WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS NOW ....

 Does the world need another book about the martini?

No, probably not. But I do.  Very much indeed. That’s how the Psychogourmet Martini Library thrives and grows and becomes more authoritative.

 

And so we welcome Alice Lascelles’ Martini, subtitled  “the ultimate guide to a cocktail icon,” though of course we all know there’s no ultimate in these matters.

Anyway it’s a damn fine book, with terrific photographs by Laura Edwards, and if Alice Lascelles’ author bio is to be believed, she’s a heck of a girl.

One very important detail: she obviously understands the importance of the glass in which the martini comes, and on her Instagram feed she’s posted photographs of some of her favourite glasses such as these:

And blow me down – I’ve got some glasses very much like that, although admittedly whereas mine are just black and gold, hers are multicoloured.  

Am I bitter and envious? Only a little.

 

And then rearranging the Martini Library, as you have to do when you get a new acquisition, I realized I had this ancient (well 1966, revised 1969) and somewhat distressed volume.  

It’s Booth’s Handbook of Cocktails and Mixed Drinks by John Doxat. This is not a name I’m very familiar with, although I do know that he too wrote a book, evidently not the ultimate, on the martini.  

I can’t say I’ve used Doxat’s book much, but looking at it last week I saw there was a recipe for a cocktail called the Adonis, not a drink I was at all familiar with, though it’s all over the interwebs, and it’s not in any sense a martini, but this being the season of alcoholic experimentation I decided to give it a try.  It requires two parts sherry to one part vermouth, with a dash of bitters.  It looked like this.

 

Adonis photos by Caroline Gannon

And damn, it was really good, really very surprisingly good.

         It’s no substitute for a martini of course, but that’s because nothing is.

BLOOD AND GUTS

   So the Guardian had its  ‘Cocktail of the Week’ - Lyon’s martini x2, devised by Anthony Lyon of Lyon’s Seafood and Wine Bar, London N8,  and described as ‘An almost savoury, nori-infused gin martini to enjoy as an aperitif, perhaps with an oyster or two on the side.’ ‘Almost savoury’ as in almost pregnant and almost dead?  i.e. not savoury?  Though it sounded entirely savoury to me.  And in any case the drink looked like this:

Creating the nori-infused gin is the hard part, Mr. Lyons favours Beefeater, and the drink also involved seaweed bitters which I’ve never encountered.

To make nori-infused gin, he says, “Toast the nori over a gas flame (or barbecue or with a blowtorch) until it turns brown and smells slightly nutty: be careful, though, because it can catch quickly. Crumble the toasted nori into a clean jar, add the gin, then seal and leave to infuse for 12 hours. Strain the gin through a coffee filter, then decant into a clean jar and seal; it will be good for three to six months. Then serve with a strip of nori on the rim.’ 

 

Well that sounded like a lot of fuss, and although nori is a perfectly good thing it’s always struck me as not at all fancy, just the kind of thing you can have with a beer.  I felt I would make my own version of the seaweed martini.

 

My local, very reliable, fish man down in Manningtree market sells two different kinds of seaweed, neither of them nori, and both of them come wet and salty as the North Sea.  The thing I usually do, thanks to the ingenuity of the inamorata, is soak them to get rid of the salt and then blend them into a pile of mashed potatoes.

 

But imagine you had a couple of small fronds of the stuff and you soaked them and dried them (using a blow torch if you insist) and then dropped them into a martini – that would be good wouldn’t it? Not a substitute for olives but part of the same food group surely.  So I did it and it looked like this.  

It tasted fierce, much fiercer than nori would have.   It was a nice experiment and a change but I can’t see it making its way into the regular rotation.

 

And then I started thinking about the things people have in or with drinks, and my mind drifted back to a bar in LAX airport where I had a Bloody Mary which came with a slice of Beecher’s cheese, made in Seattle.  Like this:

It seemed great at the time, although when a man’s waiting for his plane’s departure gate number to be announced, his connoisseurship may not be at its finest.  But even in the cold light of day it still seemed like a pretty good idea.

 

And it so happens that the Manningtree market has an Italian cheese man, Solo Cheese, from whom I only ever really buy one thing and that’s pecorino with olives in it. 

 

And I bought some at the weekend but when I tasted it I realized it wasn’t just olives in there, there was some kind of red hot pepper as well.  And that worked really well with a Bloody Mary. You don’t need Tabasco in the drink when you’ve got a slice of hot cheese perched there on top.  Another small but significant triumph.

 

 

SETTLE DOWN DEER

 I was prepared to be a little disappointed by St John, Marylebone, not because I thought it would be bad but because the inamorata and I love the other two branches – Smithfield, and Bread and Wine - so much.  

This and the vast majority of the other pics by Caroline Gannon

Also the menu didn’t include bone marrow, which is the single thing I like best about the other St Johns.  But we had an American friend over from California and he said he wanted to go to St John, any St John, and since you apparently have to book months in advance for the other two, off we went to Marylebone.

 

Well, I was a fool even to have contemplated disappointment.  Admittedly the appearance of the martini (above) didn’t reassure completely.  How on earth do you make a martini look as cloudy as that? Though it tasted absolutely fine.

 

But then the food arrived and it was as good as anybody could wish.  The so-called Rarebit was a revelation.  I expected it to look this this:

but in fact it was a Deep Fried Rarebit, so it looked like this:

which if I hadn’t known better I might have thought was a rissole or even a croquette.

 

There were Crispy Sweetbreads with Aioli which were top notch:

But star of the show was the Roe Deer with Celeriac.  I’m not sure exactly what they did with the venison, slow-cooked it in a fine broth I expect, but the result was fantastic.

     Now, I’m not sure I could tell a plate of roe deer from any other kind of deer but some apparently can.  I remember a terrific piece by AA Gill in which a waiter tells him the special is venison. 

“What kind of venison?”  

“It’s the fillet sir.”

“No, where does it come from?”

“From our specialist supplier.”

And so on for some time, until in the end, having eaten the meal, Gill concludes, “Anyway, the deer was roe and it was a buck … I could tell.  It had that odd tang buck gets when it’s rutting.  It’s some sort of secretion.”   No competing with that.

 

And to round it off there was an Eccles Cake with Lancashire Cheese, for the inamorata and I:

and our American friend had a Bread And Butter Pudding, seen here in a mise en abyme:

LOVELY LIFE, LOVELY GRUB

 I can’t absolutely swear to it, but I do believe I was once in the same room as April Ashley, one of the first Brits to undergo gender reassignment surgery, male to female. The room was the bar of the Chelsea Arts Club and somebody told me that the distinguished-looking woman across the way was Ms. Ashley.  I had no reason not to believe.

         

After the op April Ashley became a model, among other things, and in 2012 received an MBE for ‘services to the Transgendered community.’  She died in 2021.

         

And now there’s a new book titled Bonjour Mademoiselle! April Ashley and the Pursuit of a Lovely Life by Jacqueline Kent and Tom Roberts.  At this point I’ve only read the reviews but there seems to be some dynamite stuff in there about food, the most immediately engaging is that Ashley became a front of house person at a restaurant I’d never heard of called AD8, a pretty dodgy establishment apparently, with a signature dish of champagne and camembert soup.  One night, apparently, April drank 32 martinis, which certainly deserves a medal if not necessarily an MBE.

 

The book was reviewed in Saturday’s Times just a few pages away from a review of Diane Abbott’s memoir A Woman Like Me, which seems a bit short on the martini drinking but there is some interesting food stuff. 

When Abbott was in a relationship with Jeremy Corbyn they went on holiday, in 1979, to the south of France. They travelled on Corbyn’s East German motorbike which kept breaking down, but Abbott consoled herself by thinking that sooner or later they’d arrived in the south of France where she’d eat ‘delicious Gallic Cuisine.’  It was not to be.  Corbyn opened the panniers on his bike to reveal ‘a week’s supply of instant macaroni and other processed food.’ 

SOMETHING ABOUT A MARTINI

 

A friend of mine, admittedly an American friend who perhaps had unreasonably high expectations, went into the bar at Euston station recently and asked the barman for a Martini.  He didn’t know what that was or how to make it, so my friend settled for a negroni, which was within the barman’s wheelhouse.

 

I think she was lucky that he didn’t just pour her a glass of ‘Martini.’  For many, many years very few people in England knew what a martini was, but they’d heard of Martini Bianco which was, and is, the trade name of a brand of vermouth made by Martini and Rossi.  I’ve always wondered whether they were deliberately trying to cause confusion.

 

And then last week in the Times, in the Comment section, Rose Wild (possibly her real name) quoted from an essay published in the Times in the summer of 1914, titled ‘Thoughts on Drink.’ The relevant passage runs ‘A wise man of the world has laid down as a law of universal application that “Whenever you want a drink and don’t know what drink it is that you want, what you want is vermouth."’

 

I suppose there must have been one or two occasions when I didn’t know what drink I wanted, but it’s a rare thing; and just as rarely have I ever wanted a glass of vermouth.

 

We come back, as so often, to the first verse of Ogden Nash’s poem, ‘A Drink With Something in It.’

 

There is something about a Martini,
A tingle remarkably pleasant;
A yellow, a mellow Martini;
I wish I had one at present.
There is something about a Martini,
Ere the dining and dancing begin,
And to tell you the truth,
It is not the vermouth—
I think that perhaps it's the gin.

 

How right he is.  It’s not, it’s never, the vermouth.

THE SAMPHIRE OF LOVE

Apparently this is a thing: the samphire martini.  And all I can say is, ‘What took us so long?'

Samphire is bloody brilliant stuff.  It is, famously, a salt-tolerant plant which means it grows by the sea on rocks or by salt marshes and therefore tastes salty, and I’m more than happy to eat it raw.  So how could it not go nicely in a martini?

 

And it does go nicely, but it isn’t quite salty enough.  To get the full benefit you’d really need a handful of the stuff.  And certainly you could have it on a bowl on the side and eat it while you’re drinking your martini, but there’s something special about actually having it in the glass

 

So we squared the circle and had a martini with samphire and an olive. Works for me.    And yeah, it looks much better in black and white.

 

MUCHO MUSSO

I once saw Sally Kellerman in Musso and Frank on Hollywood Boulevard.  And then I saw her in an episode of 90210, in a scene filmed in Musso and Frank.  Art imitating life imitating art.  Like this:

 

Another time I was there I saw Tim Curry sitting at a table right by the front window so that anybody passing in the street could see him.  I suppose he must have wanted it that way.  He didn’t look like this:

 

Musso and Frank is one of my favourite restaurants in the world - it's been there since 1920, the year before Prohibition started - and not only because of the presence of celebrities.  But it does no harm. 

 

Of course it’s a long way from where I live to Musso’s but I do my best to recreate certain elements of the experience, not least the martinis.. When I was there last year the bartender gave me some cocktail stirrers to take away as a souvenir, which helps a little, though I don’t use them in martinis. And of course I never had the little flask containing a second helping, and which is apparently called a sidecar.

The food is another matter.  One of the starters that always hits the spot is celery sticks filled with blue cheese, which look like this:

Photo by Caroline Gannon.

 

So the inamorata and I tried to recreate them – she did most of the hard work. I found a convincing recipe online though it required various things we didn’t have to hand.  

The cheese should have been Roquefort but all I had was Stilton left over from Christmas. You’re supposed to thin the cheese to make it more pliable by the addition of sour cream, but we had Greek yoghurt.  And then supposedly you use a piping bag to put the mixture into the celery. I believe I’ve never so much as touched a piping bag. And frankly our celery was too thin to hold much cheese, and as you can see, I went a bit mad with the smoked paprika. But apart from all that it really wasn’t bad at all. 

 

 

 

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.

CHRISTMAS TRIMMINGS

One year, when I was a kid, I was ill on Christmas day morning; nothing really alarming and with no obvious cause, but I was feeling totally out of sorts.

My family used to spend Christmas at my grandparents’ house. Various aunts, uncles and cousins lived very near by - and over the course of the morning quite a few of them trooped in and stared at me and said how ill I looked and how they hoped I'd be able to manage a bit of Christmas dinner.  And one uncle said, ‘Well perhaps he’ll be able to have a bit of turkey, even if he can’t manage all the trimmings.’

 

And this dismayed me because when it comes to Christmas dinner I liked the ‘trimmings’ much more than the turkey. It was the stuffing and the cranberry sauce, the pigs in blanket, and of course the roast potatoes, that really tickled my fancy. 

 

Well the years have gone by and my feelings about the trimmings haven’t really changed, but fortunately since my mother’s no longer in charge of things I don’t have to eat turkey.  This year’s bird was a mighty duck, from Creedy Carver of Devon – ‘reared for flavour’ – well, why not?

 

The inamorata and I worked diligently, and you know, it all went as well as it possibly could have, and I ate it with enthusiasm; duck, trimmings and all.

And as you may have spotted, this year the trimmings  included red cabbage.

 

Oh yeah, and there were martinis too.  We didn't have those at my grandparents' house.