How To Enjoy Your Martini Outdoors
Martini History: California Gold Miner Invented Bond's Best Drink
Aug 20, 2008
The martini’s reputation has been over polished by inclusion in the works of Sinclair Lewis, Scott Fitzgerald, H. L. Mencken and Somerset Maugham, but the martini’s beginnings are reputed to be much more down to earth.
Gold Miner Wanted More Than Whiskey
Legend has it that a gold miner wandered into a saloon in Martinez, California and asked the bartender to fill an empty whiskey bottle with something worth its weight in gold. He didn’t want whiskey. The bartender reached behind other bottles, pulled out some rarely used spirits, speared an olive, put it all together and named the drink after the town.
So, why not take a Martini along on the next back-to-nature outing? Here goes:
- Dress for the occasion… as a retro hipster, as something out of the Appalachian mountains, in your fatigues, or as an L. L. Bean groupie.
- Start with a favorite Martini recipe. Some prefer the original martini, but now there are a couple dozen fruited-up recipes to choose from. There are also easy-to-find martini recipes by such hardy souls as Hemingway and such detail-conscious men as Alfred Hitchcock. The martini’s first-known recipe was in The Modern Bartender’s Guide (1884: New York)
- Keep the ingredients in separate containers until it is cocktail time. Plastic water bottles are a good choice. Include a lidded wide-mouth plastic container for mixing.
- Stemmed glasses now come in plastic. Look for them at the Dollar Store or in a chain supermarket. GSI Outdoors has a collapsible martini glass.
- Pier 1 Imports usually stocks cocktail napkins with martini glasses on them.
- Pack the liquid ingredients in dry ice.
- To achieve a smoky flavor to go with fish or fowl cooked on an open fire, take a flask of scotch along. Use less than 6 drops of scotch per drink.
- “Martinis should always be stirred, not shaken, so that the molecules lie sensuously one on top of the other," instructed Somerset Maugham. That is probably pure bull. Shaking them has more of the rugged outdoors sense of action.
- Don’t rim the glass with sugar, but do garnish with an edible flower, such as a nasturtium, skewered on a dry pine needle. If flowers aren’t in season, substitute three dried cranberries.
M*A*S*H army surgeons Hawkeye Pierce and Duke Forrest, wearing fatigues, sat in a well worn tent drinking martinis in stemmed glasses. Give it a try!
SOURCES:
Explore Magazine article by Kevin Callan (February, 2008)
Martini, Straight Up, by Lowell Edmunds, revised edition (1998: Johns Hopkins University Press)
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