The Up-To-Date is over a hundred years old, but it’s such a perfect portrait of the state of cocktail trends today. We’ve been falling all over ourselves declaring sherry The Next Big Thing in cocktails, but here it is with rye, orange curaçao and bitters, looking like it just walked out of the hottest cocktail bar in town rather than 1916’s Recipes for Mixed Drinks.
This is a flexible drink template – swap bourbon for rye, sweet sherry for the original’s Amontillado, or trick it out with orange or cherry bitters instead of the de-rigueur Angostura aromatic bitters.
Like many vintage spirit-forward cocktails, the Up-to-Date is a strong drink! It benefits from being well-stirred – a solid minute is good. It’s also best served in a very small, very cold glass. We keep a few chilled glasses in the Test Kitchen freezer for drinks like this.
