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| While variations are many, a standard modern martini is a 5 to 1 ratio, made by combining approximately two and a half ounces of ] and one half ounce of dry ] with ]. Many Europeans, however, prefer somewhat less vermouth — about a 6:1 proportion of gin/vodka to vermouth. Because ] mixes easily and uniformly with its solvent (gin or vodka), a martini should always be mixed in a stirring glass. Many bartending schools insist that a beverage shaker tends to dull the taste of the ], and some argue that it sharpens the taste of gin by "bruising" the liquid. However, it is relatively common to see a bartender mix a martini with a shaker due in part to the influence of superspy ], who asked for his martinis "shaken, not stirred." This may be attributed to the fact that Bond drank vodka martinis and not gin martinis. The ingredients are mixed then strained and served "straight up" (without ice) in a chilled ], and garnished with either an ] or a twist (a strip of ] peel, usually squeezed or twisted to express volatile citric oils onto the surface of the drink). | While variations are many, a standard modern martini is a 5 to 1 ratio, made by combining approximately two and a half ounces of ] and one half ounce of dry ] with ]. Many Europeans, however, prefer somewhat less vermouth — about a 6:1 proportion of gin/vodka to vermouth. Because ] mixes easily and uniformly with its solvent (gin or vodka), a martini should always be mixed in a stirring glass. Many bartending schools insist that a beverage shaker tends to dull the taste of the ], and some argue that it sharpens the taste of gin by "bruising" the liquid. However, it is relatively common to see a bartender mix a martini with a shaker due in part to the influence of superspy ], who asked for his martinis "shaken, not stirred." This may be attributed to the fact that Bond drank vodka martinis and not gin martinis. The ingredients are mixed then strained and served "straight up" (without ice) in a chilled ], and garnished with either an ] or a twist (a strip of ] peel, usually squeezed or twisted to express volatile citric oils onto the surface of the drink). | ||
| The ] martini is a very new invention, along with ] and ] martinis. The pomegranate martini is easy to prepare: 1.5 ounces of ] with 2.5 ounces of pure pomegranate juice. This martini is an invention of ]. | |||
| While the standard martini may call for a 5:1 ratio of distilled spirits to vermouth, many aficionados may reduce the proportion of vermouth drastically. This gave rise to stories such as martinis being made by just passing the cork of the vermouth bottle above the glass. | While the standard martini may call for a 5:1 ratio of distilled spirits to vermouth, many aficionados may reduce the proportion of vermouth drastically. This gave rise to stories such as martinis being made by just passing the cork of the vermouth bottle above the glass. | ||
Revision as of 02:28, 10 November 2006
The martini is a cocktail traditionally made with gin and dry white vermouth, though in recent years substituting vodka for gin has become more popular than the original recipe. Over the years, the martini has become perhaps the most well-known mixed alcoholic beverage. H. L. Mencken once called the martini "the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet" and E. B. White called it "the elixir of quietude." It is also the proverbial drink of the one-time "three-martini lunch" of business executives, now largely abandoned as part of companies' "fitness for duty" programs.
While variations are many, a standard modern martini is a 5 to 1 ratio, made by combining approximately two and a half ounces of gin and one half ounce of dry vermouth with ice. Many Europeans, however, prefer somewhat less vermouth — about a 6:1 proportion of gin/vodka to vermouth. Because vermouth mixes easily and uniformly with its solvent (gin or vodka), a martini should always be mixed in a stirring glass. Many bartending schools insist that a beverage shaker tends to dull the taste of the vermouth, and some argue that it sharpens the taste of gin by "bruising" the liquid. However, it is relatively common to see a bartender mix a martini with a shaker due in part to the influence of superspy James Bond, who asked for his martinis "shaken, not stirred." This may be attributed to the fact that Bond drank vodka martinis and not gin martinis. The ingredients are mixed then strained and served "straight up" (without ice) in a chilled cocktail glass, and garnished with either an olive or a twist (a strip of lemon peel, usually squeezed or twisted to express volatile citric oils onto the surface of the drink).
The pomegranate martini is a very new invention, along with mango and chocolate martinis. The pomegranate martini is easy to prepare: 1.5 ounces of vodka with 2.5 ounces of pure pomegranate juice. This martini is an invention of R. S. Wenocur.
While the standard martini may call for a 5:1 ratio of distilled spirits to vermouth, many aficionados may reduce the proportion of vermouth drastically. This gave rise to stories such as martinis being made by just passing the cork of the vermouth bottle above the glass.
Although it started with olive as a garnish, olive juice can be added to a Martini to make it a 'Dirty Martini'. The taste of olive distracts from the taste of straight gin and , easing the stiffness of the drink.
Another common but controversial variation is the vodka martini, which is prepared in exactly the same way as a standard martini, with vodka being substituted for gin as the base spirit. In the 1990s, the vodka martini supplanted the traditional gin-based martini in popularity. Today, when bar and restaurant customers order "a martini," they frequently have in mind a drink made with vodka. Martini purists decry this development: while few object to the drink itself, they strenuously object to it being called "a martini." The martini, they insist, is a gin-based cocktail; this variation should be designated as such, with the name "vodka martini" (it may also be called a "vodkatini" or a "kangaroo"). Further confusion may arise from confusing Martini vermouth, a brand of vermouth, with the martini cocktail.
A more recent development that further offends martini purists is the use of "martini" (or the suffix "-tini") to refer to any flavored vodka cocktail served straight up in a cocktail glass. For example, the appletini, the chocolatini, or pineapple martini.
History of the drink
The origin of the martini is uncertain. By one widely disseminated account, the martini is a descendant of the Martinez, an older, sweeter cocktail consisting of two ounces of sweet vermouth, one ounce Old Tom gin (a sweetened variant), two dashes maraschino cherry liquid, and one dash bitters, shaken with ice, strained, and served with a twist of lemon. The Martinez was most likely invented in Martinez, California, where a plaque commemorating the birth of the martini can be found on the northeast corner of the intersection of Alhambra and Green streets. The earliest known reference to the Martinez is found in "The Bon Vivants Companion: Or How To Mix Drinks," first publishied in 1862 and authored by "Professor" Jerry Thomas, the "Principal Barman" at many famous watering holes including the Occidental Hotel in San Francisco. According to George A. Zabriske, who republished the original book in 1928, Thomas had a client who took a ferry from the Occidental Hotel on Montgomery Street to the then-state capital of California, Martinez, every morning. Thomas mixed him the Martinez to keep the morning chill off, and named it after his client's destination. Distilled spirits in the 1800's were not regulated as they are today, and were sold at cask strength - upwards of 135 proof. As the strength of the spirits decreased, smaller quantities of mixers were needed to make them palatable. Now it is more common to see a martini made with no vermouth at all. Some suggest that the drink owes its name to Martini (known in the United States as Martini & Rossi), the brand name for a popular Italian vermouth marketed internationally since the 19th century. It is possible that in Jerry Thomas's trips to Europe he influenced Italy's barmen, where the term "Martini" denotes sweet dark vermouth, rather than the cocktail, which is made with dry white vermouth. Americans who order the drink in Italy are often surprised to be served a sweet vermouth instead of a cocktail containing gin or vodka.
In the book, The World's Drinks and How to Mix Them, copyright 1907, written by William T. Boothby, the recipe for Dry Martini Cocktail (à la Charlie Shaw, Los Angeles, Cal) instructs, "into a mixing glass place some cracked ice, two dashes of Orange bitters, half a jigger of (dry) French vermouth, and half a jigger of dry English gin. Stir well until thoroughly chilled, strain into a stem cocktail-glass, squeeze a piece of lemon peel over the top and serve with an olive." Other than the bitters and the ratio of vermouth to gin, this is remarkably similar to a modern martini cocktail.
William Grimes, restaurant critic for the New York Times claims (in Straight Up or On the Rocks: the Story of the American Cocktail) that the dry martini was invented by Signor Martini di Arma di Taggia, the bartender at the Knickerbocker Hotel, in New York, in 1912. The fact that numerous published references to the martini predate 1912 discounts this theory.
The martini was an established American cocktail at the beginning of the 20th century, but did not attain its pre-eminent status as the country's classic cocktail until later in the century. Perhaps paradoxically, Prohibition did a great deal to elevate the martini's stature. Americans' preferred tipple at that time — whiskey — requires skillful blending and long aging, whereas cheap but (marginally) drinkable "bathtub gin" is relatively easy to produce, so martinis were more readily available in the era of the speakeasy.
The Prohibition-era martini was quite "wet" by today's standards. With the repeal of Prohibition, and the ready availability of quality gin, the drink became progressively dryer, with less vermouth being added. This trend toward dryness eventually reached fetishistic extremes, and became the source of a considerable body of martini anecdotes, wit, and lore. One might prepare a martini by waving the cap of a vermouth bottle over the glass, or observing that "there was vermouth in the house once." Winston Churchill chose to forgo vermouth completely, and instead simply bowed in the direction of France, while General Patton suggested pointing the gin bottle in the general direction of Italy. Alfred Hitchcock's recipe called for five parts gin and "a quick glance at a bottle of vermouth." Ernest Hemingway liked to order a "Montgomery", which was a martini mixed at a gin:vermouth ratio of 15:1 (these supposedly being the odds Field Marshall Montgomery wanted to have before going into battle). In a classic bit of stage business in the 1955 play Auntie Mame sophisticated pre-adolescent Patrick Dennis offers a martini, which he prepares by swirling a drop of vermouth in the glass, then tossing it out before filling the glass with gin. Similarly, in the 1958 movie Teacher's Pet, Clark Gable mixes a martini by turning the bottle of vermouth upside-down before running the moistened cork around the rim of the glass and filling it with gin. Surrealist director Luis Buñuel was another supporter of the drink, including his personal recipe into his Oscar-winning 1972 film Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie and in his memoirs, which consists basically of "coating the cubes", a method of adding the flavor of vermouth by pouring the vermouth into a shaker of ice, then pouring it out before adding gin. Also, atomizers similar to those used for perfume were sometimes used to dispense a token amount of vermouth.
The martini's popularity waned in the health-conscious, wine-and-spritzer-drinking seventies, but resurged in the late eighties and nineties. During this "martini renaissance," vodka supplanted gin as the most commonly requested base spirit, and nouveau variations proliferated: the green apple martini, the chocolate martini, and so forth. Whether the more extreme variations of this era may truly be called martinis remains a topic of vigorous debate. The first reference to a vodka martini in the United States occurs in the 1951 cocktail book Bottoms Up by Ted Saucier. The recipe is credited to celebrity photographer Jerome Zerbe.
Martini lore and mixology
Western culture has created a virtual mythology around the martini, in part because of the many legendary historical and fictional figures who favoured it, among them Churchill, J. Robert Oppenheimer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Cary Grant and the fictional James Bond. The dry martini is also sometimes called "The Silver Bullet" because it "is clear, potent and never misses its mark". (Of course, this is not to be confused with Coors Light, which is also known by that name.)
The classic martini of yore was stirred, "so as not to bruise the gin." W. Somerset Maugham declared that "Martinis should always be stirred, not shaken, so that the molecules lie sensuously one on top of the other," while James Bond from the Ian Fleming novels ordered his "shaken, not stirred", a drink properly called a Bradford.
In the novel Casino Royale, Bond's recipe is specified in more detail as made with three measures of gin (Gordon's was Bond's preference), one measure of vodka (Russian or Polish is preferred), and half a measure of Kina Lillet aperitif, shaken until ice-cold, and with a large, thin slice of lemon peel for garnish (properly called a "Vesper" after his love interest in the book). By the second Bond novel, Live and Let Die, Bond was drinking vodka martinis, with a vodka/vermouth ratio of six to one. This trend continued when 007 moved to the screen in 1962.
The concept of "bruising the gin" as a result of shaking a martini is an oft-debated topic. The term comes from an older argument over whether or not to bruise the mint in preparing a Mint Julep. A shaken martini is different from stirred for a few reasons. The shaking action breaks up the ice and adds more water, slightly weakening the drink but also altering the taste. Some would say the shaken martini has a "more rounded" taste. Others, usually citing hard-to-track-down scientific studies, say that shaking causes more of a certain class of molecules (aldehydes) to bond with oxygen, resulting in a "sharper" taste. Shaking also adds tiny air bubbles, which can lead to a cloudy drink instead of clear. In addition the drink is a perfect aperitif - it cleanses the mouth before eating - and the tiny air bubbles restrict the gin (or vodka) from reaching all tastebuds. This is why purists would claim that a martini should always be stirred. Some martini devotees believe the vermouth is more evenly distributed by shaking, which can alter the flavor and texture of the beverage as well. In some places, a shaken martini is referred to as a "Martini James Bond".
Although Charles Dana Gibson is most likely responsible for the creation of the Gibson martini (where a pickled onion serves as the garnish), the details are debated and several alternate stories exist. In one story, Gibson challenged Charley Connolly, the bartender of the Players' Club in New York City, to improve upon the martini's recipe, so Connolly simply substituted the olive with an onion and named the drink after the patron. Other stories involve different Gibsons, such as an apocryphal American diplomat who served in Europe during Prohibition. Although he was a teetotaller, he often had to attend receptions where cocktails were served. To avoid an awkward situation, Gibson would ask the staff to fill his martini glass with cold water and garnish it with a small onion so that he could pick it out among the gin drinks. A similar story postulates a savvy investment banker named Gibson, who would take his clients out for the proverbial three-martini business lunches. He purportedly had the bartender serve him cold water, permitting him to remain sober while his clients became intoxicated; the cocktail onion garnish served to distinguish his beverage from those of his clients.
The martini has become a symbol for cocktails and nightlife in general; American bars often have on their signs a picture of a conical martini glass garnished with an olive. In Martini, Straight Up: The Classic American Cocktail, Lowell Edmunds, a classics professor and doyen of martini lore, analyzes the cocktail's symbolic potency in considerable depth. It has also been suggested that the V-shaped glass connotates the symbol of the sacred feminine. This gives the drinker the ability to "drink from a woman," explaining the sex appeal of martinis in popular culture.
One popular version of the martini is the "dirty" martini. Made with either gin or vodka; instead of vermouth, olive brine is mixed. It is generally garnished with an olive. In 2005 the term "dusty" martini was coined by Greg Brayton, a patron of the Hollywood eatery Ammo to refer to a martini that was only "slightly dirty".
Over the years
Although the original Russian Vodka Martini is still popular, colorful, flavored vodka martinis are rapidly becoming the trend of new drinkers, as well as the vodka veterans. Unlike gin, vodka has a neutral flavor which allows it to easily mix with other flavors to make a wide variety of flavored martinis.
New specialty martinis are being made every day, using many different combinations of fresh fruit and vegetable juices, splashes of cream, and brightly colored liqueurs.
Instead of the typical cocktail olive, cocktail onion, or lemon twist, unique garnishes are being used in the new flavored martinis. Some of these garnishes are marinated capers, fresh herbs, or olives stuffed with blue cheese, anchovies, or sun-dried tomatoes.
In popular culture
Ian Fleming's James Bond is famous for his preferred drink: Vodka martini; shaken, not stirred.
In the popular TV series M*A*S*H, characters Hawkeye Pierce, Trapper John McIntyre and B.J. Hunnicutt in order to make their own martinis made their own gin in a still in the Swamp. In the first-season episode "Chief Surgeon Who?", Hawkeye declares, "Actually, I'm pursuing my lifelong quest for the perfect, the absolutely driest martini to be found in this or any other world. And I *think* I may have hit upon the perfect formula." Upon hearing this, Trapper asks, "Five-to-one?" Hawkeye replies, "Not quite. You pour six jiggers of gin, and you drink it while staring at a picture of Lorenzo Schwartz, the inventor of vermouth." (This is inaccurate, though, as vermouth was actually developed by Antonio Benedetto Carpano.)
In the television show The West Wing's episode "Stirred" (3x18), Jed Bartlet asks "Can I tell you what's messed up about James Bond?" "Nothing," his aide Charlie Young replies. Bartlet ignores him. "Shaken, not stirred, will get you cold water with a dash of gin and dry vermouth. The reason you stir it with a special spoon is so not to chip the ice. James is ordering a weak martini and being snooty about it."
In The Thin Man (1934) Nick Charles shakes all of his cocktails, saying, “Always have rhythm in your shaking. Now a Manhattan you always shake to foxtrot time, a Bronx to two-step time, a dry martini you always shake to waltz time.”
Brian Griffin, from the television show Family Guy, is often seen with some sort of alcoholic drink, usually a martini.
General Amos T. Halftrack, from the Beetle Bailey comic strip, is often shown drinking an olive-garnished martini.
Karen Walker is normally seen drinking a martini on the American sitcom Will and Grace.
The 1997 motion picture Picture Perfect shows the lead character, portrayed by Jennifer Aniston, ordering a dirty martini.
On the popular television series Gilmore Girls, main character Lorelai Gilmore always drinks a martini and often asks that it be made with gin.
In the movie Legally Blonde Ellie's parents are always shown with martinis in hand.
In her poem "Death of the Fathers" Anne Sexton wrote: "...Father laughed and drank down his martini, clear as tears."
Neo-Burlesque performer "Dirty Martini" (real name Linda Martini)
See also
References
- Conrad, Barnaby III. The Martini: An Illustrated History of an American Classic. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1995. (ISBN 0-8118-0717-7)
- Edmunds, Lowell. Martini, Straight Up: The Classic American Cocktail. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1998.
- Fleming, Ian. Casino Royale. New York: Penguin Books, 2002. p. 045
- Grimes, William. Straight Up or On the Rocks: The Story of the American Cocktail. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.
- Miller, Anistatia R. and Jared M. Brown. Shaken Not Stirred: A Celebration of the Martini. New York: HarperCollins, 1997.
- Regan, Gary. The Joy of Mixology: The Consummate Guide to the Bartender's Craft. New York: Clarkson Potter, 2003.
- Tastings: The Beverage Tasting Institute. Eds. Laverick, Charles, and Marc Dornan. 25 May 2004. <http://tastings.com>.
- Trevithick C.C., et al. not stirred: bioanalytical study of the antioxidant activities of martinis. British Medical Journal 1999 Dec 18; 319(7225): 1600-1602.
- Moorhouse, Frank. Martini: A Memoir. Sydney. Knopf, 2005.
External links
- The Martini FAQ
- History of the Martini: A talk with Max Rudin 29 December 1997 http://talkinghistory.oah.org/arch1997.html