In Florence I had martinis in a cocktail bar, on the other side of which were a group of Russian women in their fifties, all very beautiful, with thuggish over-muscled young men dressed like Peter Andre, their eyebrows plucked. The maitre d was a beautiful old Italian in a Gucci suit. “I get two a year, I keep them very well.” His English had a Liverpool twang, discordant and wrong, and he conducted his bartenders with a maestro’s skill. His martinis came in the proper glasses, very icy, soft. “I like to go to London once a year to drink a martini at the Savoy and make sure mine are still better.” One of our party, a Brooklynite in a big fluffy sweater, is dancing with one of the Russian women while her companion drinks Red Bull and vodka, his Stakhanovite’s hand nearly crushing his glass. The pianist plays My Way.
I have certain habits: at a train station, an airport, aboard a ferry I’ll always get an egg mayonnaise sandwich; no egg mayonnaise sandwich has ever let me down because I’ve never expected anything from it. I will always order a margarita pizza: this thing of purity gives you the measure of a place: if it is excellent, it is excellent indeed, but if it’s mediocre it will always be reasonably nice. If I am somewhere drinking cocktails, I’ll order a martini - to get the measure of the place. This is risky, though, since a martini is a thing of the sublime and thus easy to ruin.
The worst martini I’ve ever had was in Bar Canova in Rome. I’d been told, again and again to order a spritz and only a spritz because everything else there would be made terribly, but late at night, after too many spritz around the city had left me dizzy with sugar, I decided to chance it. A fool. The bartender, a not-entirely friendly man, threw three or four small pieces of ice into the shaker, about a glass of vermouth and a little less gin before giving it a watery shake. The glass he took from behind his head was grimy and he washed it, hot, did not cool it after. The drink was warm, sickly, ungarnished and he did not even look at me as he slid it toward me.
So what is it done properly? It is dangerous, utterly uncivilised, yet given a veneer of respectability by dress — it’s glass, manner — temperature, exotic trappings — vermouth, olive. Without these what is a martini? It is a tarted up double measure of gin, a shot, has the same potential for violence and disorder, made from gin, “the principal cause of all the vice & debauchery committed among the inferior sort of people”. Only after drinking martinis have I gotten entirely stupid: lied through my teeth with no hope of being believed, slept on the floor of my kitchen, my head beneath a chair.
The most dangerous are drunk alone and made almost surreptitiously in glasses kept in one’s freezer with whatever gin or vodka is around, also from the freezer, with the brine of, variously, pickled turnips, conichons, cauliflower, carrot, pickled ginger — a mistake — onions, and, obviously, olives. If there is vermouth, it goes in, though only for the first and, sometimes, second drink. I’m cooking — not simply sitting — and watching The Sopranos. The first of these steadies. The second entices one to the third, it is more delicious and doubts about the efficacy of drinking alone are dispelled. The third muddles you into thinking the fourth is a good idea. The fourth is a mistake and you burn something, forget to salt the pasta water, hurt someone’s feelings. This is the Cook’s Martini for which you shall need,
A glass from the freezer
Vermouth, if you have it, refrigerated
Vodka or gin, from the freezer
A vegetable pickled in a saltwater brine
If you have it, pour a small jot of vermouth into the glass, swirl it around, and discard, probably into whatever you’re cooking. Fill the glass, almost, to the brim with your spirit and add a little glug of brine and its vegetable. But these are not really martinis. Simply mother’s ruin, cold. The missing ice is the most important ingredient in a regular martini, it gives it its cloud and softens its flavour, besides, the martini is a thing of balance. And that balance includes actions as well as ingredients. This martini is imbalanced.
My favourite martini olive is the vibrant green, grandiose and buttery Nocellara del Belice, prepared alla Castelvetrano. They linger on the tongue and contrast wonderfully with the force of the gin. I favour getting mine from a deli but jarred are fine, so don’t tax yourself. If you find a brand you enjoy, stick to it religiously. On occasion I like to use darker olives, they give the drink a wonderful purply-bruise hue which reminds me of childhood scraps. But this is the sort of decision one makes during a flight of fancy, like a trip to Italy, and one soon becomes homesick. Do not make a martini with those olives stuffed with a pepper, the brine is completely wrong.
It is the brine that matters most and so a well made martini with bad brine is deep tragedy, which is why the most disappointing martini I have drunk, though not the worst, was at the Stamba Hotel in Tblisi. It’s a sexy sort of place, a bit tacky in an expensive and tasteful way, Soho House mixed with Sketch, with bemused looking backpackers, Georgian criminals, rich young women, successful-ish artists, tourists, all sitting beneath a big square chandelier. In the distance, in the dining room, members of the vague global rich eat indifferent plates of pasta, quinoa, bright salads, as they might anywhere else. My friend Gwantsa ordered some horrible, bright thing and I asked for a martini, dry and dirty. Vermouth only touching the only glass, good, the gin from Plymouth, good, a teaspoon sloshing in two measures of brine, perfect. “Gaumarjos!” and then quite vile disappointment: the brine is horrible and the drink spoiled. I down it — I’m not wasteful — and order a negroni, which one can’t mess up, aside from by using tarty and overpriced artisanal alternatives to Martini Rosso and Campari.
Generally I like my martini very dirty, and take a puerile pleasure in telling the bartender. At home I will pour brine from the jar, but if you want to stay consistent the teaspoon is a the best measurement. Paszkowski in Florence, a classy place, give you a small silver-plated jug of brine with your martini, allowing you to decide how dirty you are. This is a brilliant idea, but one must be careful of overexcitement, to not imbalance creation, which I did on my first (of four).
But what is this drink? The first to be called a martini sounds disgusting: half gin, half vermouth, bitters, syrup, maraschino cherry. Maybe from San Francisco, maybe from a gold-rush town called Martinez, the drink’s first name. A miner who’d struck gold asked for champagne, no the house special, no for Scotch, but the bar had none in, so the bartender made up a drink for him and named it after the town. No, it was on the way to Martinez that the bartender made it, naming it for the destination. No it wasn’t California at all, it was in Manhattan first and was a bastardised version of a Manhattan and that’s where the name came from. Court rulings in SF and Martinez have both held up their own claims, and no one knows, and it hardly matters, since the first Martini wasn’t anything anyone would drink now. It was disgusting.
Over time all this was shed, until only the vermouth remained, stubborn. The IBA still insists on one part vermouth to six parts gin. Yuck. It is not that the vermouth is unimportant, it is deeply so, but I take it as a mark of my own special sophistication to take up that maxim, attributed to many, that a good martini is made by waving one’s gin in the direction of Italy. At one place I found the dry martini was made with a spritzer containing the vermouth — by spraying onto the glass before the gin went in: four sprays each. But here there was no gambling, no personality. A bartender ought to bring chance into the equation or their drinks will lack magic, there is a tragedy in measures, the same that exists in branded sausages and blended whiskies.
I spent a long time dropping just a little in, always a bit too much, never quite right until I was taught how to make a good martini by Davide, the bartender at the sadly closed Elisa, Barga. While in Barga — Italy’s most Scots town, and one of its most beautiful — it was a good habit to drink two martinis at Elisa’s before pushing off for the evening. And every evening I was very watchful. This is how he did it and how I do it now.
Pour a jot of vermouth in a glass and swirl it around, then discard. If I am making more than one I’ll pour this vermouth into the next glass, if not I’ll usually pour it back into the bottle. The slope of a martini glass is important here — providing the right traction to take on enough vermouth. Now place a handful of ice in each glass and set them aside. You can skip this step if they’ve come from the freezer. Fill a shaker with lots of ice and gin a glass of gin (or vodka, I suppose) kept at room temperature and shake, rapidly, for thirty or so seconds. The shaker will be cold. Strain into the glasses (after removing the ice), top with an olive and the desired amount of brine.
I prefer Plymouth gin and care little about what sort of vermouth I have. The brine I have discussed. The ice and gin — at room temperature — is where lots of the magic happens. I view drinking a vodka martini as something of an aberration: this drink was made popular by James Bond and if you want to side with the tastes of a misogynist and a bully that’s up to you.