Martini

by Frank Moorhouse

  Voltz has a friend who crafts each martini separately for each guest but he himself does not.

  This brings us to the question of the lost orange bitters. Up to the 1950s orange bitters – a dash or a few drops to the glass – was sometimes added to the martini. Why this stopped is still being studied. Plays, films, books and bartenders’ guides can be carbon-dated by their martini recipe. If the recipe mentions orange bitters or Angostura bitters, it comes from before 1960.

  In the interests of research after finding that even the best bars no longer carry orange bitters, I went looking for it at David Jones’ liquor department. While waiting to speak to the manager I overheard a conversation between him and a dapper man in his eighties.

  The old man was asking about orange bitters. He wanted to buy a bottle – as did I.

  I couldn’t restrain myself and butted in, saying to the old man, ‘Did I hear you correctly? Are you after orange bitters?’

  He said that indeed he was.

  ‘How do you use the orange bitters?’ I asked the old man.

  ‘In martinis,’ he said, with a touch of impatience. ‘I bought a bottle years ago, but I only use a dot or two and the bottle lasts a long time.’

  I told them both I was also searching for orange bitters. The manager was astounded. ‘I’ve never been asked for orange bitters in my twenty-five years in the liquor business. And today two people come in and ask for it at the same time!’

  I looked at the older man and had an intimation of mortality. I would be him in twenty years, I would be there asking for orange bitters and behind me would be a younger man seeking the same thing.

  David Jones did not stock it nor was it listed in the products offered by their suppliers. It has all but disappeared.

  Bartender Leonard Opai (in Maori his name means ‘all good’) at the Bayswater Brasserie did find some orange bitters and we experimented with it. The orange bitters he had was a Dutch brand named Hoppe but it is a liqueur (a sweet alcoholic drink flavoured with fruits, herbs, spices, chocolate and so on) and did not work in the martini. The indefatigable Voltz tracked down the last manufacturer of orange bitters in the US, the Fee Brothers, in Rochester, New York state. Voltz said when he rang to order some orange bitters from them the woman on the other end of the telephone asked him to hold on while she ‘found a pencil’ to write down his order.

  The Fee Brothers’ orange bitters is made from water, glycerine, alcohol, and the oil of bitter oranges from the West Indies. Bitters are something of the opposite to the sweet liqueurs. The famous Angostura bitters is distilled in Trinidad, named after a town in Venezuela and allegedly uses a secret recipe of herbs and spices from 1824 when it was developed as a general purpose stomach medicine. It probably has wormwood in it.

  Voltz and I tried it but decided that the last thing a martini needs is another flavour – we calculated that with vermouth and gin and the olive, not counting the wood of the toothpick or minerals in the local water, it already had more than twenty botanicals in play.

  ‘In life that is more than enough,’ Voltz said.

  There is something called a Virgin martini. A woman told me that when she felt like a martini but didn’t feel like drinking she’d make a shaker of ice and water with just a dash of gin, a taste of vermouth – enough to give the drink a suggestion of the martini – and add a twist. ‘I drink these sometimes while reading,’ she said, ‘and while dreaming of a martini.’

  Voltz said that you had to be open to intoxication when you drink a martini or otherwise steer well away from it. ‘The martini is a pathway,’ he said. ‘You either take it or you don’t.’

  ‘In life, generally?’

  He looked at me. ‘Are you taking the piss?’

  A Captivating Observation

  In my experience, the martini is the only drink that a waiter will advise you not to order because he or she does not believe that they make it properly at the bar of the restaurant in which they work.

  Although, once in a Greek restaurant when Sam Dettmann and I ordered a bottle of retsina, the waiter muttered, ‘Brave souls.’

  The Question of Coldness

  As I intimated earlier, there is even occasional dissent about the requirement of absolute coldness in a martini. One connoisseur argues that the minuscule amount of melting ice water which finds its way into the drink during the time that the gin and vermouth are together with the ice in the shaker, actually improves it. He argues that this smidgin of water is needed to give a smoothness to the ingredients and to take the ‘burn’ out of the alcohol.

  It is true that Scotch and bourbon drinkers usually add some water, according to taste, to their drink for this reason.

  I think that relieving the gin of any burn is the role of the gentler vermouth.

  It is also achieved by having the martini ‘on the rocks’, a poetic Americanism meaning with ice. I remember that on my first trip to the US I was very resistant to American usage because I felt I would sound inauthentic if I used Americanisms. I would not say ‘on the rocks’ when ordering a drink. I would say, ‘With ice’. And each time the bartender would come back, ‘On the rocks?’ and I would be pressured into saying, ‘Yes’. A martini on the rocks does mean that water increasingly joins with the drink as the ice melts. I do not find this unpleasant, although I would order a martini on the rocks only if it looked as if the drink was not going to be cold enough because of poor bar practice or when seated alfresco on a sunny day.

  One problem with a martini on the rocks is that some bars will use a whisky glass to serve the martini because it needs more space for the ice. This problem is overcome by using the controversial giant martini glass.

  Another connoisseur, Howard A. Rodman, is from my school of thought about coldness: ‘Another crucial recommendation is that the ice be so cold and hard that it won’t melt, since nothing’s worse than a watery martini … Let me give you my personal recipe, the fruit of long experimentation and guaranteed to produce perfect results. The day before your guests arrive, put all the ingredients – glasses, gin and shaker – in the refrigerator. Use a thermometer to make sure the ice is about twenty degrees below zero (centigrade).’

  He adds a refinement that I do not practice: ‘Don’t take anything out until your friends arrive; then pour a few drops of Noilly Prat and half a demitasse spoon of Angostura bitters over the ice in the shaker. Shake it, then pour the liquid out, leaving only the ice, which retains a faint taste of both. Then pour straight gin over the ice in the shaker, shake it again, and serve.’

  When I questioned Voltz about ice and the martini when we were in Marianne’s bar in New York, he was uncharacteristically embarrassed and excited. He compulsively brushed his chinos. ‘I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I’ve discovered the way to create the perfect ice cubes for cocktails.’

  Although unsettled by the demonic nature of his confession I felt I should go along with him. I asked him to describe the Voltz Ice Cube Method.

  ‘You fill the plastic ice trays about halfway full and put them in the freezer.

  ‘I know little about refrigeration but what I do know is that ice cubes in the tray freeze from the outside to the inside. After about an hour there’s a kind of ice “shell” in the mould: ice on the outside surrounding a core of unfrozen water. You take them out at this stage.

  ‘Then you twist the ice tray. Twisting the plastic tray seems to cause a bubble of trapped, concentrated air to float out of the water to the top of the “shell”.

  ‘I have experimented by pricking each of the semi-frozen cubes with a toothpick and then putting in more water to displace the air bubble.

  ‘The resultant ice cubes are denser and perfect for the martini shaker or other drinks: the cubes last longer, are an interesting tone of grey, and have a heft to the tongue which is very pleasing. But I warn you, you have to work to get rid of those spider-shaped air bubbles trapped inside.’

  I must have concealed my true reactions – which were to be worried abo
ut him – and instead showed interest in his ice cube method. I think I said something like, ‘That’s a real break through, Voltz’, because he looked me in the eye and put a hand on my arm. ‘Thank you for being the only one of my friends to listen sensibly to my better ice-making idea. Two other friends suggested that I desperately need to get out more.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘believe me, I understand how the idea of the perfect ice cube could capture your mind – for a time.’

  Voltz says that countries can be classified by their ice. Third World ice you never touch – bad water. And there are countries without efficient refrigeration which can’t get the ice hard enough.

  He said that in the UK, for reasons never adequately explained, the ice is always melting and doled out by the piece, never treated with generosity or understanding.

  ‘France doesn’t understand ice – you can’t buy bags of ice there.’

  According to Voltz, bad ice is a very serious matter. ‘When I was in St Petersburg, I was warned not to drink the water because it had a notorious bug in it. Yet I downed martinis – St Petersburg is a martini city because it is the West trapped in the East – until it occurred to me that the same dangerous water was used in making the ice cubes which had been in the shaker. So I switched to straight vodka like the rest of the locals. I think that’s why Russians drink vodka straight.

  ‘I always take warm alcoholic drinks as a sign of a not-very-advanced civilisation,’ Voltz said, with intensity. ‘Ice, not soap as Treitschke claimed, is the measure of civilisation. And by the way, soap can spoil a martini.’

  ‘From bad rinsing of the glass?’

  ‘No, on the hands. You have to be very careful not to wash your hands with strongly scented soap – in bar toilets avoid those dispensers of perfumed liquid soap; you should wash only with water, because the smell of soap on your hands will interfere with the taste of the martini. And food. You have to be careful with perfumed soap, it’s a gastronomic trap.’

  Going back to our discussion of ice, I told Voltz that refrigeration does not kill bacteria but it does prevent bacteria from breeding.

  He said that he was glad I knew things like that. It made him feel safe in my company.

  I drew his attention to the scene from the film Basic Instinct, in which Sharon Stone makes a drink at her beach house while detective Michael Douglas watches. She takes large chunks of ice from the fridge and violently breaks them with an ice pick (an ice pick had been used as a murder weapon in the film).

  Douglas watches her forceful smashing of the ice and says, ‘You got anything against ice cubes?’

  Stone laughs, and says, ‘I like rough edges.’

  I asked Voltz where the film-makers would have found ice like that in the US. ‘It’s the sort of ice you get from breaking up one of those old blocks which went into ice chests.’

  Apparently Voltz had given this some thought himself. ‘They would have had to have it specially made by the Props Department so that she could say the line and get to use the ice pick. But I know what she means about ice. I empathise with her about that. I think that the irregular chunks of ice would expose more surface to a martini on the rocks and chill it better. I would like to see that tested. And it would give the martini an alpine look.’

  I told him I had once chipped ice off a glacier in New Zealand to put in my drink. I could see by the way he looked at his college ring that he was impressed. He returned to Sharon Stone. ‘Maybe we should follow that up – see where they got the ice for Basic Instinct?’

  ‘I could ask my friends in the film industry. It might be worth knowing.’

  I could see that we were already overloaded with investigations and that this would be low on our list.

  ‘There is another kind of ice,’ I said, ‘which I would love to try in a martini. A Norwegian mariner friend who returned from the Antarctic had been scuba diving down there to make repairs to his ship. He told me that there are fine ice crystals suspended in the water. If we could devise a way of suspending the ice crystals in the martini that would be a breakthrough.’

  Voltz was interested and asked questions. ‘But I am loath to meddle much more with things, especially suspended things.’

  ‘It would seem that the drink would have to be at something like minus thirty for the ice crystals to form.’

  ‘There is a vast difference between tweaking on the way to perfection and meddling for the sake of it,’ he said, closing the question for now.

  I passed on Voltz’s ice cube experiment by email with a martini-drinking writer friend in Paris and he replied, ‘… you and I have covered a lot of territory over the years, and visited many interesting places together and, all in all, had discussions that have ranged from the wildly amusing to the deeply depressing; we even, I recall, once went through a dumpster on a Paris street outside the old Zinc Bar then being demolished, in the deluded belief that there were precious Art Nouveau relics somehow buried inside it (why we thought this, I cannot even begin to guess, although it was after lunch).

  ‘But nothing that we have ever discussed can compare with the valuable insights that you have provided by sending me the Voltz Ice Cube Method. Ice cube clarity; density; structure; the refracting brilliance of “treated” ice cubes compared with the cloudy patina of “free range” ice cubes. Thank you for pointing out, in such an understated and kindly manner, the risks which befall a writer after a while …’

  I also shared it with my publisher, Jane Palfreyman, who was proposed to at the inaugural Sydney University Martini Ball and invited back the following year with her husband, David Kirk, as Mr and Mrs Martini. ‘My God, where do you find these kindred souls?’ she said. ‘I must meet Voltz. I am ashamed to recall the countless times I have just shoved the ice tray into the freezer without a thought to the intricate aesthetic and molecular processes occurring within.’

  So far the Voltz Ice Cube Method has yet to spread widely, perhaps because it requires some sense of timing and an idle life.

  In New York you can buy a martini glass chiller, a balloon-shaped bowl which is designed to allow the martini glass to sit on crushed ice when it is not being drunk. Voltz is reluctant to try it, feeling that it is part of the drift towards ‘gadgetry’ in drinking. We agreed that such a glass holder would take away the aesthetic pleasure of the image of the martini standing on a well-polished old wooden bar.

  I had the final word on coldness by suggesting to Voltz that the martini is a drink combining the paradox of both fire and ice. In the chill of the martini you find fire.

  To quote the American poet, Robert Frost:

  Some say the world will end in fire,

  Some say in ice.

  From what I’ve tasted of desire

  I hold with those who favour fire.

  My lover Paul met Robert Frost when he was at university in the US and read his work to me when we were in bed together when I was seventeen. Years later I was to read the poems of Robert Frost to my young lover while driving through Maine – the pageant of learning.

  This Thing Called Gin

  I first drank gin as a seventeen-year-old cadet journalist when a woman at a backyard barbecue in the western suburbs of Sydney tried to seduce me into joining the Communist Party. I was a young socialist still exploring the socialist options and had been going to Party activities including their gym class – vaulting horses and medicine balls. That was as close to being a communist as I got.

  I drank too much of the gin and ended up vomiting in the garden. I never joined the Party and instead, I turned away from revolutionary socialism and the Soviet Union model and became more interested in the cooperative movement. I began describing myself as a Guild Socialist or a Cooperative Socialist, feeling that cooperative organisation should replace competitive corporations. I was then to meet up with the Sydney libertarians and non-violent anarchism which married well with my personality.

  The European Union Regulation that governs spirit drinks, regulation No. 176 of 1989, def
ines only two legitimate gins: London gin (commonly known brands include Bombay, Tanqueray, Beefeater, Gordon’s, Vickers, Gilbeys, Boodles, and, confusingly, Plymouth) and Dutch gin. Fleischmann’s tried to market an American gin ‘distilled from American grain’ but it did not take. Other countries made gins but ultimately it is the British or Dutch gins which are drunk worldwide.

  I am awaiting with interest the European Union’s regulation on the exact way to make a martini. I can already see the milling crowd of expert witnesses wanting to give evidence, with many more arriving daily to appear at the hearings. I could imagine Voltz there in his long overcoat and his battered college briefcase accompanied by his lawyer.

  All gins except sloe use juniper berries as a core ingredient. The juniper is a small common shrub, growing to just over a metre high, found throughout the northern hemisphere. It grows well on the slopes of the chalk downs near London, which might have given the Londoners the lead in gin-making. Juniper berries take two to three years to ripen and are then collected and laid out on shelves to dry and used for flavouring the basic alcohol.

  The alcohol in gin is a white spirit made by distilling grains such as barley, corn or rye. Other flavouring ingredients, sometimes called botanicals, are then added to the grain mash during distillation. In the making of gin the juniper berries are combined with herbs and spices including coriander, angelica, orange peel, lemon peel, cardamom, cinnamon, grains of paradise (the powder of a west African spice, hot and bitter, sometimes used as a drug, and sometimes chewed to warm the body), cubeb berries (an Asian shrub from the pepper family) and nutmeg.

  A good gin contains six to ten botanicals mixed according to the secret recipe of each manufacturer. The gin made by Tanqueray has the odd statement on its label saying, ‘made from the world’s finest botanicals’.