SQUID-U-LIKE

 

Just before Christmas a friend sent me an article from Esquire magazine titled “The Best Martinis in America, 2023.”  Some of these sound great, some sound a bit odd, and I’d say a fair proportion aren’t martinis at all, but I’m old school in these matters.

 

The oddest, to my mind, was the Dirty Pasta Water Martini (above), served at Fiorella in Philadelphia, which looks the article describes it like this: ‘Dirty pasta water is often referred to as liquid gold, that secret ingredient that gives pasta dishes a velvety texture. So it makes sense that it could be used for the same purpose in a martini. The heavily salted pasta water takes the place of vermouth in this martini. The only other ingredients are gin and olive brine, making for an incredibly food friendly martini. Try it with Fiorella’s five pomodoro spaghetti. —K.S.’  Well, I think I probably shan’t, but you go right ahead KS.

 

Which brings us to the Tentacle Martini which can be found in Feasting a book by Bompas and Parr, and a book that I still thumb through once in a while.  The Tentacle Martini looks like this:

 

It’s made with gin, green chartreuse and an octopus tentacle  ‘It came about when we only had gin, green chartreuse and a few octopus in the refrigerator.’  What a life these boys lead.

 

Well, I’m not a fan of chartreuse, and although I’m bigfan of octopus, what was in my fridge was squid. The Bompas and Parr recipe says ‘there’s so much alcohol in there it effectively cooks the tentacle’ but I was taking no chances and I blanched and chilled the tentacles before putting them in the drinks.  They looked like this (and I'm sure a better photographer could have made them look better):

 

So the Nicholson Tentacle Cocktail was born: gin, vermouth and squid.  I’d still say it wasn’t really a martini but you know, it tasted exactly like a martini with a squid tentacle in it.