On the Martini

     One of my favorite subjects is liquor. And, with a few in me, I’ll run on and on about it at amazing length. Sometimes to the point of sending my audience running, politely, to the other end of the bar or party. But from time to time I’ll find a willing listener or I’ll be posed an actual question.

     Often it’s a form of this one: “What’s the toughest drink to make?”. Or, and only slightly less complicated to answer: “What is your favorite drink?”

     As a bar tender for the better part of ten years I’ve thought about this at great length and have decided that the cocktail should be viewed more as an artistic endeavour and less like a recipe. Which means that the process is as important as the end result or that there should be artistry in it’s creation. Beyond the pomp of the classically trained bar man’s flare and flourish, the steps and components should be chosen with an eye to both form and function.

     So lets look at the Martini, the undisputed king of the American cocktail. With a glut of material on the subject I’d be a fool to think that anything I could add here hasn’t already been covered. So we’ll be using it as an example and a patch of common ground. I live about two miles from the bronze and field stone marker that proclaims Martinez California the birth place of the “Martinez Special”. It claims that in 1874, Julio Richelieu made the first in his saloon for a miner with “a fistful of (gold) nuggets” and that it contained 2/3 gin, 1/3 vermouth and a dash of orange bitters, was served over crushed ice and garnished with an olive. Which, in my opinion, makes it closer to a high ball than what we think of now as a Martini. And since that time the great debate has continued to raged over how to make a “proper” Martini.

     It’s W. Churchill that gets credit for the old saw ” give me a glass of ice cold gin and show it to a bottle of vermouth “. And the subject of the amount of actual Vermouth in the drink is also the point of  Hemingway’s calling for “Montgomery(s)”, which is a version that’s 15:1 gin to vermouth. So named because those were the odds Field Marshal Montgomery wanted before committing to a battle. I’ve adopted, to much compliment, a version that’s traceable to a recipe from the 1955 play Auntie Mame, where a drop of vermouth is swirled in the serving glass and then thrown out. Sometimes a chilled martini glass is no where to be found so I usually put the drop into the glass with ice and water, let it chill while I shake the gin vigorously and then toss the ice water before straining the gin and serving. This “glass flavoring” looks sloppy and redundant when making the drink “over (ice)” so I try to steer the drinker away from such a choice.

     The point is, the hardest drink to make is the one so mired in version and opinion that every one you set on the bar will be compared to every other one set there yesterday, today and tomorrow. The hard part is having the experience to understand this and the confidence not to care. With cocktails like this it’s much more important to serve it consistently every time with the only changes being adjustments made by the patron.  Sometimes it’s just easier to have a beer. Just tip like it came in stem ware and by the grease of the bar tender’s elbow.