Where the cocktail actually comes from

In 1806 a reader wrote to The Balance and Columbian Repository, a newspaper in Hudson, New York, asking what a 'cock-tail' was. The editor's reply defined it as a stimulating liquor composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water and bitters. That is the template: spirit, sugar, water, bitters — what we would now call an Old Fashioned.

The definition matters because it is specific. A cocktail was not originally any mixed drink; it was one particular category among many — slings, juleps, punches, flips, cobblers — that happened to be the one whose name generalised. When people say the Old Fashioned is the original cocktail, this is what they mean, and unusually for drinks history it is broadly right.

Jerry Thomas's How to Mix Drinks, or The Bon-Vivant's Companion appeared in 1862 and is the first substantial printed collection of drink recipes in English. It is the reason we know what mid-nineteenth-century American bars were actually serving rather than having to reconstruct it.

It also shows how much of the modern repertoire did not yet exist. There is no Martini as we would recognise it and no Daiquiri; there is a great deal of punch, and a Blue Blazer involving setting whisky on fire and pouring it between two mugs. The canon we treat as timeless is mostly later than people assume.

Explanations for the word include docked horses' tails, a mixed-breed horse, the dregs of a barrel, a French egg-cup called a coquetier, and a tavern-keeper's daughter. Each of these is repeated in print regularly. None has contemporary evidence behind it.

The honest position is that the etymology is unknown. That is unsatisfying, which is precisely why so many confident alternatives circulate.