Read Online Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 12 by Gavin J. Grant - Free Book Online
Authors: Gavin J. Grant
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Universally renowned as decent is Noilly Prat. It deserves its rep. If you have some fancy small batch vermouth, try that—make sure to use dry vermouth, not sweet. If you're stuck with Martini & Rossi or Stock or Cinzano, make do until you've finished that bottle, then pay the extra buck for the Noilly Prat.
Get some gin that's decent. This is actually easier than the vermouth purchase. Gin is a poor person's drink; it's flavored grain alcohol, the simplest booze to manufacture. It is automatically not fancy, no matter what various pop cultural artifacts of the twentieth century say. So, get something that's good but not faux good, like Bombay or Beefeater but not Bombay Sapphire or Tanqueray Number Ten, unless you feel like plunking down the cash. In other words, get something in a glass bottle (not a plastic one).
Now, get a garnish. Weird purists (weird purists who are not me) will demand that you eat an olive. You do not need to do this. One thing you definitely do not need to do is to drink a dirty martini, obtained by pouring olive brine in with the other fluids. If you like olive brine, then go have a large salty flagon of olive brine, but don't ruin your martini with it. So decide whether you'd like one olive or two, or instead of olives, a citrus twist. The citrus can be lemon or lime (see Bombay Gin bottle as reference for the lime option). The olives can only be manzanilla-sized olives, not jumbo or “queen” olives. You're having a cocktail, you're not eating lunch.
Keep the vermouth in the fridge once you've opened it; it's delicate, like Sandy Denny. Keep the gin either in the freezer, or in the liquor cabinet. If you keep it in the freezer, it's already nice and cold, which is good, but the ice will melt less quickly when you prepare it. You want the ice to melt. You want some dilution. Dilution via melting ice is the key to any good cocktail. If you keep the gin in the freezer, make sure to stir your martini for an extra-long time.
Get a mixing glass. Crack some ice. You don't want just ice cubes; you want actual cracked ice. Buy a bag of it, or make it yourself with a hammer or with a Tap-Icer(R), or build a robot friend that you can program to crack ice for you. Put plenty of the cracked ice in the mixing glass. Then put in the vermouth. If you're completely vermouth-o-phobic, allow it to flavor the ice, then dump it out (this is the “In and Out” martini). If you want a real martini, though, leave it in, and use about one part vermouth to six parts gin. Add the gin. Stir. Continue stirring. Stir some more.
Strain into your frosted martini glasses. You have kept them in the freezer, right? Add the garnish. Drink, and enjoy. If the gin-to-vermouth ratio feels wrong to your taste buds, well then, make another. Cheers, y'all.
[Back to Table of Contents]
What's the Story
Reading Deena Metzger's The Woman Who Slept with Men to Take the War Out of Them
L. Timmel Duchamp
Deena Metzger's The Woman Who Slept with Men to Take the War Out of Them tells the story of a woman writer trying to bring into plausible existence within the space of her own imagination a story that runs counter to all the stories she knows, a story that stands in defiant opposition to the unreflective, restrictive logic our society characterizes as “common sense.” On the page, the novel looks like a play, but it lacks stage directions and offers no formal divisions into acts or scenes of whatever “action” it might describe. I imagined, as I was reading it, voices speaking almost at will, as though the text presented to us as a finished work of art, originally began life as a transcript of voices speaking to the author that she has merely polished up and passed along to the reader. And yet my awareness of the sophistication of Metzger's narrative technique and the craft and artistry of her prose, even as I persisted in constructing such an image in my imagination, told me, from the beginning, that this aural impression of
Get some gin that's decent. This is actually easier than the vermouth purchase. Gin is a poor person's drink; it's flavored grain alcohol, the simplest booze to manufacture. It is automatically not fancy, no matter what various pop cultural artifacts of the twentieth century say. So, get something that's good but not faux good, like Bombay or Beefeater but not Bombay Sapphire or Tanqueray Number Ten, unless you feel like plunking down the cash. In other words, get something in a glass bottle (not a plastic one).
Now, get a garnish. Weird purists (weird purists who are not me) will demand that you eat an olive. You do not need to do this. One thing you definitely do not need to do is to drink a dirty martini, obtained by pouring olive brine in with the other fluids. If you like olive brine, then go have a large salty flagon of olive brine, but don't ruin your martini with it. So decide whether you'd like one olive or two, or instead of olives, a citrus twist. The citrus can be lemon or lime (see Bombay Gin bottle as reference for the lime option). The olives can only be manzanilla-sized olives, not jumbo or “queen” olives. You're having a cocktail, you're not eating lunch.
Keep the vermouth in the fridge once you've opened it; it's delicate, like Sandy Denny. Keep the gin either in the freezer, or in the liquor cabinet. If you keep it in the freezer, it's already nice and cold, which is good, but the ice will melt less quickly when you prepare it. You want the ice to melt. You want some dilution. Dilution via melting ice is the key to any good cocktail. If you keep the gin in the freezer, make sure to stir your martini for an extra-long time.
Get a mixing glass. Crack some ice. You don't want just ice cubes; you want actual cracked ice. Buy a bag of it, or make it yourself with a hammer or with a Tap-Icer(R), or build a robot friend that you can program to crack ice for you. Put plenty of the cracked ice in the mixing glass. Then put in the vermouth. If you're completely vermouth-o-phobic, allow it to flavor the ice, then dump it out (this is the “In and Out” martini). If you want a real martini, though, leave it in, and use about one part vermouth to six parts gin. Add the gin. Stir. Continue stirring. Stir some more.
Strain into your frosted martini glasses. You have kept them in the freezer, right? Add the garnish. Drink, and enjoy. If the gin-to-vermouth ratio feels wrong to your taste buds, well then, make another. Cheers, y'all.
[Back to Table of Contents]
What's the Story
Reading Deena Metzger's The Woman Who Slept with Men to Take the War Out of Them
L. Timmel Duchamp
Deena Metzger's The Woman Who Slept with Men to Take the War Out of Them tells the story of a woman writer trying to bring into plausible existence within the space of her own imagination a story that runs counter to all the stories she knows, a story that stands in defiant opposition to the unreflective, restrictive logic our society characterizes as “common sense.” On the page, the novel looks like a play, but it lacks stage directions and offers no formal divisions into acts or scenes of whatever “action” it might describe. I imagined, as I was reading it, voices speaking almost at will, as though the text presented to us as a finished work of art, originally began life as a transcript of voices speaking to the author that she has merely polished up and passed along to the reader. And yet my awareness of the sophistication of Metzger's narrative technique and the craft and artistry of her prose, even as I persisted in constructing such an image in my imagination, told me, from the beginning, that this aural impression of
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