Martini

by Frank Moorhouse

  Whatever this Flirtini was, despite the homage of its name, it is nowhere near, or even related to the martini. Nor was the favourite drink of the women in the TV series, The Cosmopolitan – vodka, Cointreau, lime and cranberry juice – which is perhaps a good drink in itself but not a relative of the martini. Why doesn’t this Sarah Jessica Parker and her friends who like these drinks find their own glass and leave the martini glass alone?

  Voltz told me that in New York City there is on sale a stem-less martini glass: the conical portion is kept upright when not in use by setting it in a special globe packed with crushed ice. I said to him that the International Martini Glass Design Competition to which I was invited (I voted for no change in the shape of the glass), had as one of its finalists an oystershell-shaped glass which worked the same way – it rested on a bed of ice.

  I became excited because these stemless, footless glasses resemble the original ‘tumbler’, the word we sometimes use for a basic drinking glass.

  At Delmonico’s (a place he detests but which has history), I was able to tell Voltz that drinking glasses were once made with a rounded bottom but with no handle or foot and so that they would not stand upright – they would tumble.

  ‘Why were they made like that?’

  I said that it had to do with the limitations of rudimentary glass blowing, but I really didn’t know. ‘It had to be drunk before it could be put back down on the table. It was a ceremonial thing.’

  ‘I suppose you did a lot of glass blowing at Wool-loo-mo-gong Tech.’

  ‘Wollongong. The tumbler is a Wollongong ceremonial drinking glass.’

  I told Voltz that Pepys had two tumblers made from silver. Eventually a tumbler holder was invented just like the martini chillers we had been describing.

  ‘Where’s the glass-blowing in these silver tumblers of Pepys? I suspect the name comes from the tumbles of the drinker, and sometimes I believe that you story-tell some of this stuff. I doubt the glass-blowing story.’

  He was right. I have no idea why tumblers were first made in that shape.

  Voltz brightened up and said, ‘I seem to remember that Pepys liked the word “tumble” to describe sexual pleasure. If my memory serves me well, he and a girl went to “a stable by the Dog tavern, and there did he tumble her and toss her”.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s my recollection that “tumble” was one of Pepys’ favourite words for sexual pleasure.’

  ‘We’ll always use the word “tumbler” now,’ Voltz declared. ‘In honour of Pepys and in honour of sexual pleasure.’

  ‘Yes. We won’t say glasses or beakers.’

  ‘No. Just “tumblers” from now on.’

  Martini traditionalists do not admit a glass flecked with colour, and, as Voltz incessantly points out, nor do we approve of the fashion for the giant glass.

  Though I have come across a martini glass with a gold rim and I am of two minds about this and can imagine an argument for it. The use of gold in design is always suspect because of its connection with wealth, ostentation, money-sickness, gold bath taps and gold toilet seats. However, the gold-rimmed glass could be seen as a design echo of the ‘yellow mellow martini’ and as a tilt towards a respectable and sound sense of splendour.

  There is the legendary Algonquin cobalt-blue martini glass, not used in my time at the Algonquin and which I have never seen, which I guess we have to accept out of literary respect for the Round Table crowd who drank from these glasses. The problem is that it deprives the martini of its cold, transparent lucidity.

  The diligent Voltz continues with his search for the ‘right-sized martini glass’. He once wrote: ‘… I’m just back from London. I stayed at the Savoy, which as you know has a good “American Bar” renowned for its martinis – this time I noticed that they now serve them in little, tulip-shaped glasses, which feel like something they found in the attic in the 1920s and seem to me to be just right. To change the subject, I went to Tiffany’s last week to buy a friend a wedding present, and was distinctly disappointed with the quality of their cocktail glassware. Expensive stuff, yet lacking in the kind of under stated shape and cut you want from a good highball or whiskey glass. I’ve had much better luck at a place called Fish’s Eddy, which sells seconds and discontinued glasses from old restaurants and hotels.’

  I was interested in Voltz’s mention of the American Bar at the Savoy where I often drink with my agent Derek Johns. American bars in Europe once imitated those American bars from the old movies but are now generally odd places where the women in the bar are paid to use their sexuality to encourage men to buy expensive drinks. They border on prostitution but, in my experience, the sex on the premises is restricted to touching and limited cuddling. No lap dancing though.

  Another challenge to the classic martini glass is the Hongell glass made familiar by Hitchcock’s film The Birds (1963). The martinis are served in a glass that is wide at the rim and then narrows down slightly to a heavy heel or base – no stem. Voltz will not discuss it.

  Camille Paglia, one of my favourite social theorists, disappointed me when she said of the film, ‘Hitchcock sculpts the human body in space … I love the way Tippi [Hedren] handles cigarettes and a martini glass with such remarkable sophistication. It is gesturalism raised to the level of choreography.’

  My disappointment is that Paglia should’ve unthinkingly accepted the glass used in the film as a ‘martini glass’. It is not a martini glass. True, they say that they are drinking martinis but the glass is aberrant.

  Hitchcock not only discovered Tippi Hedren but also put this aberrant martini glass into Tippi’s hand. Because of the popularity of the film it is now known as the Tippi glass and sold as such.

  Glass designer Goran Hongell, one of the pioneers of the Finnish glass tradition in the 1950s, designed the glass. Hitchcock discovered Hongell’s martini glass at the Ritz Bar in London and bought some to take back to his home in the US, but also decided to use two of these glasses in The Birds. As it is, the Hongell glass is my preferred picnic glass because it can be used outdoors for a diversity of drinks including wine but never for martinis. Its heavy base is ideal for resting on the ground or on grass and it keeps it from tumbling.

  Perhaps the holding of a martini glass is part of our own ‘gesturalism’, and becomes part of our own image when we are seated in a bar holding a martini – what I call the affiliation awareness in the drinking of the martini. Perhaps, when holding a martini, we are fleetingly relocated into a scene composed of all the films, cartoons and books from which we have learned of the martini – perhaps we become part of a psychological image not of our own making, but one we’ve earned the right to inhabit if our attitude to life and to the martini are right. We become momentarily conscious of our part in a historical continuity; we are for a second or two partly embedded in its imagery. This in turn releases us a little from the reality of our own personality, glamorises us a little. As we hold the martini we join a great and wonderful crowd from the past.

  By the way, the Austrian glass company Riedel has seventy styles of drinking glass, including a 5oz martini glass (less than half the size of a Twist martini glass but not small enough to make Voltz happy) and glasses for grappa and for water. Voltz says that the gauge of a sophisticated household is the number of glasses it possesses which are appropriate to the beverage. I agree.

  The Olive and the Lemon Tree

  In my ‘Martini’ story, the eighteen-year-old girl, drinking her first martini which the older man had just mixed, pauses to admire the beauty of the drink, and observes that the olive on the toothpick gives the drink an axis.

  He had never before observed this. She has taught him something in return.

  She also asks what she should do with the olive: ‘Do you eat it at the beginning or the end of the drink or is it just a … garnish?’

  I now remember a note from a sassy, martini-drinking woman friend which read, ‘… it’s a long slow day after an evening of (gin) martinis. I felt it im
portant to practise the art of cocking the tail to ensure that I would remember how to drink elegantly and appropriately for when we catch up. But I was in trouble from my companion for eating all the olives and not leaving one in my glass until the drink was drunk. I am clearly out of practice as well as out of sorts.’

  Without consulting Voltz, I rang her back immediately to tell her that the leaving of one olive in the martini was a purist position – some argue that the olive should not be eaten, that it is purely a visual pleasure. I told her that this line is pushed by the American Standard Dry Martini Club; also Tin House magazine in NYC argues that one olive should be left until the end in their own specially designed martini. I said I knew of no such universal rules concerning the olive. It is only in recent years that bartenders have put more than one olive in a martini – I have seen up to five, but this then requires a larger glass and pushes the martini towards being a snack. The Bloody Mary also went through a phase of being loaded up with vegetables, celery and so on.

  It seems to me that you may eat up the olives any old way: meditatively, impulsively, unthinkingly – although, oddly, this goes against the central tradition of the martini, that it is a drink about which nothing relating to it is done unthinkingly.

  The other quandry of having more than one olive is that if it is unpitted, the toothpick has to be pushed through the olive to avoid the pit. This is fine with one olive and keeps the aesthetic of the martini. More than one and you end up with a toothpick and a lopsided string of olives. Of course with stuffed olives, the toothpick can be centred and the resulting formation of olives looks correct.

  As the man explains in the story, some people like to prick the olive with the toothpick and watch the oil seep out into the drink. But you should not sit at the bar spending too much time pricking the olives in a martini and watching the oil seep out. You will attract worried attention.

  When I was living with Sarah Ducker and her son Harry, who was about six, he would enjoy mixing the martinis at the cocktail hour. He would have a juice and I would have a martini while we watched the television news. During one mixing he misremembered my instructions and put the olives in the martini shaker rather than the glass. After he had finished his mixing, we fished them out of the cocktail shaker and put them in the martini glass. It was, accidentally, an acceptable innovation to the martini. From then on we called this martini a ‘Harry Catterns’ and now years later I sometimes make my martini this way in memory of the good times we had together. If he can still remember how to make a martini, that is a fine continuation of the pageant of learning, from Norma through me to Harry – a stretch of more than fifty years.

  Hundreds of cartoons have appeared about the martini – especially in the New Yorker magazine which began in 1926 when the martini began to assert itself as the cocktail of taste and discernment. It was best known as the drink of the Algonquin Hotel Round Table lunching club, established in the 1920s, made up of writers from the New Yorker and other literati, although the Round Table predates the New Yorker. Dorothy Parker was one of its better known members. The Round Table is recreated in the film Mrs Parker, where Dorothy is played by Jennifer Jason Leigh.

  My proudest moment in martini drinking was when I returned to the old Blue Bar at the Algonquin after two years’ absence. The only person in the bar, I seated myself on a stool, having just arrived from a twenty-five-hour flight from Australia. Without looking around, Dave Gresham, the bartender, Vietnam vet, a fan of my books, who was polishing glasses (as an idle bartender should – according to Dave to remove any detergent residue) said, ‘Bombay gin, Noilly Prat the old way, straight-up, two stuffed olives – right, Moorhouse?’ He had seen me in the mirror.

  It was a Sunday evening and pouring with rain and after an hour no one else had come into the bar. Dave went to the door and put up the closed sign and we settled in for a night of drinking. There in the old Blue Bar of the Algonquin, we were visited by some great ghosts including, of course, Dorothy Parker, John Cheever, Harold Ross and others. I think the bar had originally been located in another part of the lobby area but the ghosts found us all right.

  Many things about the martini garnish are argued in pursuit of perfection – olive pitted or unpitted, stuffed or unstuffed, olive or a twist of lemon peel, or whether a drop of brine from the olive jar improves the martini or whether it makes something else called, positively, a ‘dirty martini’.

  In the bar of the White Horse (where Dylan Thomas died), I once asked Voltz about the dirty martini.

  ‘I am sure that the dirty martini seems to be a name given to something that came about by accident,’ he said. ‘Often when olives are added to martinis, a little brine from the olive jar gets into the drink from the olives, sometimes more than at other times. Someone, somewhere decided to call it a dirty martini and to intentionally put in a little more brine than would normally come off the olives. Hardly a rage here in New York where The Crazy Drinks are in fashion, although I want to believe they’re dying out.’

  We discussed whether in the mixing of a dirty martini, the brine should go into the shaker rather than the glass.

  Voltz replied quite sensibly that there would always be some brine in any martini from the olives and to add more brine into the shaker at the mixing was a tricky business. ‘It requires a developed sense of judgement. And some dexterity. You have to be aware of how much has gone into the shaker and then pre-calculate how much might get into the drink when the olives go into the glass, which in turn depends on who is handling the olives, whether they are a sloppy sort of person or not. There is a certain sloppy style which I don’t mind as long as it flows from a generous personality and not from carelessness.’

  Voltz said that he did not believe in using the product now marketed as ‘olive juice’. There is an olive juice made from the crushed leaves of the olive tree but this is not what we are talking about. And do not add pure olive oil to a martini.

  ‘When Roosevelt met with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin in Tehran in 1943…’ I offered.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Tehran.’ Voltz shook his head at my having teasingly and slyly held back the evidence for my nomination of Tehran as a martini city.

  ‘… Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin were in Tehran discussing the end of the war. It was there that they agreed to create an international organisation to maintain the peace – the UN.’

  ‘Come on – out with your arcane knowledge.’

  ‘Patience. Roosevelt served each of them his favourite dirty martini, which was two parts gin, one part vermouth, and a splash of olive brine.’

  ‘Very good.’ He made a noise resembling a chuckle, for he rarely chuckles. ‘Tehran is in.’

  ‘Yes. Tehran is, I think, possibly a martini city for this reason alone.’

  ‘But,’ he said, ‘not having been to Tehran I would suspect that one would have to bring one’s own ingredients and make the drink oneself. However, I agree that it would be historically obtuse to visit Tehran and not drink a dirty martini.’

  I pointed out that Roosevelt’s proportions of vermouth and gin were those of the 1930s and 1940s, although I would have expected his martini to contain a drop or two of orange bitters which was part of the martini back then. But Roosevelt had gone to the trouble to take his martini makings with him to Tehran and it is unlikely that he would have forgotten the orange bitters, so he must have abandoned it by then.

  ‘I am unsure about the “splash” of brine,’ Voltz said. ‘That seems to me to be too much. A half-splash would also seem a lot. Maybe a flick or two of brine per glass would be right, though flicking is always a ticklish business.’

  ‘I have known people to use an ounce of brine for two martinis.’

  ‘That is wrong. That would topple the martini over into something else.’

  ‘Is there a difference between a splash and a dash?’

  ‘From what I remember from my mother’s Country Women’s Association of NSW Cookbook a dash is a sixth of a teaspoon
.’

  ‘Are all teaspoons the same size then? In Wollongong?’

  ‘Yes. And I think that the word splash is longer than the word dash, which suggests that a splash is larger than a dash. Not much larger. That’s what’s known as the Lexicographer’s Measure.’

  ‘It seems to me that the dash has more force to it, less control; you are likely to get more from a dash than from a splash.’

  ‘No, you’re wrong about that. Splash is bigger. But I do know that both are less than an ounce.’

  ‘I think that in future it’s wise to always ask a bartender if he’s using a dash or a splash and what his measure is.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And a flick. A flick is less than a dash.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But it has more letters in it than dash – what about the so-called Lexicographer’s Measure?’

  ‘Flick is a thin word. Dash is a fat word. It goes flick, dash, splash.’

  ‘It’s a tricky business.’

  I was also able to tell Voltz that after signing the act repealing Prohibition in 1933, Franklin Roosevelt celebrated by mixing the first legal martini in the White House.

  ‘And I have another Roosevelt martini-diplomacy story.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Legend has it that when they met again in Yalta in 1945, Roosevelt again made a martini for Stalin. He’d wanted to serve it with a twist but had forgotten the lemons. He apologised to Stalin. Next morning Roosevelt woke up to find a lemon tree with two hundred lemons on it outside his residence there in Yalta. Stalin had had a lemon tree up-rooted from his native Georgia and flown in overnight and replanted.’

  Voltz looked startled. ‘You mean that Roosevelt made a dirty martini with olive brine and then put in a twist?’