Martini (cocktail)

Martini

Cocktail
The martini is one of the most widely known cocktails, shown here with its two main ingredients
Type	Cocktail
Base spirit	Gin
Served	Straight up: chilled, without ice
Standard garnish	olives or lemon peel
Standard drinkware	Cocktail glass
Commonly used ingredients	5.5cl (5 parts) gin 1cl (1 part) dry vermouth
Preparation	Traditionally stirred into a chilled glass, garnished, and served straight up.

The martini is a cocktail made with gin and dry white vermouth, although substituting vodka for gin is now common. It is often described as being "crisp" or "astringent". 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.

The martini is one of six basic drinks listed in David A. Embury's classic The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks.

Preparation

While variations are many, a standard modern martini is a five to one 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 six to one proportion of gin or vodka to vermouth. 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 fictional super-spy James Bond, who asked for his martinis "shaken, not stirred." The ingredients are mixed then strained and served "up" (without ice) in a chilled cocktail glass, and garnished with either an olive or a twist of lemon (a strip of the peel, usually squeezed or twisted to express volatile citric oils onto the surface of the drink).

While the standard martini may call for a five to one ratio of distilled spirits to vermouth, aficionados of the dry martini may reduce the proportion of vermouth drastically for a drier martini. Connoisseurs boast of sweetening the cocktail by merely coating the glass with vermouth, passing the vermouth cap above the glass, shining a light through the vermouth bottle onto the glass, momentarily passing the finished drink near a closed vermouth bottle, or jokingly whispering "vermouth" over the glass. It's been said that a "Churchill Martini" contains no vermouth, just British gin. The legend holds that Churchill would get as close to the vermouth bottle as to "look at it from across the room". This would make it very dry or a so called "Churchill Martini". (Another story has it that Churchill, rather than adding any vermouth to the gin, would simply bow in the direction of France.)

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 vermouth, easing the stiffness of the drink.

Some aficionados avoid imparting excessive flavors to their martinis. If they do use an olive, it is either unstuffed or is stuffed with something as neutral as an almond; the olive itself is rinsed of any brining or vinegar solution prior to use. The olive is then slipped into the martini so as not to disturb the fine mixture of gin and vermouth. A "lemon twist" is considered a more delicate garnish because of its mild and complementary flavor accent. In this case, a special lemon peeler might strip off a slender rope of lemon (including the pith) while the lemon is held carefully above the nearly finished martini. This orientation allows the mist of lemon oils to gently spray the top of the cocktail.

It should be noted, however, that classic Martini Cocktail receipes from the early part of the Twentieth Century mix with a gin to vermouth ratio of as low as 2:1. A simple web search will show that the most common ratio for a classic, as opposed to a modern, Martini is 3:1. The broad variation of gin to vermouth ratios is what gives the Martini its enduring fascination. In general the use of the classic names from history indicate a falling amount of Vermouth from a Gibson, to a Classic Martini, to a Martini (modern) to a Montgomery (Hemmingway) to a Churchill Martini (just a glass coating).

Another common but controversial variation is the vodka martini, made with vodka instead of gin. 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" (or "vodkatini", or "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 the 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 north-east corner of the intersection of Alhambra Avenue and Masonic Street. The earliest known reference to the Martinez is found in "The Bon Vivants Companion: Or How to Mix Drinks," (1887 edition) 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 Martinez, then the state capital of California, 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 1800s 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 little or no vermouth. 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 nineteenth century. Americans who order the drink in Italy are often surprised to be served a sweet vermouth instead of a cocktail containing gin or vodka. (There the martini is best ordered as a "martini cocktail".)

A 1901 novel, set in the mid-1880s, has a Harvard undergraduate referring to "a Martini cocktail."

In the book The World's Drinks and How to Mix Them (1907), written by William T. ("Cocktail") Boothby, the recipe for dry martini cocktail (à la Charlie Shaw, Los Angeles) 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 reports the theory (in Straight Up or On the Rocks: the Story of the American Cocktail) that the dry martini was invented in 1912 by Signor Martini di Arma di Taggia, the bartender at New York's Knickerbocker Hotel. Numerous published references to the martini before 1912 discount this theory.

The martini was an established American cocktail at the beginning of the twentieth 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 sweet by today's standards. With the repeal of Prohibition, and the ready availability of quality gin in the United States, the drink became progressively dryer, with less vermouth being added. This trend 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, saying that the perfect Martini involved pouring a glass full of cold gin and looking at a bottle of vermouth. 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 15:1 gin-to-vermouth ratio (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. A scene cut from the theatrical version of M*A*S*H suggested that a bottle of vermouth should 'last an entire war.' 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 1970s, but has grown since the late 1980s. During this martini renaissance, vodka supplanted gin as the most commonly requested base spirit, and new variations proliferated: the green apple martini, the chocolate martini, etc. Whether the more extreme variations of this era may truly be called martinis remains a topic of 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

A martini made with Lillet Blanc and 3 olives

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, Truman Capote, J. Robert Oppenheimer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Cary Grant, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the fictional James Bond. The dry martini is also sometimes called a "Silver Bullet" because it "is clear, potent and never misses its mark"; this is not to be confused with a beer, Coors Light, that is also sometimes known by that name. According to others, a "Silver Bullet" is simply gin on the rocks with no vermouth at all.

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.

For absolute purists the bottle of gin, the mixing glass, vermouth and martini glass are all frozen prior to mixing. As a result the dry martini pours as an oily texture and is very soft on the palate.

The classic martini 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," James Bond from the Cubby Broccoli films ordered his "shaken, not stirred", a drink properly called a Bradford (Embury 1948, p. 101) (whilst in the original Ian Fleming novels they were in fact ordered as stirred not shaken'). 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 obscure 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 a clear one. If the drink is used as an aperitif, to cleanse the mouth before eating, 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" or a "007."

In a scientific study, researchers with the Department of Biochemistry, Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, University of Western Ontario, Canada, determined in 1999 that a shaken martini is demonstrably more healthy than a stirred one. Antioxidants are known to promote health, particularly by reducing the incidence of such age-related diseases as cardiovascular disease, stroke, and cataracts. Antioxidant properties are possessed by alcoholic beverages in general, including martinis; but in carefully controlled tests, the researchers determined that a shaken martini has significantly higher antioxidant properties than a stirred one. As they humorously concluded in publishing their results in the British Medical Journal, "007's profound state of health may be due, at least in part, to compliant bartenders." See "Shaken, not stirred: bioanalytical study of the antioxidant activities of martinis," British Medical Journal, December 18, 1999, on line at http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=28303#N0x9446320.0x9637ce8.

Martini variations

Gibson

Gibson

IBA official cocktail
Type	Cocktail
Base spirit	Gin
Served	shaken
Standard garnish	silverskin onion peel
Standard drinkware	Cocktail glass
IBA specified ingredients†	2cl to 3cl (2 to 3 parts) gin 1cl (1 part) dry vermouth (note IBA official receipe gives 6:1)
Preparation	Stir well in a shaker with ice, then strain into glass. Garnish and serve
† Gibson recipe at International Bartenders Association

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 an onion for the olive 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.

Another version of the origin story, included in The Good Man's Weakness by Charles McCabe, states that the drink was created in San Francisco by Walter D. K. Gibson (1864-1938) at the Bohemian Club around 1900.

Dirty martini

A popular version of the martini is the "dirty" martini in which olive brine is used in place of, or alongside, vermouth. It is also generally garnished with an olive. Additionally, the term "dusty" martini is a dirty martini that has only a fraction of the usual olive brine.

Saketini

A relatively recent vodka martini made with sake instead of vermouth. This is a relatively recent creation, but is currently popular in high-end cocktail bars.

Smoky martini

Gin with a splash of Scotch whisky, stirred and garnished with lemon peel.

Mexican martini

This popular Texas cocktail consists of a large margarita on the rocks, usually shaken and presented in the shaker, providing several servings poured by the drinker into a salt-rimmed cocktail glass with an olive garnish.

Pickletini

This popular East Tennessean drink consists entirely of vodka and pickle juice (garnish optional). It was created during the TVA initiative by poor dam workers trying to beat the intense southern heat. It was believed that the drink's sour-sweet odor was an effective mosquito repellent.

Vodka "martinis" and martini-inspired cocktails

Although the vodka martini (or "kangaroo") is still popular, flavored vodka martinis are rapidly becoming a trend among new drinkers, as well as some of 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.

Bartenders are constantly creating new types of specialty "martini," using many different combinations of fresh fruit and vegetable juices, splashes of cream, and brightly colored liqueurs. Perhaps the most popular of these is the chocolate martini, where the glass used may be first decorated with swirls or patterns of chocolate syrup, and the body is prepared using cocoa flavoured vodka. A similar recipe involves vanilla in place of chocolate. These are popular in western restaurants to finish a meal, rather than as an aperitif, as they serve to some extent as a substitute for dessert.

Instead of the typical cocktail olive, cocktail onion, or lemon twist, unique garnishes are being used in these new flavored martinis. These garnishes include 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." (See above.)

In the original movie MASH, characters Captains Hawkeye Pierce, Duke Forrest and Trapper John McIntyre have their own still in their tent, the "swamp". When Trapper originally shows up, he is offered a martini without olives and asks, "Don't you use olives?" His initiation to their circle is completed when, to their amazement, he removes a jar of olives from his coatpocket, saying, "Yes, but a man can't really savor a martini without an olive, otherwise it just doesn't quite make it."

In the TV series M*A*S*H, characters Hawkeye Pierce, Trapper John McIntyre and B.J. Hunnicutt distill gin for martinis in their tent ("the Swamp"). 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." Trapper responds, "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." (Vermouth was actually developed by Antonio Benedetto Carpano.)

Other fictional martini connoisseurs include Alexis of Dynasty, Brian Griffin of Family Guy, General Amos T. Halftrack of Beetle Bailey, Karen Walker of Will and Grace, John Dorian of Scrubs (although he tends to drink an apple-flavored variation called the Appletini), Lucille Bluth of Arrested Development and Lorelai Gilmore of Gilmore Girls.

References

• Embury, David (1948), The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, Garden City, NY: Doubleday
• Fleming, Ian. Casino Royale. New York: Penguin Books, 2002. p. 45
• 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 December 18; 319(7225): 1600-1602.
• Moorhouse, Frank. Martini: A Memoir. Sydney. Knopf, 2005.
• On his album "Volume 4," songwriter Joe Jackson included a song titled "Dirty Martini," which takes place in a New Orleans bar.

See also

• List of cocktails
• List of martini variations

External links

• The Martini FAQ
• History of the Martini: A talk with Max Rudin 29 December 1997 (real audio format)