft card, with the first semester away from home or the first full-time job. At twenty-one we can drink (legally); by thirty we have debt. Somewhere in the twenties and thirties, life settles upon us, sometimes with watershed moments, but mostly creeping in as softly as fog. Adulthood is a situation that one day we wake up in.

Thirty is younger than it feels when it happens. Forty is the first true milestone of maturing adulthood. At least it was for me. When I turned forty, I was living in New York City at the top of my game. I had a wonderful mate and we had navigated, survived and could give names to problems that less experienced couples didn't even know existed. I was flourishing in a career at Fortune 500 corporation. I, a kid who grew up in a dusty small town where the Great Depression was still a recent memory, whose first days in the big city were so hardscrabble that I sewed costumes for cash, worked in a skyscraper! Great friends surrounded me in relationships that are still among the most important of my life. I even had a writing career that nicely integrated all of the elements of the good life that I had been blessed with, but also had worked for.

At fifty, it is uncertain if you're old but it is a certainty that you're getting older. No one really knows what to do or how to behave, so either they wait for cues from you or they do nothing at all. What birthday cards arrive make crude jokes about balding pates and bulging waistbands. Party favors feature sickles and tombstones. It all speaks to the uncertainty and weirdness of this particular milestone, not the least of which is how your loved ones try to approach the topic or, just as likely, dodge approaching it at all. Many people turning fifty report depression, but none of my family or friends, including those who work as depression advocates, checked in with me to see how I was doing.

At fifty, we assess where we are, for what we are used to thinking of as the future has manifested, inexplicably, into the now. Often that now is a future we did not envision, which may concurrently be the future we did envision but did not come to pass. The landscape has changed, possibly considerably, hopefully for the better or at least not for the worse. The course of a decade seems like a long time and a long time ago simultaneously. As I sat in that lounge, waiting for John to come back from the bar with refills, the quietude of the winter night and the amber warmth of the flickering fire worked their magic. I realized that, for me, the shock of turning fifty was not that time had passed so quickly as people usually seem to feel, but that so much of it had passed.

During the decade just passed, life and death had become tangible. I had weathered the loss of key people and situations from my life. I had been an ally for my husband as he nursed a parent through a fatal disease. I had survived cancer and, at press time, was still surviving it. I had advanced in both my corporate and writing careers, and through them I had been the breadwinner when my husband went back to school during his own forties. And just as I had been supported by loved ones through my successes and my stumbles, my advances and my retreats, so had I done for them through theirs.

Most significantly, I had navigated a colossal change that I would not, could not ever have guessed would come to pass. John and I had toughed through a year of living apart bicoastally, and that led to the previously unthinkable act of leaving New York City. After twenty-five years as card-carrying New Yorkers, we relocated to Los Angeles. Relocating was a herculean effort in every way from packing up and transporting a household to fathoming that it was really happening, but it was the right decision. It pains me to write it, but New York had changed so significantly during those twenty-five years that the city I loved no longer existed when I left. Excluding lifelong friends, whom I miss every day, when I left, all that I was leaving was a zip code.

Perhaps that is why I wanted to go to Solvang for my fiftieth birthday, even over New York City, which was another option John had offered. I belong in southern California. I am as much a Los Angelino as a palm tree or a taco stand. I play tennis and have blond streaks and socialize on patios. DTLA and Century City provide all of the skyline I need. We have a car! In it, we make our circuits in West Hollywood and Los Feliz and Burbank and Studio City and Glendale. And, when schedules allow, we drive up to the Santa Ynez Valley.

It was appropriate for me to cap my fiftieth birthday in a firelit lounge in Solvang with just my husband and good bourbon for company. While wine country lounges feature de rigeur pours of local wines, they also serve good honest drink. And what I was honestly drinking, on this evening of red oak smoke and the sediment of memory, was an Old Hickory.

The Old Hickory is one of those cocktails that definitive recipes exist for but that bartenders seize upon to craft their signature. The Old Hickory is named after President Andrew Jackson, whose endurance and rough and tumble style earned him the nickname Old Hickory. It is a classic New Orleans cocktail mixed in honor of old Ol' Hickry himself, as it was rumored to be his drink of choice when he was a general during the Battle of New Orleans. The story is unsubstantiated, but the drink is a blend of sweet and dry vermouths cut with bitters and crowned with a lemon peel.

Those classic Old Hickories are still mixed, but as it has matured, the Old Hickory has taken its past self as inspiration for an evolution in its identity. Today's Old Hickory mixes top shelf bourbon with French vermouth in a spin of a classic Manhattan. The hickory comes from smoky bitters, which perfume the drink with the wise old smoke of campfire and cigars.

My fifth decade settled upon me as I sipped an Old Hickory. Though the local wood is red oak, hickory led me through my own history to a fireside in California wine country. Hickory is a sturdy, convoluted hardwood. Its strength sustains everything from sporting equipment to airplanes. Its sweet, pungent smoke is as important to barbecue as is the red oak of the Central Coast. Hickory burns beautifully, but don't throw it into the fire just yet. Old hickories accumulate the past with each new ring of growth, but they build upon it with each new tangle of branches. A healthy tree is always maturing. Old hickories abide, and they endure.

Old Hickory
Old Hickory 1 is the classic New Orleans cocktail. Old Hickory 2 is the contemporary version. I serve Old Hickories over a large block ice cube; click here to learn about large block ice trays.

Old Hickory 1
1 shot premium dry vermouth, such as Dolin or Vya
1 shot premium sweet vermouth, such a Dolin or Vya
Orange Bitters
Peychaud's Bitters
1 lemon

• Place a drop of fruit and vegetable cleanser in your palm. Rub the lemon with the cleaner and rinse the lemon under cool water until the skin feels clean.
• Safely use a peeler or citrus knife to excise a pieces of lemon peel approximately 1 inch in length. Try just to get the lemon peel and none of the bitter white pith underneath.
• Place a large block ice cube into a double old-fashioned glass.
• Place three ice cubes into a bar glass.
• Shake one drop each of orange and Peychaud's bitters over the ice.
• Measure the vermouths into the bar glass.
• Use a bar spoon to stir the cocktail (no shaking) until the cocktail releases its fragrance and the walls of the bar glass become too cold to touch.
• Use a bar strainer to gently pour the cocktail over the large ice cube in the cocktail glass.
• Hold the lemon peel over the glass. Gently twist the lemon peel into a spiral, and drop the lemon twist on top of the drink.
• Serve immediately. 

Old Hickory 2

1 double-shot shot premium bourbon, such as Knob Creek or Maker's Mark
1 shot Maurin Vermouth Rouge
Smoky bitters, such as Fee Brothers Black Walnut or Old Men Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
Preserved Cherries

• Place a large block ice cube into a double old-fashioned glass.
• Place three ice cubes into a bar glass.
• Shake three drops bitters over the ice.
• Measure the bourbon and the vermouth into the glass .
• Use a bar spoon to stir the cocktail (no shaking) until the cocktail releases its fragrance and the walls of the bar glass become too cold to touch.
• Use a bar strainer to gently pour the cocktail over the large ice cube in the cocktail glass.
• Top the drink with a preserved cherry.
• Serve immediately.

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