Fall is here, and as the leaves turn, I turn to whiskey drinks that, though perfectly appropriate any time of the year, appeal to me particularly when the weather starts getting chilly. Among them are the Manhattan (rye whiskey, sweet vermouth, and bitters), Irish coffee (Irish whiskey, coffee, heavy cream, and sugar), and the drink of Scotch whisky and Drambuie. But I no longer call this latter drink a Rusty Nail — the name trademarked by the Drambuie people. There are far more evocative choices.
The drink has been known by several different names over the years. Rusty Nail is the designation that stuck, even though it is far from the best. That said, Rusty Nail is better than at least one of the drink’s other monikers, the Knucklehead.
One of the early names for the drink, one that had a toehold in the 1940s, was the D&S. An acronym for Drambuie & Scotch, D&S is a name as elegantly simple as it is descriptive.
The drink was a house standard in the late ’40s and through the ’50s at a small, swanky New York restaurant called the Little Club. A Broadway hoofer named Billy Reed opened the pint-sized boite on East 55th Street after the war and had it done up in busy peppermint stripes. The night the club opened in 1947, it featured the “First New York Cafe Appearance” of that “Favorite Thrush of the Younger Set,” Doris Day, who was making her move to become a solo act after a few years singing (and riding the bus with) Les Brown and his Band of Renown. A critic offered this rather faint praise for Doris at the Little Club: She “sings better than most band vocalists.”
Had you been there, enjoying Day’s impeccable singing, you might also have been enjoying a Little Club No. 1 cocktail — Scotch and Drambuie.
I like that name for the drink, but there is one other that I like even better.
The pilots flying against the commies over North Vietnam called the drink a MiG-21. A reference to the jet-jockey preference for the cocktail can be found in William Harrison’s 1969 novel In a Wild Sanctuary. (Harrison, if I may digress, was once a well-regarded novelist who is now all but forgotten. His main legacy is a short story, “Roller Ball Murder,” that was turned into a dystopic film envisioning a future corporatocracy, Rollerball.)
Back to the skies over Vietnam. MiG-21 was a favorite drink for toasting a flier who had flown 100 missions from the Takhli air force base in Thailand. Completing 100 missions was no mean feat, given that the flyers were Wild Weasels — that is, planes that would make themselves targets for North Vietnamese anti-aircraft batteries. Like a rodeo clown taunting a bull, they attracted fire so that the batteries could be spotted and destroyed.
The drink was also a favorite of Sikorsky HH-3E “Jolly Green Giant” helicopter crews. The combat search and rescue boys handed out cards to fliers with instructions on how to be rescued. The cards also read, “The bearer of this card, upon being suitably rescued, agrees to provide free cheer at the nearest bar for those making said rescue possible.”
So, this fall, I will be drinking not Rusty Nails but some MiG-21s. Not only is the name superior by dint of having been used by some of the gutsiest pilots ever to climb into a cockpit, it is, strictly speaking, a more accurate name for the drink as I like it. The Rusty Nail is traditionally equal parts Scotch and Drambuie, which is far too sweet; the MiG-21 dialed back the sweet liqueur, making for a drink three parts whisky and one part Drambuie. Drink it over ice in a rocks glass.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
