Martini

The martini is a cocktail made with gin and vermouth. The drink is almost always garnished with an olive or, less commonly, a sliver of lemon peel. It is often described as being "crisp"^{[citation needed]}. Over the years, the martini has become one of the most well-known mixed alcoholic beverages. H. L. Mencken once called the martini "the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet",and E. B. White called it "the elixir of quietude".^[2] It is the drink of the one-time "three-martini lunch" of business executives. The martini is one of six basic drinks listed in David A. Embury's classic, The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, along with many other favorite cocktails.

Preparation

While variations are many, a standard modern martini is an approximate four to one ratio, made by combining approximately two ounces (or 55ml) of gin, and approximately half an ounce (or 15ml) of dry vermouth. Some prefer somewhat less vermouth—about a five or six to one proportion of gin to vermouth. Many bartending schools insist that a cocktail shaker tends to dull the taste of the vermouth.However, it is relatively common to see a bartender mix a martini with a shaker due in part to the influence of popular cultural figures such as the fictional super-spy James Bond, who asked for his vodka martinis "shaken, not stirred" (the James Bond version of the martini was originally a Vesper), and super-sleuth Nick Charles (William Powell) in The Thin Man (1934), who instructed a bartender, "A dry Martini you always shake to waltz time." The ingredients are mixed then strained and served "straight up" (without ice) in a chilled cocktail glass, and garnished with either a green olive or a twist of lemon (a strip of the peel, usually squeezed or twisted to express volatile oils onto the surface of the drink). While the standard martini may call for a four to one ratio of distilled spirits to vermouth, aficionados of the dry martini may reduce the proportion of vermouth drastically for a drier martini. Connoisseurs boast of sweetening the cocktail by merely coating the glass with vermouth. The legend holds that Churchill would get as close to the vermouth bottle as to "look at it from across the room." On the other hand, some experts strongly object to this practice, arguing that a cocktail with one predominant ingredient is no cocktail at all, and furthermore, that the term "dry" has nothing to do with the gin-to-vermouth ratio, but with the use of dry, white, French vermouth instead of sweet, red, Italian vermouth. A stirred martini will have a more potent, more "pure" taste. Whereas a shaken martini will be somewhat "watered-down" by the ice melting slightly during the vigorous shaking. While the traditional method is to stir all clear drinks, a shaken martini can be just as tasty. A more recent development that further offends martini purists is the use of "martini" (or the suffix "-tini") to refer to any beverage served in a cocktail glass, such as the appletini, the chocolatini, or the pineapple martini.