musings on martinis
What is a martini, anyways? A bunch of men laid down the law of the cocktail in 1966, in a jokey, semi-official document. Here's the horror — or innovation — that's unfolded since.
Lately: It hasn’t been this hot in D.C. since the Dust Bowl. At least we have air conditioning this time around. I’ve barely left the house all week. … Semi-related to my shut-in status: I ordered overpriced citruses on the Internet, and they’re so good, I may do it again. … I just got “Le Sud,” a new cookbook that focuses on the cuisine of southeastern France. Due to the whole “it’s too hot to cook” problem I’m facing, I’ve only made a few of the cocktails at this point, and they’ve all been great (and refreshing). The Grande Plage is reprinted here, if you’re interested in trying one. … I wrote 3,500 words of my novel on Tuesday and feel like I’m hitting a groove. … I also really enjoyed this Bitter Southerner piece from 2019, which has some extra resonance this week, unfortunately.
In 1998, the New York Times took stock of the martini at a trying time for the classic cocktail. Gin had given way to vodka. In Dallas, a bar called the Martini Ranch was serving a Mars bar martini, which entailed a diabetes-inducing ingredient list and a run through a blender. In Atlanta, an establishment with a menu of 50 martini variations was set to debut an expanded list of 100. The drink, Bill Grimes wrote, had “entered the late-Elvis phase of its once-splendid career. … It’s time to go to rehab.”
Tongue, meet cheek. Grimes quotes Robert Donohoe, the self-elected president for life of the American Standard Dry Martini Club, which sounds a lot like an authoritarian organization with noble aims. “Real martini drinkers are suffering," Donohoe told the Times. "When you say you're a martini drinker, that's supposed to mean something, but all this silliness has degraded the whole concept of the drink."
I think he’s joking. Or, more accurately: I think he thinks he’s joking. How could he not? And as I researched the decades-long debate over what constitutes a proper martini — a very serious drink, the drink of James Bond and Jay Gatsby and all matter of brooding men — I was surprised at all the sly banter I uncovered.
Donohoe, whose iron-fisted rule began in the early ’90s, wrote a newsletter in addition to running his club. He was inspired, in part, by a 1966 document: the American National Standards Institute’s “Safety Code and Requirements for Dry Martinis,” a four-page, extremely unserious dissertation released by a serious and legitimate nonprofit charged with codifying voluntary standards for American products and services. How exactly this came about, I’d love to know.
Reviewers of the 1966 code included Floribunda Trellis of the Dry Wine and Cocktail Institute, Terrence Pitt of the Olive Institute, Harry Underarms of the Political Decisions Coordinating Council and G.O. Home of the Yankee Know-How Institute. The document defines a dry martini and establishes certain rules: no vodka, no rocks, olives are acceptable (within certain constraints), French vermouth always. It’s riddled with absurdities — olive specifications are measured down to the thousandth of an inch, and stirring patterns are diagrammed — but based, like most jokes, in a basic sense of truth. Underneath all the flourish and bluster, we are led to uncover the Absolute Truth of the Dry Martini.
In the nearly 60 years since those standards were first click-clacked from typewriter to paper — and even in the 25 years since Grimes’s story published — martinis have flowed and ebbed, been stirred and shaken and further edited or adulterated, depending on your perspective. I, a frequent orderer of a dirty gin martini, find myself straddling the line between caring and shrugging — between telling the ghosts of these sardonic old men that they’ve lost control of their cocktail and bemoaning the appropriation of language and kitchen equipment that’s birthed all these confounding variations.
That’s where the narrative ends. I started tapping away at this newsletter because I wanted to write about martinis, but most of my thoughts are disjointed. A lot of my thoughts are about the people who come to mind when I think of a martini: Don Draper, Bond, Gatsby, Winston Churchill, even Ernest Hemingway. In “A Farewell to Arms,” the main character, an American soldier, talks about his love for the cocktail. "I had never tasted anything so cool and clean,” he says. “They made me feel civilized"
The martini stereotype is so utterly male. You are dashing and saving the world on a grand adventure and drinking a martini. You are fat and saving the world from behind a desk and drinking a martini. You are cheating on your wife and drinking a martini. What does the martini tell us about the man who’s sipping it?
In a scene from the fourth season of “Sex and the City,” Carrie Bradshaw has just started freelancing for Vogue, and she’s holed up in an editor’s office after getting a gutting critique from a different editor, played by Candice Bergen. The sympathetic editor, a man, pours her a dry martini, with a fleeting aerosol spritz of vermouth. They start drinking, and the story flashes forward a few minutes and a few martinis. For Carrie, 1.5. She’s drunk and shouting about the edits on her piece, about her voice as a journalist and how writing is the only thing she’s good at. The editor asks how she’s gotten so drunk off of so few martinis.
“I didn’t eat breakfast, and I’m a size two, which should make me perfect for Vogue, but nope,” she answers. It’s a smart scene masked by theatrical excess — a veiled discussion about what kinds of creativity are allowed from a woman in a certain staid setting, and what kinds of behavior. The editor helps her out of the building, good humored and (literally) supportive.
A martini is the perfect drink for me, because one is essentially the equivalent of 1.5. And I eat breakfast religiously, so that won’t do me in. I’ve reached the point in my life where I almost never want two drinks in a night, but sometimes I want more than one. Et voilà.
Have you ever had a Martinez? The origins of the martini are murky, but the Martinez is widely believed to be its direct precursor. I live near a bar, Copycat, with an awesome menu that lists multitudinous variations on each classic cocktail, and at some point, either my husband or I ordered a Martinez. It tastes absolutely nothing like a martini, but it’s wonderful.
The Martinez dates back to at least 1887 and contains gin, sweet vermouth, Maraschino liqueur, bitters and lemon. The ratio I like is: 6 parts gin, 6 parts sweet vermouth, 1 part Maraschino, a dash of Angostura bitters and an orange twist.
I love a cold martini, gin only!