DIRTY DRINKIN'

 There have been a few stories in the media lately about the retirement of Colin Field (sometimes Colin Peter Field), the Warwickshire lad who was barman at the Bar Hemingway, part of the Ritz, in Paris.  I have a feeling I might have been in there once, though the memory is vague.  This is Colin:

He's 62, which seems no age to be retiring, though I gather he’ll still be doing private parties and will be guest bartender two nights a week at a boutique hotel called the Maison Proust.  How do they come up with these names?  This is Colin with Bruce Willis.

 

Field did write a book titled Cocktails of the Ritz Paris, though I haven’t been able to find a copy for sale.  

But chiefly what drew my attention was Field’s invention of variations on the martini: the Picasso Martini and the Clean Dirty Martini.  I decided I would follow in his footsteps and, in the absence of his book of recipes, attempt to make my own versions. 

 

The Picasso Martini involves freezing vermouth into ice cubes (Cubist – get it?) - and then putting them into a glass of icy gin.

Now, I have been to bars in New York where they’ve rinsed the glass with a minimal splash of vermouth them tossed it out, but personally I’m pro-vermouth, so this sounded like a plausible drink.  However, my vermouth refused to freeze solid, and l was surprised by this  – I mean I’ve had bottles of wine freeze in the freezer when I forgot about them and left them in over night.  I left the vermouth cubes in much longer than that.  But a less than solid cube of vermouth seemed just about acceptable since it was going to melt in the gin anyway, even it in undermined the Cubist aesthetic.

The cubes looked like this when they first went into the glass, 

and like this when they were in the gin.

 

How was it?  Well it was all right but somehow, surprisingly, just a bit watery.  Maybe next time we should go for Picasso’s Blue Period and add a squirt of curacao.

 

Apparently it took ten years for Colin to develop the Clean Dirty Martini. Now, I have always thought the Dirty Martini – gin, vermouth and olive brine  - was a bit of a rip off.  I love olives, but If I’m paying good money for alcohol, I don’t want it diluted with salty water.  But heck, in the interests of science I duly put some olive brine in an ice cube tray, and just to jazz things up I put an olive in each cube.  When they were frozen, they looked this:

 

This time I was surprised that the brine froze so easily – I suppose olive brine contains less salt than I thought it did.  And when the gin was added it looked like this:

 

How did it taste? Well not bad, but not as good as an actual clean martini, but not bad at all.. Of course if Colin Field had made it, it might have tasted very different, and much better.  I’m no Colin Field, but we knew that already.  I’m not even a Bruce Willis.