Shake or stir, but please don't sweeten
22-Mar-2010 • Bond Style
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Unlikely for the suave superspy, says Wbur.org.
A martini is certainly more than a drink. It's long been an embodiment of style and sophistication â and it's popular again. It's often served with this sort of unorthodox twist.
Putting a drink in a long-stemmed V-shaped glass does not make it a martini. A martini is this: gin and dry vermouth. And maybe an olive or two. Or a twist of lemon peel. It is ice cold and crystal clear, never green or pink. I don't begrudge anyone a chocolate-flavored vodka drink. Just don't call it a martini.
The martini is an icon. H.L. Mencken called it "the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet."
Recipes for the martini appear as early as an 1882 bartender's manual, although in addition to gin and vermouth, that concoction called for sweet syrup. Over the years, the martini got drier and drier. Martinis were popular in Prohibition speak-easies, probably because it was easier to make gin in a bathtub than whisky.
Ever after, the martini was the height of urbanity.
"The martini is a city dweller, a metropolitan," the American writer Bernard DeVoto wrote. "It is not to be drunk beside a mountain stream or anywhere else in the wilds."
Think Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant and art deco furnishings in wood-paneled bars. The martini was the drink to accompany witty repartee at the Algonquin roundtable. What Fred Astaire â in white tie and tails â drank just before he took Ginger Rogers to the dance floor.
A martini defined cool and modern. The 1950s jazz saxophonist Paul Desmond said he wanted the sound of a dry martini.
The TV show Mad Men is set around the same time Desmond composed the Dave Brubeck Quartet's hit "Take Five." Mad Men is careful with period details and gets the martini-style cool just right. Many of the characters drink martinis at bars, cocktail parties or when they get off the train from Manhattan.
Mad Men also shows the downside of the three-martini lunch: car crashes, failed marriages, lost jobs.
The martini's star faded in the late 1960s and '70s with opposition to expense account dining, health food stores gaining on liquor stores and the popularity of other mind-altering substances.
Classic cocktails made a comeback in the 1980s, but things began to run amok. Frou-frou-tinis featured flavored vodka or fruit purees. Even bacon bits have become common in raucous bars with loud music.
Which is all wrong for the drink that writer E.B. White called the elixir of quietude.
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