The history of the martini

The venerable Martini. Perhaps the most famous cocktail and, without a doubt, the drink mixed with the most myths, stories and traditions. It’s also the cocktail that has a following and its own brand of snobbery. You don’t usually see two people arguing over a Planters Punch.
The basic martini recipe is as simple as you can get. Traditionally, a Martini is made with gin and dry white vermouth, although recently the Vodka Martini has become much more popular. The standard modern martini is five parts gin or vodka to one part vermouth, though few bartenders today would follow that model. The ingredients are shaken or stirred with ice, filtered and served “straight” without ice in a chilled cocktail glass and garnished with an olive.
Martini purists are upset that vodka is now the liquor of choice when people order a martini. They insist that it should be called ‘Vodka Martini’ or, if they are very picky, ‘Bradford’.
The amount of vermouth to add is also a subject of great debate. The less vermouth, the drier the Martini. Today the most common way to mix vermouth is to coat the ice cubes in vermouth and then throw away the leftover vermouth. Some progressive bars now use vermouth sprinklers to cover the ice (thereby saving a lot of vermouth).

Shaken or Stirred?

According to the true Martini drinker, because vermouth mixes easily and evenly with its solvent (gin or vodka), a martini should always be mixed in a shaker glass. For the purists, shaking “bruises” the gin and also cracks the ice when diluting the Martini.
However, thanks to novel and movie spy James Bond, who ordered his Martinis “Shaken, Not Stirred,” the Martini is shaken more often these days.
Shake aficionados say that, as with Scotch, a little water creates a rounder flavor. They also claim that the shaking action adds oxygen to the drink and sharpens the flavor and distributes the vermouth more evenly.

History

The generally accepted origin of the Martini begins in San Francisco in 1862. A cocktail named after the nearby town of Martinez was served at the Occidental Hotel. People drank at the hotel before taking the afternoon ferry to Martinez across the bay. The original cocktail consisted of two ounces of “Martini and Rosso” Italian sweet vermouth, one ounce of sweet Old Tom gin, two drops of maraschino cherry liquid, a dash of bitters, shaken and served with a lemon wedge. By the end of the 19th century, the Martini had been transformed into a simpler form. Two dashes of orange bitters were mixed with half a jigger of dry French vermouth and half a jigger of dry English gin, stirred and served with an olive.
But it was Prohibition and the relative ease of illegal gin making that led to the rise of the Martini as the predominant cocktail of the mid-20th century.
With the repeal of Prohibition and the easy availability of quality gin, the drink became progressively drier and less vermouth was added.
The first reference to the use of vodka in a Martini was in the 1950s, but it was Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels and subsequent films that raised the profile of the vodka martini in the 1960s. In the novel Casino Royale Bond’s recipe for his “vespa martini” was three parts Gordon’s gin, one part Russian vodka, half a Kina Lillet aperitif measure, shaken until ice cold, served with a lemon wedge. In Bond’s second novel, Live and Let Die, Bond drank standard vodka martinis.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the martini was considered old-fashioned and was replaced by more elaborate cocktails and wine coolers. But the mid-1990s saw a revival of the drink and an explosion of new versions. These new specialty martinis can be made with combinations of fresh fruit juices, splashes of cream and brightly colored liqueurs.
Instead of the traditional olives, onion cocktail or lemon twist, new garnishes such as marinated capers, fresh herbs, coffee beans or sun-dried tomatoes are used.
Today, the Martini in all its versions has returned to its position as the quintessential cocktail in the world.

Folklore

The Martini comes with its own folklore and many former Martini drinkers have their own recipes to create the perfect or driest Martini. The quest for dryness has taken on strange proportions.

Winston Churchill’s recipe called for pouring gin into a glass and then simply bowing in the direction of France. 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, the odds that Field Marshal Montgomery would supposedly want before going into battle.
In the 1958 film Teacher’s Pet, Clark Gable mixes a martini by upending the vermouth bottle, then running the moistened cork around the rim of the glass before filling it with gin.

The classic 1970s TV show MASH satirically attacked this dryness fetish. ‘Hawkeye’, working at his still, tells his fellow military medics, “I am pursuing my lifelong quest for the perfect, absolutely driest martini to be found on this or any other world. And I believe I can have found the perfect formula”. …he pours six glasses of gin and drinks it while looking at a picture of Lorenzo Schwartz, (the inventor of vermouth).”

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