A drink for the ages
Playing the martini game
with cukes, roses and beer
THAT was a dry martini Bette Davis knocked off before she delivered her famous razor-sharp line: “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night” in the 1950 movie, “All About Eve.”
The gin martini reinvents itself every generation. What began as the elixir of quietude is being sullied almost daily. There is even a Scottish label gin with an unexpected infusion of flavors of cucumber and rose petals. There is also a Beer Martini, and we shall get into that later.
This leads me to worry that no one is drinking the real gin martini anymore.
I was aghast to watch a comely young woman elbowing the bar at Copia’s in Rock Island and drinking a chocolate martini, its glass edges dappled with what looked like a crushed Hershey bar. I smiled my innocently boyish grin and corrected her, “You’re not drinking a martini. Real martinis are straight gin and 10 drops of vermouth.”
She looked at me in disgust. She thought for one sip and said, “You’re being mean because I drink chocolate martinis and I’m young, not old and 60 like you.”
I coughed. “M’dear, I would be happy to be 60 again,” and adjourned closer to the sound system so I could better hear Sinatra singing, “It’s been a very good year.”
Martinis change, like the year we live in. I like to check martini menus wherever I travel, marveling at the imagination of the bartenders, and disgusted at what has happened to the straight gin drink that was the choice of Churchill, Roosevelt and James Bond, who says in most 007 movies:
“Bond ... James Bond, Yes, my martini is very dry.”
In north and south and in the Quad-Cities, martinis are being desecrated, their originally intended recipe of straight gin and vermouth abused regularly.
Far up along Lake Superior, I once asked Jennifer, a curly-haired server at Ledge Rock Grille, for the house’s martini menu. She said the Superior Sunrise Martini is a favorite, made with rum and peach schnapps, with a slice of peach on a pick instead of olives. But no gin.
There is always the debate if a martini should be stirred or shaken. “The Little Black Book of Martinis” — a guide to the king of cocktails — says, “Shaking produced the drink with the most antioxidants, and thus the healthier drink.”
That is a moot point, but professed to be true after a study by the biochemistry lab at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, where they must have sipped a lot of martinis to find out.
Wandering hither and nowhere, I recently came upon a place called Farlow’s in southern Florida. When I asked about a straight-up gin martini, the server looked at me as if I must be a Neanderthal man. She said that few people order those anymore. If I wanted to be hip, I would like their Cheesecake Martini, a blend of raspberry rum, white crème de cocoa and rimmed with — of all unexpected things — graham cracker crumbs.
The martini almost succumbed until all these fancy versions came to be favored as a drink for young people. There will always be new versions until the next generation comes along.
The latest I heard was a Polish Martini served at a bar in Winona, Minn. The bar is in a Polish end of town. A Polish Martini is draft beer, served in a stemmed martini glass containing about 2 ounces of beer and a green onion stem.
Bill Wundram can be contacted at (563) 383-2249 or bwundram@qctimes.com.