Can you imagine James Bond asking for a chocolate butterscotch martini, or an apple martini, lemon drop martini or prickly pear martini? Unlikely for the suave superspy.
Putting a drink in a longstemmed V-shaped glass does not make it a martini. A martini is this: gin and dry vermouth. And maybe an olive or two. Or a twist of lemon peel. It is ice cold and crystal clear, not green or pink.
A martini recipe appears as early as 1882 in a bartender’s manual, although in addition to gin and vermouth, it calls for sweet syrup. Over the years, the martini got drier and drier.
A martini defined cool and modern. 1950s jazz saxophonist Paul Desmond said he wanted the sound of a dry martini. Just listen to his composition Take Five.
From roughly the same era, the TV show Mad Men is careful with period details, so many of the characters drink martinis at bars, cocktail parties or when they get off the train from Manhattan. Mad Men also shows the downside of the three-martini lunch style: car crashes, failed marriages, lost jobs.
The martini’s star faded in the late 1960s and ’70s with opposition to expense account dining rising, health food stores gaining on liquor stores and the popularity of other mind-altering substances.
Classic cocktails made a comeback in the 1980s, and things began to run amok. Frou-frou-tinis featuring flavored vodka, fruit purees, even bacon bits have become common inraucous bars with loud music. All wrong for the drink that writer E.B. White called the elixir of quietude.
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