Martini

No classic has murkier paperwork. The martini’s ancestor is probably the Martinez — a sweeter, darker gin-and-vermouth affair from 1880s bar guides, which the town of Martinez, California claims was invented for a gold miner paying in nuggets. Rival theories credit the Martini & Rossi vermouth on every backbar, or a Knickerbocker Hotel bartender named Martini di Arma di Taggia, said to have stirred one dry for John D. Rockefeller around 1911. Nobody has ever settled it, which suits the drink.

What is documented is the century-long march toward dryness. Victorian recipes ran sweet; by the 1930s the ratio was 3:1; by mid-century, vermouth had become a punchline. Churchill was said to achieve sufficient dryness by glancing at the vermouth bottle from across the room. Hemingway ordered his at 15:1 and called it a Montgomery — the odds, he said, the field marshal preferred before attacking. Luis Buñuel held that light passing through the bottle was enough.

“The elixir of quietude.”

— E. B. White, on the martini

It survived Prohibition as the speakeasy standard, became the three-martini lunch of postwar Manhattan, and met its rival when vodka arrived in the fifties — a takeover sealed by a fictional spy who ordered it shaken, to the despair of purists everywhere. E. B. White got closest to explaining its permanence, calling it simply “the elixir of quietude.”