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The "cocktail" found its place in literary history in 1806 in the May 6 issue of The Balance and Columbia Repository being defined to a confused reader by the editor as "Cock-tail, then is a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water and bitters. It is vulgarly called a bittered sling...". Over the next thirty years or so, this definition became the "Old Fashioned" cocktail and was more of a way to make a drink than just a name for one. Taken by definition, if you use just those ingredients, you can make a Gin Old Fashioned, a Tequila Old Fashioned and so on. There was never any fruit or club soda involved in the original definition. That version seemed to pop up somewhere after Prohibition. Being the "back to basics" kind of guy I am, I don't use fruit or club soda in my Old Fashioned either.
