by Julia Reed
In New Orleans, two more recent gin refreshers have entered the fray, the delicious sage julep at John Harris’s Bouligny Tavern and a Straddling Thorsten, a drink of my own invention. Many more years will have to pass before I can reveal the full story behind its name—suffice it to say it involves a Nobel Prize winner, a lusty blonde in a white leather mini-skirt, and a group of Chinese brain scientists, and you can take it from there. Based on the now-shuttered La Caravelle’s Alberto No. 1, it is much like a Southside with lime instead of lemon and has a champagne topper that encourages a certain lightness of spirit. As it combines two of Churchill’s very favorite elixirs, gin (it’s especially good with Hendrick’s) and champagne (Churchill only drank Pol Roger), I bet he would have swallowed it.
GIN RICKEY
( Yield: 1 drink )
½ ounce fresh lime juice
2 ounces gin
Club soda
Pour or squeeze the lime juice into a Collins glass filled with ice. Add the gin, top with club soda, and stir.
THE ‘21’ CLUB SOUTHSIDE COCKTAIL
( Yield: 1 drink )
2 ounces vodka
Juice of 1 lemon
2 teaspoons extra-fine sugar
1 tablespoon fresh mint leaves
Place all ingredients in a shaker and shake vigorously to bruise mint leaves. Strain into chilled Collins glass filled with ice.
NOTE: To make a Southside Fizz, use at least one more teaspoon of sugar and top with club soda.
BOULIGNY TAVERN’S SAGE JULEP
( Yield: 1 drink )
3 sage leaves
½ ounce simple syrup
½ ounce lemon juice
1½ ounces Aviation Gin
Crushed ice
In a mixing glass, muddle sage with simple syrup lightly to extract oils. Add lemon juice and gin. Fill a Collins glass with crushed ice. Pour liquid over crushed ice, leaving muddled leaves on top of ice.
THE STRADDLING THORSTEN
( Yield: 1 drink )
Juice of 1 lime
2 teaspoons powdered sugar
10 whole mint leaves
2 ounces gin
Champagne
In a shaker, combine lime juice and powdered sugar. Stir until dissolved. Add mint leaves and muddle with spoon. Add gin and ice; shake and pour into stemmed wineglass. Top with champagne and garnish with a mint sprig.
NOTE: You can also pour this over ice in a brandy snifter or oversized wineglass.
14
Men and Martinis
Plenty of notable women have been crazy about martinis. In the film Every Day’s a Holiday, the ever-reliable Mae West urged Charles Butterworth to get out of “those wet clothes and into a dry martini.” Dorothy Parker wrote a much-quoted poem about three martinis putting her under the table and four putting her “under the host.” Will & Grace’s inimitable Karen Walker once asked for a martini “and don’t waste any space with those olives,” while a slightly more earnest M. F. K. Fisher wrote that “a well-made dry martini or Gibson, correctly chilled and nicely served, has been more often my true friend than any two-legged creature.”
Like Parker, Ogden Nash came up with an amusing verse about martinis (“A tingle remarkably pleasant … I wish that I had one at present”), as did Cole Porter (“They’ve learned that the fountain of youth/ Is a mixture of gin and vermouth”). Robert Benchley, Parker’s fellow Algonquin wit, had plenty to say on the subject (and uttered a variation of West’s line in the film The Major and the Minor five years later). H. L. Mencken called the martini “the only American invention as perfect as a sonnet.”
But the thing about men and martinis is not what they say but how they look—few things make a man appear more elegant than having one in hand. A case in point is the marvelous Slim Aarons photograph of Clark Gable, Van Heflin, Gary Cooper, and Jimmy Stewart leaning against the bar at Romanoff’s on New Year’s Eve 1957. They are all in white tie, they are all cracking up, and they all exude a level of masculinity and cool that is breathtaking. Gary Cooper is holding what looks like a straight-up martini. It may well have been champagne, but I prefer to think not.
Romanoff’s, the Rodeo Drive restaurant that closed in 1962, was enormously popular among the stars of the day, as was Chasen’s, another Los Angeles landmark that closed in 1995. Chasen’s was famous for its chili (Liz Taylor had several quarts flown to the set of Cleopatra) and a martini called Pepe’s Flame of Love. Created by Chasen’s bartender Pepe Ruiz, the latter was made with Stolichnaya vodka, sherry instead of vermouth, and orange peel—flamed over the glass with some fanfare—rather than lemon. Legend has it that Dean Martin, another very cool cat, complained that he was bored with regular martinis and the dramatic new drink was the response. Before Chasen’s closed in 1995, I enjoyed many of Pepe’s Flames, along with that old-fashioned (flaming) masterpiece Steak Diane, made tableside, and I can attest that both were excellent.
These days, some of the finest martinis in the world are made in the bars of London hotels—usually by Italian bartenders. I am partial to the bar at Duke’s, where bar manager Alessandro Palazzi starts with a frozen glass and garnishes the finished product with either the peel of an Amalfi lemon or olives from Puglia. James Bond creator Ian Fleming is said to have written part of Casino Royale at Duke’s, a location that obviously inspired him. The novel (Fleming’s first Bond book) is the one in which Bond creates the Vesper, the martini he names after the gorgeous double agent Vesper Lynd. According to Bond’s instructions to the casino barman, the Vesper should be served “in a deep champagne goblet” (which means that my man Cooper could well have been drinking one), and made with “three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet.” It should then be shaken “very well until it’s ice-cold” and garnished with a “large thin slice of lemon peel.” The result was enough to impress Bond’s CIA contact Felix Leiter: “Gosh, that’s certainly a drink.”
Like Bond, my father is partial to Gordon’s, mainly because it has less alcohol than most other gins, enabling him to drink more of it. When I was in grade school he taught me to make his martini a little on the wet side and garnished with an onion, which technically makes it a Gibson, and paid me ten cents per drink. For Christmas one year, I collected my earnings and bought him a sterling silver vermouth dropper, which I am fairly certain he never used. He still drinks martinis though, and he is still partial to fellow martini drinkers. During one of his many trips to Washington, he spied Bill Blass in the Jockey Club bar with a straight-up martini happily in hand. After ordering one of his own, he introduced himself and they became fast friends. On the face of it, they were an unlikely pair: a world-famous dress designer and a businessman/politico from the Mississippi Delta. But Blass exuded the same sort of masculinity and cool as Gary Cooper, and Clarke Reed could easily have held his own with that bunch at Romanoff’s. All of them knew how to “hold” their gin, in every sense of the word.
Blass died before the rise of the Cosmopolitan, the Lemon Drop, the Appletini, and, worst of all, the Chocolatini. But I’m sure he’d agree that serving something in a martini glass does not a martini—or indeed a perfect sonnet—make. I’m an anomaly among most of my female friends for standing firmly against the Cosmo in particular, but there is one “feminine” martini I do endorse, the Ginger Martini from Birmingham’s Hot and Hot Fish Club, which substitutes Cointreau for vermouth and adds a bit of ginger syrup. Someone once paid tribute to the martini’s elegance by calling it “Fred Astaire in a glass”; I think I’ll privately rename Hot and Hot’s cocktail the Ginger Rogers in tribute to Astaire’s dance partner.
While I drink plenty of them, I also sort of agree with Lowell Edmunds, author of The Silver Bullet: The Martini in American Civilization, that vodka martinis should be classed with “polyester fabrics, supermarket tomatoes, and books printed on toilet paper as a symptom of anomie.” Put another way, my friend Jay McInerney, a self-described martini “constructionist,” says, “I like my martinis with gin, so t
hat they taste like something, and enough vermouth to add complexity—otherwise it’s just gin and not a cocktail at all, and where’s the genius in that? I’m an olive man, although lately I have fallen under the spell of Hendrick’s gin with a slice of cucumber. That’s as innovative as I get.” He adds that he prefers them shaken and straight up, “of course.”
I’m with Jay and 007—I love those tiny shards of ice floating at the top of a straight-up martini that can only come from vigorous shaking. But there is a strong contingent in favor of stirring. Supposedly, shaking a martini dissolves too much air into the mix—the “bruising” of the gin that some martini drinkers complain about. Somerset Maugham said stirring was the superior method “so that the molecules lie sensuously one on top of the other.” Clearly, Maugham was a man who had given his martinis a lot of passionate study.
The only other serious point of debate is the garnish. Mixologist Brooks Reitz, bar manager of Charleston’s Fig Restaurant, sometimes substitutes a silver-dollar-sized piece of grapefruit peel for the traditional lemon, which is actually sort of nice. At Galatoire’s in New Orleans, the waiters hedge their bets by bringing what I call a “martini salad” to the table, a small bowl of lemon peel, cocktail onions, large green olives stuffed with pimientos, and green olives stuffed with anchovies. After two or three martinis, it’s pretty much all you need for dinner.
Just in case, I include a recipe for Steak Diane, below.
PEPE’S FLAME OF LOVE
( Yield: 1 drink )
½ teaspoon fino sherry, chilled
Three 2-inch orange peels
2¼ ounces chilled vodka, preferably Stolichnaya, chilled
Chill a martini or cocktail glass thoroughly. Add the sherry to the glass and swirl to coat completely, pouring out any excess.
Take one of the orange peels, light a match, and squeeze the orange peel sharply, so that the oil is propelled through the flame and onto the inside of the glass. Repeat so that the oil evenly coats the glass, and discard the peels.
Shake or stir the vodka with ice to chill, and strain into the coated glass. Squeeze the remaining peel over the drink and around the rim of the glass and drop it into the drink for garnish.
NOTE: When the practiced Chasen’s bartenders flamed the orange peel, it would usually briefly ignite the sherry in the glass to very good effect. But you don’t have to be a showman to make the drink—it’s all about the perfect combination of flavors, and the orange oil releases nicely even without a flame.
THE VESPER
( Yield: 1 drink )
3 ounces gin
1 ounce vodka
½ ounce Lillet Blanc
Long thin peel of lemon
Place gin, vodka, and Lillet in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake vigorously and strain into deep champagne coupe or cocktail glass. Twist or bend the lemon peel, rub around the edge of the glass, and drop it into the drink.
THE HOT AND HOT FISH CLUB GINGER MARTINI
( Yield: 1 drink )
4 ounces Tanqueray Rangpur or other lime-infused gin
1 ounce Cointreau
¾ ounce ginger simple syrup
1 ounce apricot brandy
1 piece candied ginger
Chill a martini glass at least 20 minutes before serving. Place the first 4 ingredients in a shaker filled halfway with ice. Shake until well chilled. Strain into the glass and drop the candied ginger into the bottom.
NOTE: To make the ginger syrup, combine 1 cup sugar and 1 cup water in a saucepan. Add about ¼ cup of peeled and julienned ginger and bring the mixture to a boil. Cover, remove pan from heat, and let the ginger steep for 30 minutes. Strain through a fine mesh strainer and refrigerate.
STEAK DIANE
( Yield: 4 servings )
4 steaks, weighing about ½ pound each and cut about ½ inch thick from a tenderloin or boneless sirloin
Freshly ground black pepper
Salt
Olive or peanut oil
5 tablespoons butter
¼ cup finely chopped shallots
¼ cup finely chopped parsley
¼ cup cognac or brandy
¼ cup slightly reduced veal or beef stock or beef bouillon
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
Juice of ½ lemon
A few drops Tabasco sauce
Trim the meat of any fat, and pound each steak between two sheets of wax paper until they are almost ¼ inch thick. Season each side of steaks with a couple of grinds of pepper and sprinkle with salt.
Heat oil in large skillet or sauté pan over medium-high heat and add 2 tablespoons of the butter. Just as the butter begins to brown, add steaks, two at a time. Cook for 40 seconds on the first side, 30 seconds on the second side, and remove to warm platter. Repeat with other two steaks. (Steaks should barely color and will become just springy to the touch.)
Add remaining 3 tablespoons of butter to skillet and when foaming, stir in shallots and parsley. Let cook for a minute, then, tilting pan away from you, add cognac and flame. When flame has burned out, add stock, mustard, Worcestershire sauce, lemon juice, and Tabasco. Stir or whisk to combine and simmer for a minute. Turn off heat, place steaks back in pan to bathe in sauce, remove to platter, and pour remaining sauce over them.
15
The Importance of Holiday Cheer
More than once, when writing about the holidays, I have quoted the ever-reliable Oscar Wilde: “After a good dinner, one can forgive anybody, even one’s relatives.” There is no question that the food is important. The odd chopped black truffle or two studding the mashed potatoes, say, or even a really good squash casserole, can go a long way toward repairing frayed nerves. Conversely, an overcooked rib roast or the wrong kind of pie can be the potentially dangerous last straw. One year, my grandmother’s Christmas rolls were so hard that my grandfather threw one down the table at her, sending it splashing into the gravy boat. Since then, I’ve learned to hedge my bets with Sister Schubert’s fail-safe frozen yeast rolls, along with copious amounts of festive refreshment, a strategy I’m sure Wilde would have enthusiastically supported.
The point is that after enough punch, people tend not to care, or even notice, that the rolls haven’t risen, that little brother’s girlfriend has a nose ring (or five), that some of the people assembled haven’t actually spoken a civil word to each other in more than forty years. This is pretty much the theme of singer-songwriter Robert Earl Keen’s infectious and spot-on anthem, “Merry Christmas from the Family,” which starts out with the line, “Mom got drunk and Dad got drunk at our Christmas party.” Of course they did. The song is populated by ex-wives and new wives, irritating cousins and Mexican boyfriends, and other members of the extended clan that most of us try to avoid until the holidays inevitably roll around and we are forced together in the name of some misguided family unity.
Keen’s crowd makes the best of the proceedings by drinking champagne punch, homemade eggnog, margaritas, and Bloody Marys (“’Cause we all want one!”). In between, there are numerous trips to the Stop ’N Go and the Quickpak Store for everything from Salem Lights and a can of fake snow to a bag of lemons and some celery for the aforementioned Bloodies. While I, too, am an errand-running fool during the holidays (what better way to appear useful while also getting the hell out of the increasingly fraught house), I am not so ambitious with regard to the drinks. Punch or eggnog, followed by the best wine you can afford, should do it. For one thing, an elegant silver punch bowl puts the sheen of propriety on the fact that what you’re really doing is serving up a big batch of holiday denial.
Made the old-fashioned way, punch is also, to quote one of my father’s highest compliments, “strong stuff.” When he uses the term, it’s usually in reference to a good-looking woman or an especially funny anecdote, but I’m sure its derivation comes straight from the punch bowl. Cocktail historian David Wondrich explains that punch was the forebear of the cocktail, originating in sixteenth-century England,
where it consisted of fairly rough wine “drowned” with sugar and lemon and spices, and augmented with stronger spirits and lots more citrus once the Brits made it to India and beyond. No matter where it ended up, Wondrich says the punch of the seventeenth thorough nineteenth centuries bears as much relation to the anemic stuff served at today’s teas and banquets as “gladiatorial combat does to a sorority pillow fight.”
Consider, for example, the Junior League of Savannah’s cookbook’s recipe for Chatham Artillery Punch, which calls for a gallon of gin, a gallon of rye, a gallon of cognac, 2 gallons of rum, 2 gallons of Catawba wine, and 12 quarts of champagne. The punch, long a point of Savannah pride, was the house brew of the city’s all-volunteer regiment, founded in 1786 and described by Wondrich as “a social register militia that spent far more time parading and partying than it did loading cannons and shooting them.” Which might have been just as well. In 1883, a Georgia journalist wrote that “we are living witnesses to the fact that … when it attacketh a man, it layeth him low and he knoweth not whence he cometh or whither he goeth.” One way to get rid of one’s peskier relatives, I suppose, is simply to kill them with the stuff. Or you could give them a couple of cups and watch them kill each other. When Wondrich whipped up a batch for a recent food and wine festival in Atlanta, he warned the participants, “I have seen bad things happen from drinking this.”