Old Pal

Rye whiskey, dry vermouth, and Campari — MacElhone's 1927 Barflies and Cocktails, the rye-based counterpart to the Negroni, using dry instead of sweet vermouth.

The Old Pal is a Prohibition-era cocktail created by William "Sparrow" Robinson, the American sports editor of the New York Herald Tribune, who spent time in Paris during the 1920s and shared the recipe with Harry MacElhone. It was published in MacElhone's Barflies and Cocktails (1927), one of the key Prohibition-era bartending guides produced in Paris, where American expatriates gathered in bars including Harry's New York Bar on Rue Daunou. The Old Pal combines rye whiskey with dry vermouth and Campari in equal parts — a construction that positions it as a rye-based counterpart to the Negroni (which uses gin instead of rye), though the Negroni uses sweet rather than dry vermouth, producing meaningfully different drinks despite the structural similarity. Campari, the Italian bitter aperitivo created by Gaspare Campari in Milan in 1860, provides the same bitter citrus backbone in the Old Pal that it provides in the Negroni, but the combination with dry vermouth's herbal astringency and rye whiskey's grain spice creates a drink that is drier, more angular, and more austere than the Negroni's rounded bittersweet character. The name reflects the casual bar democracy of the Prohibition era.