Martini

by Frank Moorhouse

  ‘Or perhaps also figments, meaning things invented or existing only in the imagination from the Latin fingere, “to fashion”.’

  Ophelia is a writer and a policy analyst for Human Rights Watch in New York and the daughter of London-based journalist Michele Field. I lived with them both for a time, years ago. Ophelia was ten when I tried to teach her to ride a bike. I didn’t succeed.

  Michele introduced me to the use of 3 × 5 note cards as a system and to the pocket wallet to hold them – the most important organisational innovation and tool-for-thinking-and-writing I have in my life. I think that as a writing system it is as important to me as the laptop computer.

  The Venerated Craft

  The martini tradition is perhaps the most elaborate and most elegant of all the drinking games – a sophisticated way of playing the fool. For what seems such a simple drink the martini is a whole lumbering wagontrain of rules and traditions and all martini drinkers fancy themselves as the Wagon Masters, the Keepers of the Lore – take Voltz as an example. Folklorists classify their material beginning with the general category Food and Drink then down to particulars, so to drink (N) and then to alcoholic beverage (N 447), then to distilled, N447.4 and then on and on. The martini makes its way into many categories: belief, riddle, proverb, craft, ritual, ceremony, festival, game, tale, custom, transformation, special vessel, maybe sacrament, and more.

  Traditionally from the 19th Century, the martini is a drink of gin with dry vermouth added in proportions according to taste. From the 1920s increasingly the amount of vermouth added decreased dramatically, although Roger Angell in an essay on the martini in the New Yorker says he has a sister-in-law who likes what he calls an upside-down martini – a martini with the usual proportions reversed: that is, a drink which is mostly vermouth with a little gin.

  The classic martini is served icy cold with an unpitted green olive on a wooden toothpick in a conical glass on a stem (Voltz has much to say about the size of the glass; he thinks the glasses used today for the martini are far too large).

  The first primary variation of the classic is the addition of more olives – sometimes up to three.

  The second variation is the use of a twist of lemon instead of the olive.

  The third acceptable variation is the use of a twist of lime instead of the lemon.

  The fourth acceptable variation is the use of vodka instead of gin.

  The secondary variations are pretty near infinite.

  There is a cocktail misleadingly called The Perfect Martini where sweet vermouth is used instead of dry, a drink which I have never seen ordered although it has interesting historical links to the fast crowd in Europe in the 1920s.

  The word martini now seems to have slipped into a wider meaning and is sometimes used to describe any concocted cocktail served in a martini glass; other drinks have appropriated the martini glass and Voltz and I are not happy about it.

  In the ‘Martini’ story the man tells his young lover that his mix is now ‘one part vermouth, five parts gin’. I like that mix, but I find that I also intuitively vary it a little either way – sometimes dryer, sometimes not. I have become flexible. That may be a worry. Voltz never varies his – one part vermouth, six parts gin.

  Thousands of cocktail-hour stories surround the martini, usually about the Right Way to make it.

  In another story from my book Forty-Seventeen the older man tells his young lover the story of the Martini Rescue – what to do when lost in the forest.

  ‘“You do not panic. You do not walk aimlessly. You find a shady spot with a fine view, you sit down, you take out the cocktail shaker, the gin, the vermouth, and the olives from your back pack (which every sophisticated trekker carries) and mix yourself a martini. If there is a glacier nearby you chip off some ice to chill everything down.

  ‘ “You will not be lost for long. Within a few minutes someone will come from nowhere, tap your arm and say, excuse me, you are not doing that right – that is not the way to make a proper martini.”’

  I came across another version of this martini joke from World War II in Roger Angell’s New Yorker essay. Navy pilots were given a survival kit to be opened only if they were forced to ditch their plane. The kit contained a tiny shaker, a miniature martini glass, a thimbleful of gin, an eyedropper of vermouth. The pilots were told that in the event of a crash they were to open the kit and mix themselves a martini.

  Within a minute a rescue boat would appear and the captain would shout out through his megaphone, ‘That is not the right way to make a dry martini.’

  Apart from agreement on the shape of the glass – if not size of the glass – the rules and practices for every other part of the martini process are argued about and tinkered with.

  I was going to say that the only other thing agreed upon about the making of a martini is that the martini must be cold, very cold. The gin can be kept in the household freezer compartment because it is not possible to freeze a bottle of gin in a household freezer compartment. But I recall an amendment to the coldness rule argued by another connoisseur which I will return to later.

  The first literary reference to the martini that I know of is in Jack London’s novel Burning Daylight (1910) about a man nicknamed Daylight who makes his fortune on the gold fields and goes to play the stockmarket and involve himself in other wheeling-and-dealing in Manhattan where he also learns to drink martinis.

  In Manhattan, Daylight is having drinks with some of his smart new friends; it is interesting to see what they drank back in 1910. One of the men ‘took mineral water served by a smoothly operating lackey …’ while another took Scotch, while Daylight took a martini. ‘Nobody seemed to notice the unusual ness of a martini at midnight … Daylight had long learned that martinis had their strictly appointed times and places. But he liked martinis and, being a natural man, he chose deliberately to drink when and how he pleased …’

  Even in 1910, martinis had ‘their strictly appointed times and places’ except, that is, for a ‘natural man’.

  One of my informants, Professor Hergenhan, pointed out that cocktails were drunk in Melbourne in 1870 and drew my attention to a mention in the writings of Marcus Clark to the Café de Paris in Melbourne: ‘On the opposite side is the billiard room and to the right of the door leading into it a Bar where a slim, cute-looking Yankee dispenses drinks and cocktails …’

  But we can find no reference to the martini in Marcus Clark.

  The martini these days is usually drunk as an aperitif, before lunch or dinner. For a time in the US there was something called the three-martini lunch which former president Jimmy Carter condemned in 1979 as bad for the economy. He was attacking the tax-deductable, expense-account lunch; he should’ve outlawed it on the grounds of bad gastronomy.

  When I first went to New York in 1972 some advertising people took me to a three-or-more-martini lunch at a Chinese restaurant, but apart from Voltz I know of no one who would suggest such a lunch now and would do it only to experience those days once more. It was the more creative period of American advertising but not a time of fine dining. Martinis do not go with Chinese food. The martini does not go with any meal. Wine goes with a meal.

  That is, unless you use Nora’s (Myrna Loy) approach to life in one of the Thin Man movies. Nora wakes up in the morning and says to Nick (William Powell), ‘Pass the martinis, darling, I need breakfast.’

  There are other martini-as-breakfast stories. This is how playwright Tennessee Williams’ typical writing day was recorded by a companion: ‘During those three days in New York with him [in 1969], living in a suite that, like all his dwellings, smelled of Listerine, I quickly became used to his routine. He arose early and made himself a martini, ordered a pot of coffee, and with a bottle of red wine in hand toddled into the living room and sat down at his portable typewriter, a battered Royal manual, and worked until noon. Then we went to lunch and later took a swim. He maintained the same schedule until he died.’

  I find that drinking and writing
don’t mix, except for proof-reading and revising at the end of the day’s work when I find it changes my focus and gives me some good results, although I always test these revisions when sober the next day.

  In the first Thin Man film, The Thin Man (1934), the William Powell character believes the martini should be shaken and says that each cocktail should be shaken to a different rhythm. He says the martini should be shaken to a waltz tune.

  The Manhattan cocktail, he says, is shaken to the foxtrot. The Manhattan is a relative of the martini – whisky and vermouth – and served in the same conical glass on a stem.

  The Gibson is another relative of the martini – a martini served with a pickled onion instead of an olive. Gibson drinkers are a rare and strange breed. Voltz occasionally takes a Gibson. It was named after a pen-and-ink illustrator for the American magazine Life, Charles Dana Gibson, who died in 1940. Gibson also had a style of woman named after him, The Gibson Girl. In his drawings around the beginning of the 20th Century he was the first to depict the New Woman, on her way to early liberation – riding a bicycle, playing tennis, wearing trousers. I am impressed by a man who had both a cocktail and a style of woman named for him.

  You will see that in North by Northwest Cary Grant is drinking a Gibson on a train (and yes, Voltz, I must admit that the glasses used in the film are quite small). In a bar a few months back I watched a girl drinking a Gibson and beside her she had a plate of pickled onions which she consumed steadily while slowly drinking her Gibson. I tried to talk with her about the Gibson but she was uninterested in the momentous tradition into which she had happily, if blindly, fallen. I left her alone. Onion after onion. She may have held martini drinkers in disdain.

  When I told Voltz he became rather thoughtful and said, ‘I wonder if there’s anything in examining the history of pickled foods and the development of the martini. It’s the only cocktail I can think of with anything pickled in it. And the Gibson.’

  I said that I might look into the history of pickled foods and the cocktail.

  Or I might not.

  ‘Make a note,’ he said. ‘And we should know what the onions are pickled in. What in God’s name is a “pickle”?’

  I told him that it was either vinegar or brine, used as early preservatives, before refrigeration, as a way of keeping food from going to waste, maybe with some sweetener added.

  I didn’t ‘make a note’.

  The Gimlet – gin and fresh or bottled lime juice, served in a martini glass – could perhaps be called a distant relative, or a drink which hung out with the martini crowd. It is a drink from around the great cocktail years of the 1920s. Raymond Chandler’s private eye, Philip Marlowe, drinks Gimlets.

  There is the inexplicably endless argument over whether the martini is to be stirred or shaken. The phrase ‘stirred not shaken’ seems to be used somewhere every day by headline writers, advertising copywriters, TV and film writers, and comedians. Perhaps the people who go into these occupations have a fondness for the martini and all it stands for, or for James Bond movies which were themselves exploiting the iconic potency of the martini.

  Voltz told me that he had lost a girlfriend once while at college when he asked her whether he could ‘fix her a drink’. He said, ‘I think it was the expression “fix a drink” which I have never used since, although it could also have been my act with the cocktail shaker – shaking it above my head. I have a theory that when men lift a cocktail shaker above their heads or when some guy at a meeting leans back with his hands behind his head, they are engaging in ape behaviour, that these postures allow the male sweat pheromones to reach the male or female in their company. A display of maleness which says “look at me, smell my power”.’

  It was hard to imagine a time when Voltz did not know how things were done.

  ‘But shouldn’t that work with a female? Isn’t that what we are supposed to do? Aren’t we supposed to give off pheromones and all that?’

  I could see that Voltz did not wish to talk of the problems of men with women.

  In retrospect, it explains to me why it was that Norma Crinion said to me during my martini-making lessons as a young man, when I’d put on a bartender act with the cocktail shaker over my head, ‘Precious, that doesn’t suit you. And anyhow the martini is stirred not shaken.’

  What did she mean when she said ‘it doesn’t suit you’?

  Some people love the sound of the ice in the shaker as part of the music of the cocktail. Norma always filled the shaker three-quarters full of ice.

  Voltz had something to say about the shaking when we were in Sardi’s. ‘Just a few observations: Bond does indeed order his martinis “shaken, not stirred” – except in the movie You Only Live Twice where he conspicuously orders it the other way round. I suspect this is because the screenplay is by Roald Dahl who would know that stirring is generally the preferred technique among purists as it supposedly prevents the gin from becoming “bruised”. I deviate from the purist tradition on this matter. I shake.’

  I said that I had never seen the molecular evidence for this alleged bruising.

  ‘That’s your old school, Wollongong Tech – is that how you pronounce it? “Wool-on-gong?” – talking again. Let me know if you find anything under the microscope. I’ve always wondered if scriptwriters on the Bond films have been making subtle fun of Bond all these years by having him make the martini the wrong way: something a Marxist French critic would’ve fastened onto to deconstruct Bond’s pretensions of class.’

  Voltz, Master of the Ice Cube, argued that it is more effective to chill a martini down by shaking it than by stirring it.

  ‘Take two similar glasses and put a single ice cube into the bottom of each. Now fill both with lukewarm water. Using a fork, carefully move the ice cube slowly around in the glass, trying to make sure that the ice cube is able to spend some time in virtually all parts of the liquid. Have someone else put the palm of their hand over the other glass and shake it vigorously. Continue for exactly 30 seconds. Now remove the ice cubes from both glasses and stick in your finger, or better still take a thermometer reading of the water. Which is colder? The shaken glass every time.’

  ‘Wouldn’t putting the palm of a hand over the glass interfere with the result? The warmth of the palm would be conducted into the water.’

  ‘OK, cup it with another receptacle, or a plate. Something like that.’

  I then came across the famed Toronto experiment, which I duly reported to Voltz.

  The Toronto Study on stirring and shaking was about its effect on the antioxidant activities of a martini. Antioxidants are thought to reduce the bad effects of ageing.

  THE EXPERIMENT: Shaken, not stirred: a bioanalytical study of the antioxidant activities of martinis and hence the health value respectively of the shaken and stirred martini.

  METHOD: Martinis were prepared by mixing two parts gin (6 ml) with one part vermouth (3 ml). They were either shaken vigorously (9 ml in a 100 ml medicine bottle for one minute), or stirred (9 ml in a 20 ml glass vial, using a vortex mixer).

  RESULTS: Although the reason for the superior antioxidant activity of shaken martinis is not clear, is it possible that James Bond chose shaken (not stirred) martinis because of the improved antioxidant potential? This added antioxidant effect could result in a healthier beverage. The authors have not examined any antioxidant contributions from olives.

  … the vermouth contributes more to the antioxidant properties of martinis … the combination of gin and vermouth is better than either gin or vermouth alone. Since much of the antioxidant activity of wine and whisky has been ascribed to the polyphenols they contain, the polyphenol content in the martinis was investigated using Folin reagent. The phenolic concentrations in the martinis … were in an order of magnitude lower than those in white wine or 12 year old Scotch whisky, and there was no significant difference between the phenolic contents of shaken and stirred martinis.

  When I was explaining this experiment to Voltz he said that he became
uneasy when I used words like ‘polyphenol’ and ‘reagent’. ‘It goes against the poetry of the drink,’ he said. ‘But I know it’s all about your schooling in chemistry.’ I’d said that at Wollongong Tech we did a lot of chemistry.

  I told him that two of our Prime Ministers had been martini drinkers, that I knew of. One former Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, is said to take a swig of gin from the bottle, swallow it, and then pour in some vermouth to replace the gin. He shakes the bottle and then places it in the freezer for a while until cold enough to drink, then pours ready-made martinis.

  ‘For me this crafting, while personal enough, lacks finesse, but I won’t make an issue of it.’ Voltz thought further, and said, ‘How much exactly is in a swig?’

  ‘An Australian swig?’

  ‘Do you think there is a difference between an American and Australian swig?’ He sounded genuinely interested.

  ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if there was.’

  ‘You aren’t being derogatory about America?’

  Privately, I had thought that maybe the American swig would be larger and perhaps behind that lay a criticism of their appetites. But that would be unfair. Australians have their gluttons too.

  ‘It would seem to me,’ I said, ‘that the size of the swig would have to do with the personality, but it would also have to do with the amount of vermouth you wished to introduce into the bottle.’

  ‘I don’t think it would be a cultural thing,’ Voltz decided, after a moment or so. ‘I agree, it is a matter of personality and vermouth judgement.’

  Voltz goes further in his crafting, arguing that the vermouth and gin should each be chilled separately by shaking in ice and only then should the gin and the vermouth be combined in the glass. He refuses to give any reasoning for this.