The other day I ordered a martini the way I sometimes like it: 5 parts gin to 1 part vermouth (which would be the way the New Yorker crowd would have drunk it in the 1930s), and the young woman bartender queried this and said, ‘You want a wet martini, not a dry martini?’ I hadn’t heard this expression and I asked her about it. She said she’d picked it up in London. However this is a slide from the original meaning of ‘dry’ in the martini, which originally meant dry vermouth rather than sweet vermouth.
Again, at LA International Airport last year I tried to order a martini with the same proportions and the bartender was resistant, as if I were breaking some sacred rule. After I insisted, he accepted my order saying, ‘Right. Gin, straight-up, olives and heavy on the vermouth.’
Connoisseur Barnaby Conrad III agrees with Voltz and I about the need for vermouth: ‘The martini cocktail’s clear and strong-willed simplicity is made possible by its two vigorous elements: gin for spirit and snap, vermouth for aroma and roundness.’ We hold Barnaby Conrad III in high regard.
We are losing the aroma of the combination and also losing something else, the taste of wormwood, the bitter ingredient used in the preparation of vermouth. The name ‘vermouth’ derives from the German ‘wermut’ or wormwood.
Through the absence of the vermouth we have also lost the colour from the martini. In 1935, Ogden Nash, a New Yorker writer of light verse, who described his poetic specialisation as ‘the minor idiocies of humanity’ – we seem no longer to have poets who write light verse – wrote this poem about the martini:
There is something about a martini,
A tingle remarkably pleasant;
A yellow, a mellow martini,
I wish that I had one at present;
There it is, the colour of the martini in the 1930s – a yellow, a mellow martini. I sometimes like a faint yellow glint in my martini by adding more vermouth, as a sort of homage to that crowd from the 1930s. I agree, though, that there is an austere lucidity to the classic martini.
Voltz and I discovered that the yellow mellow martini is reached by adding .12 vermouth to every one part of gin. We are both more inclined to the lustre of .2 vermouth.
Dry vermouth is created by infusing wine (French vermouth is made from white wine grapes) with herbs, spices, barks and peels, then allowing it to mature. Vermouth is first recorded in the 1700s and became internationally known through the Italian company, established by Sig. Martini and Sig. Rossi, and the French company Noilly Prat, established by M. Noilly and M. Prat, which was the vermouth preferred by Ernest Hemingway.
The name of the cocktail almost certainly comes from the name of the Italian vermouth makers Martini & Rossi. We may as well deal with the origin of the drink now. The gin comes from London, the vermouth from Italy or France, the olive from the Middle East. No one is sure where the design of the glass came from. The combining of these ingredients almost certainly went on in any place where London gin and Italian or French vermouth were available and where the drinkers were playful. The cocktail hour came from the idea of the European aperitif. The glamour came from the Americans.
Sadly, these days in Europe, outside the finer bars, when you order a martini you are often served simply a glass of chilled Martini & Rossi vermouth.
Why wasn’t it called a Rossi? Rossi probably asked himself that question until he died.
I came across one of the best descriptions of the place of vermouth in a martini in the crime novel B for Burglar by Sue Grafton. ‘[My martini] was silky and cold with that whisper of vermouth that makes me shudder. I always eat the olive early because it blends so nicely with the taste of gin. He caught sight of my shiver. “I can leave the room if you want to be alone with that.”’
The presence of wormwood in vermouth excites the romantics because it links the martini with the legendary drink absinthe, made famous by writers and painters who mythologised the drink: Manet, The Absinthe Drinker (1859), Degas, L’absinthe (1876), Jean-François Raffaëlli, The Absinthe Drinkers (1881), Vincent van Gogh, Still Life with Absinthe (1887) and Picasso’s Buveur de l’absinthe (1901).
In 19th Century Europe, absinthe had a reputation for causing hallucinations and dangerous behaviour. The early impurity of some of the absinthe made then led to bad side-effects and it was banned in France in 1915. In recent years, the drink has been cleaned up and has made a comeback among romantics. The alcohol content of the original absinthe was very high.
Because of the wormwood, absinthe was a very bitter drink and had to be sweetened with sugar. As you might expect, Voltz is an absinthe romantic and he told me in Cannes: ‘… evidently there are quite a few absinthe spoons. Mine looks like a little garden shovel or the sort of thing with which you pick up pieces of cake – except it has holes in the shape of stars to permit the absinthe to flow through the sugar cube. There is also a type which looks like a very long spoon. There are also, from what I can tell, about a half dozen types of absinthe glasses … By the way I had luncheon on Saturday with Reinaldo Herrara, famous Venezulean socialite. He brought his strapping young trainer along, although for what reason I couldn’t begin to tell you. Perhaps when you reach a certain age and sophistication you like to be accompanied by someone, no matter who, when you go to town. We ate at Lupa’s, an excellent new Italian restaurant. I haven’t tried the absinthe martini, but I’m growing more interested …’
Wormwood is a shrub found in Europe and North America. It gives the bitter taste to the aniseed drinks made from dill or anis, such as Pernod, which was invented in 1797 by M. Henri-Louis Pernod, and pastis and ouzo, and was also used traditionally as a medicine before becoming a social drink.
Professor Brian Kiernan – himself not a martini drinker – first brought my attention to the startling fact that people in the 1950s would add a dash of the insecticide DDT to their cocktails. I found it hard to believe, even if there have been times in my life when I was willing to swallow just about anything if it promised a good time.
However, when I came to look at the molecular structure of DDT and wormwood, I found, strangely, that they are very close indeed and that historically wormwood was used as an insect repellent.
Voltz was unsettled by this historical fact and, I suspect, dismissed it as what he sometimes refers to as ‘Wollongong chemistry’.
It was also Professor Kiernan who sent me the 1920s quotation from Somerset Maugham about the absinthe martini: ‘… the manservant brought in a tray with an array of bottles and Isabel, always tactful, knowing that nine men out of ten are convinced they can mix a better cocktail than any woman, asked me to shake a couple. I poured out the gin and the Noilly Prat and added the dash of absinthe that transforms a dry Martini from a nondescript drink to one for the gods of Olympus …’
Professor Kiernan is best known among drinkers for the Kiernan Fallacy – that at a restaurant dinner expensive high-quality wines are cheaper because they are drunk slowly.
A Disturbing Observation
To: [email protected]
Subject: a disturbing observation
Voltz, I have discovered a dry-cleaning company that uses the business name ‘Dry Martini’ together with the classical martini glass signage as its logo. I could take this to the Business Names Commission or I could put a brick through the window. Obviously, it is disturbing. Weeks afterwards, at the cocktail hour, I still find myself thinking of dry-cleaning fluid in a martini glass. Not a palatable image.
From: [email protected]
Subject: a disturbing observation
In America, there’s a dry-cleaning process called ‘Martinizing’. I wonder if your dry-cleaner is playing off of that or has just misunderstood it? This process is named after its inventor, a Mr Martin.
Could it be the company you refer to is using gin and vermouth as a cleaning fluid?
The Breast: the Bra: the Glass
As we know – in the sense that we know rain beating on a tin roof – Voltz believes that the martini is at present served in glasses that are too
large. He dismissively describes them as ‘buckets’.
Once in the bar of the Ritz in London, he said to me, ‘I was watching an old Humphrey Bogart movie from 1942, All Through the Night, and at one point Bogart is at a nightclub and orders a sherry for his girlfriend and a “double martini” for himself. The drinks are delivered in nearly identical-sized glasses: this tells me that a “double martini” in the 1940s meant a drink only as large as a stemmed sherry glass. Most of the drink was actually taken up by the olive. I am continuing my campaign to return to smaller martinis …’
I agreed that the smaller glass does not have time to warm in the hand.
Through the intricacies which go to form taste and preference in design, the martini evolved its own glass: a clear, conical vessel (leaving aside the question of size for now) on a stem which keeps the warm hand away from the drink. Glass manufacturers’ catalogues from the 19th Century show glasses approximating the martini glass but Voltz and I cannot track down the name of the designer.
The martini glass is celebrated in cocktail lounge signage throughout the world; that beckoning sign of the neon-lit martini glass often with a neon olive in it, sometimes flashing on and off outside a cocktail lounge or at an airport bar. I have found that after driving all day in the US and arriving in a strange city, this flashing neon martini makes me want to stop and go into the bar, especially those windowless American bars sometimes found on the highway strip on the way into the central business district of a city.
The neon martini glass always promises relief from the discomfort of being alive. And often gives it. I share the philosophy of Blanche in Tennessee William’s play A Streetcar Named Desire: ‘I have always relied on the kindness of strangers’ – and in my case, the tranquillity of the martini. At least, that is, I shared Blanche’s philosophy until I saw Angels in America and heard Jeffrey Wright (Belize) say, ‘Well, that would be a foolish thing to do.’
So ubiquitous is the martini glass that the New South Wales State Railways have as their ‘No Drinking on Trains’ sign a martini glass with a bar across it. I have never seen a martini drunk on a New South Wales train nor have I seen a bar car. I dream of the day when the martini glass symbol is there with a tick beside it and an arrow pointing to the bar car.
When I mentioned this to Voltz last year he took me to a park on 6th Avenue in New York City where the martini glass with a bar across it is used as a sign forbidding alcohol. Voltz said, ‘It is as if the park authorities fear that Nick and Nora and their friends will invade this park for a cocktail party. Or that the old Algonquin crowd will stroll down and take over.’
Once when I was living out of New York City in Westchester, I would sometimes take the commuter train from Grand Central Station; on the platform near the doors to the train would be a man seated at a table with ice and premixed martinis and a stack of large paper cups. The commuters would buy their double or triple martinis from the man in paper cups filled with ice and take them onto the train to sip on the journey home. I suppose many would also be greeted by a freshly made-up wife with another martini already made for them and she would play the piano while they talked about their day (at least, that was how I imagined married life then). Stylistically, the paper cups disappointed me and I considered the whole practice a grave offence against the dignity of the martini, but it sure as hell affirmed the centrality of the martini in that commuter culture described so well by John Cheever.
Any drinking vessel is a technological artefact which evolved from the cupped hands, from the time our forebears squatted at a stream to scoop up water to drink with their hands. I guess one day some smart forebear started using a pod or a nut or shell or an animal horn and then began to carve and fashion a cup, which quickly led them back to the shape of the female breast which, for most of us, was our first drinking vessel. Those needing mysticism were also quick to use the cup, renamed a ‘chalice’, as a central spiritual symbol. There is something called a double-cup which has been used in some ceremonials over the centuries. The two parts of the cups fit together and can be broken apart. Each person drinks from a section of the double-cup in a celebration of their bonding. In some ceremonies it was thought special toasts from these cups would make women fertile and men virile. I suppose in some more secular bondings the women silently toast in the hope that the men will, at least on that night, remain virile but that they will be, for that night, infertile.
There are many bar legends about the shape of glasses and the shape of breasts.
Two of the most common are that Madame de Pompadour, mistress of France’s Louis XV, had glasses crafted in the shape of her breasts as a gift for Louis because he admired her breasts and he wanted to be able to drink champagne from them. There is another legend that the dish-shaped champagne glass was designed for Louis XVI and was shaped from Marie Antoinette’s breast.
It seems to me that the martini glass derives from the breast-shaped tradition of glass design, perhaps by way of the cone-shaped bra found in early Eygptian paintings. Some depictions of Cleopatra show her in such a bra. The conical bra was fashionable for a time in the 1920s and then again in the 1950s, when it was marketed as a whirlpool bra and can still be bought and which is something of a festish object. Jean-Paul Gaultier designed what he called a ‘cone bra’ for Madonna as part of a corset called the classique for her Blonde Ambition tour in 1990.
If you would like to make one of these corsets for yourself, the middle panel on the costume is actually made from ribbons that are woven together to make a diamond pattern effect. If you have the patience, certainly try doing this as I did on my first Blondie costume. But if you want to get the costume finished faster then take the quilting route which is more efficient and produces the same effect. Fuseable batting and a ruler to draw the lines for the stitch work are some of the tools you’ll need.
Just kidding.
Gaultier markets an eau de toilette in a bottle shaped as the figure of a woman wearing the corset classique.
I have never said this to Voltz, but I have a feeling that his desire to return to some vaguely visualised, ideal smaller glass from times past may be a hankering after the primal nipple. Maybe it’s time I did. The glass he dreamily describes to me seems to shrink from the breast-size ever closer to the nipple-size. He once said to me in the bar of the ‘21’ Club that he sometimes hankers after the almost thimble-size glasses of the 1920s. I let it pass.
Instead, I have repeatedly told him that the Greeks preferred wide goblets or bowls because they claimed that the more of the mouth that is exposed to the liquid, the fuller the sensation. They were right, because the wide rim not only exposes the lips to the liquid but also the nose, which is intrinsic to taste. The martini glass is perfectly designed to maximise the sensation to the lips and to the nose.
The adjectives modernist and moderne (from the Latin word modo meaning ‘just now’) are applied to the martini and its glass by Max Rudin in an essay ‘There Is Something About a Martini’, in an issue of American Heritage magazine. By these words I understand him to mean the geometric Art Deco period, which he sees as coming to an end with World War II and from which the conical or triangular cup of the martini glass with its straight line stem and disc base is an example. Perversely, my favourite martini glass, purchased in a second-hand shop in Cannes, has an Art Nouveau, more organic stem that resembles tangled flower stalks.
A young woman at my lecture on the martini in Shanghai last year suggested that the strange drinks that are emerging and claiming to be variations on, or parodic departures from, the classic martini and that are served in martini glasses are post-modern, which embraces everything from the past and playfully mucks around with it. What Voltz calls The Crazy Drinks, in fact, poke fun at the staidness of the classic martini as a representative symbol of a fading modernism.
I would argue that The Crazy Drinks also inescapably pay homage to the martini, especially when they steal its glass.
Be that as it may.
Actu
ally, unlike Voltz, I do not deride The Crazy Drinks, the post-modern drinks, and I am curious enough about them to taste them when a companion orders one. The thing of it is this: I just haven’t time enough to include them in my life. Inclusion at best is an act of appreciation, and appreciation has its sometimes tiring demands. To be honest, I have enough trouble coming to terms with all the potential in the martini and its close relatives without straying away from it to other drinks.
Let’s get one thing straight: the martini glass can vary slightly but should not stray too far from its traditional shape. The drinker of classic martinis does not, for example, admit the zig-zag stem which is the signature glass of a cocktail lounge called Twist at the Ameritania Hotel in Manhattan, which serves drinks in large cone-shaped glasses with ‘Z’ shaped stems. Voltz and I have banned this bar.
This is sometimes known as the Shazam Stem, which is taken from the signature lightning bolt of the comic strip character Captain Marvel, published between 1939 and 1953. In his everyday life, Captain Marvel was Billy Batson, child reporter for Whiz radio, who became a superman-style hero when he said the word ‘shazam’.
Twist specialises in The Crazy Drinks such as the Espresso Chocolate Martini or the Times Square Tootsie.
Which reminds me that at the premiere party of the now-concluded TV series ‘Sex and the City’ in 2000, one of the stars of the show, Sarah Jessica Parker, requested ‘a fun, pink drink’ from the bartender. According to Men’s Journal, the drink that was served to her could be described as a feminist manifesto (but did not explain why): it was raspberry syrup, ‘Razberi’ Stolichnaya vodka, Cointreau, lime, pineapple and cranberry juices, with a splash of champagne and served in a large martini glass. Parker named it the Flirtini. The magazine said it was a ‘chick drink’ because of its colour, fruitiness and sweetness – ‘as pretty to look at as it is easy to drink – with the alcohol well disguised’.
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