The Lost Art of Cocktail Mixing, Episode I

This is an archival post taken from my old xanga blog. Comments have been disabled.

Something that has sort of fascinated me, since roughly the time it became legal for me to drink, is the mixing of cocktails, or more specifically, the mixing of cocktails prior to about 1965. Somewhere along then, someone came up with the “wine spritzer” and the American palette has yet to recover. Most now popular mixed drinks seem to take inspiration from some flavor of LifeSaver or SweetTart. There was a time (so I’m told) when cocktails were consumed at least as often in the home as in bars. I think the following quote from The Joy of Cooking (the old one, of course) is rather telling:

“…hold fast to a few general principles. The most important of these is to keep the quantity of the basic ingredients–gin, whisky, rum, etc.–up to about 60% of the total drink, never below half. Remember as a corollary, that cocktails are before meal drinks–appetizers. For this reason, they should be neither oversweet nor overloaded with cream and egg, in order to avoid spoiling the appetite instead of stimulating it.”

Seemingly, the cocktail craft was once an integral part of American hospitality (hence, the “cocktail party”) and not primarily a vehicle for lowering the sexual inhibitions of female strangers. Due to the loss of this tradition, most of what we now think of as mixed drinks hold little interest for me and I have always steered toward beverages that retain some level of subtlety: beer, wine, cognac, scotch, etc. But I have always wondered what we’re missing, so I’ve decided to find out. As a (hopefully somewhat) regular part of my blog, I’m going to start exploring the libations of our grand-parent’s and great grand-parent’s era. Each entry will focus on one drink, or family of them, explore the history of it if its interesting enough, and of course, cover how to make it (and just as importantly, how not to). The first of the series will be the most venerated and most bastardized of all cocktails:

The Martini In popular usage, martini has come to mean any alcoholic beverage served in the typical cone-on-a-stem cocktail glass, most of which are vodka based fruit drinks, e.g. appletinis, etc. I’ll spare you my feelings about this. Pretty much since its inception, the recipe for the ideal martini has been a controversial topic, primarily in regards to the relative proportions of gin to vermouth. But as a basic starting point for the discussion, a martini is 5 parts gin to 1 part dry Vermouth with an olive or twist as garnish, served cold. Generally speaking, a “dry martini” has less vermouth.

About the Ingredients

Gin has a surprisingly interesting history. What we think of as gin is a variant that developed in London but has its origins in the Netherlands as Jenever. It was introduced to England when (the dutch) William III was enthroned. During the 18th century, there were heavy tariffs placed on the import of foreign spirits, while domestic production was largely unregulated. It became common to use low quality grain (e.g. rye) that couldn’t be used for beer or whisky production to make “bathtub gin.” This became so popular amongst the poor that by the middle of the century production was six times that of beer. (Its important to note that at that time, beer was a staple as it was generally safer to drink than water.) Needless to say, gin became a catalyst for many social problems in England.

Cut to the present, gin is a distilled spirit flavored with various “botanicals,” most notably juniper berries. Other ingredients vary amongst the distilleries, but citrus peel, “grains of paradise” (whatever the hell that is), almond extract, liquorice, and so forth are some examples. But invariably, its the flavor of juniper berries that dominates. If you don’t have an intuition for what juniper berries might taste like, think “pine needles” but more so.

Vermouth is a type of fortified wine. Wine tends to be relatively fragile and doesn’t lend itself well to sea travel, but merchants found they could stabilize the flavor somewhat by adding distilled alcohol (usually brandy) before fermentation has finished, killing the yeast before all the sugar has been metabolized. Some fortified wines are delicious (e.g. Port, Madiera, sherry) while, IMHO, vermouth is not. There are essentially three styles of vermouth: dry (or “French”), sweet (or “red”, aka “Italian”), and white/bianco which is the sweetest of the three. While red is sometimes drunk straight, dry vermouth is pretty nasty by itself and even in mixed drinks is generally used in small quantities.

Olive: not much to say here.

A Twist is a strip of lemon peel with the bitter tasting white pith removed, leaving only the zest. Squeeze and twist the strip of peel before placing in the drink so as to release the aromatic oils and aid infusion.

History

The martini is believed to have originated in San Francisco, possibly at the Occidental Hotel, around the end of the 19th century or the beginning of the 20th, but was popularized by the prohibition era speakeasy, as gin is easier to produce, both in terms of equipment and requisite skill, than whisky or beer. The manic search for the ever-drier martini began after the repeal of prohibition, where a “dry martini” might involve the waving a vermouth cork in the air somewhere in the general vicinity of a cocktail glass of cold gin. Winston Churchill supposedly eliminated the vermouth from the equation entirely and simply made a bow in France’s direction before drinking.

However, there are other controversies surrounding the drink besides the vermouth content. Prior to the James Bond influence in the 60s, martinitis were usually made in a pitcher and stirred rather than shaken in a cocktail shaker. Technically, a “shaken martini” is called a “Bradford” but you’re unlikely to find a bartender that knows that. Purists still prefer mixing over shaking, as the latter tends to add more water to the gin. There are claims that shaking also has some detrimental effect to fragile molecules in the gin, but I remain highly skeptical. I say, if you want to make half a dozen martinis for a cocktail party, use a pitcher. If you want to make one martini, use a shaker.

The Vodka Martini, where vodka is substituted for gin, appeared sometime in the late 40s or early 50s, steadily increased in popularity, and is now more common than the gin martini. When ordering a martini, you would be well advised to specify “gin martini” or you may well end up with vodka and an olive. With some exceptions, the quality of a vodka is generally a function of how little flavor it has, so I think vodka martinis are about as boring a drink as you can make. However, for people who don’t like gin but think drinking martinis makes them look distinguished, the vodka martini is an option.

A note about the cocktail glass: its a flawed design. The idea is you hold the very edge of the rim with your thumb and index finger with your ring finger against the stem for balance. This is supposed to minimize contact with your hand so as not to heat the contents of the glass. Unfortunately, the conical shape of the glass damn near maximizes the surface area through which heat can be absorbed by the mere 3 ounces of liquid. Moral of the story: martinis need to be drunk quickly.

Some Variations

Its no longer common, but a martini can be served in a standard tumbler “on the rocks.”

If a cocktail onion is substituted for the olive, the drink is called a Gibson. With an onion-stuffed olive, a Gibsontini (expect a confused bartender). Alternately, use a hazelnut or a pickled straw mushroom and call it whatever you want.

A Dirty Martini is made by adding a teaspoon of brine from the olive jar prior to shaking. (Preferred by Franklin Roosevelt.)

A Perfect Martini has sweet vermouth in addition to dry vermouth.

A Sweet Martini is made with sweet red vermouth, and may be garnished with a maraschino cherry instead of an olive.

A martini with multiple olives, or a combination of olives, onions, or any other garnish is sometimes called a Gin Salad.

Tips

A common technique is to pour a teaspoon of vermouth into the chilled glass, swirl it, and pour it out before adding the shaken gin. Some prefer to pour the vermouth over the ice in the shaker, shake, then pour the vermouth out before adding the gin. Others use a perfume style atomizer to spray a mist of vermouth over the glass after the gin has been poured.

Religious wars aside, the quality of the gin will determine the quality of the martini, though “quality” is subjective and there is a substantial variation in flavor between gins from different producers. Personally, I prefer Tanqueray to most commonly available gins, and Tanqueray Ten in particular (a more expensive variant made in smaller quantities, blah, blah, blah). I don’t know that I’ve ever seen it in a bar, but there is a brand called Henderick’s produced in Scotland infused with cucumber and rose petals I think is pretty interesting.

Given the relatively spartan use of dry vermouth, its not too surprising that the market can’t support much variety. There are only 4 or 5 brands commonly available in the US, with Martini & Rossi being the most common. Noilly Prat tends to be a little drier than the rest.

As a point to end on, I should mention that I have never met anyone that liked the first martini they drank. Gin is pungent so its an acquired taste—one I’m still in the process of acquiring (and slowly, since there are plenty of other tastes I have already acquired). But I’ve been assured that, like most other things that take getting used to, its worth the endeavor. We’ll see.