On June 19, shake up some gin and vermouth with some ice and add a lemon twist. It’s National Martini Day!
This adult beverage has grown to become one of the best-known mixed alcoholic drinks. A cocktail made with gin and vermouth, the martini is normally garnished with an olive or lemon twist.
James Bond, the fictional spy, sometimes asked for his vodka martinis to be “shaken, not stirred.”
Some people prefer to have their martinis served “on the rocks”, which is the ingredients poured over ice cubes and served in an old-fashioned glass.
Dirty martini – Martini with a splash of olive brine or olive juice and is typically garnished with an olive.
Over the years, the traditional martini has had a number of variations added to it and other flavors have evolved such as the cosmopolitan, chocolatini or appletini.
- A classic martini is gin or vodka, a splash of dry vermouth (French-white) and an olive or a lemon twist garnish.
- Italian immigrant bartender Martini di Arma di Taggia in New York City is said to have invented the drink around World War I
- If a Martini is shaken it is said to be ‘bruised’ or watered down. Many say stirring the ice will help chill without adding water to the mixture.
- Many think the martini is derived from a British-made rifle called a Martini & Henry used by the English army 1870’s because of its ‘kick’.
- It is said that John D. Rockefeller ‘brought the Martini to Wall Street’ thus establishing the ‘3 martini lunch’
- By one widely accepted account, the martini is a descendant of the Martinez, an older, sweeter, but similar cocktail, which consists of (approximately) two ounces of sweet vermouth, one ounce gin (specifically, Old Tom gin, a sweetened variant), two dashes maraschino cherry liquid, and one dash bitters, shaken with ice, strained, and served with a twist of lemon.
- W Somerset Maugham declared that “Martinis should always be stirred, not shaken, so that the molecules lie sensuously one on top of the other,”
- The first official mention of Martini was in The New and Improved Illustrated Bartending Manual in 1888.
- It is said that prominent figures like Frank Sinatra, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Alfred Hitchcock, Winston Churchill and F, Scott Fitzgerald drank their Martinis from classic Martini glasses.
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