One might prepare a martini by waving the cap of a vermouth bottle over the glass, or observing that "there was vermouth in the house once." Winston Churchill chose to forgo vermouth completely, and instead simply bowed in the direction of France, while General Patton suggested pointing the gin bottle in the general direction of Italy. Ernest Hemingway liked to order a "Montgomery", which was a martini mixed at a gin:vermouth ratio of 15:1 (these supposedly being the odds Field Marshall Montgomery wanted to have before going into battle). In a classic bit of stage business in the 1955 play Auntie Mame sophisticated pre-adolescent Patrick Dennis offers a martini, which he prepares by swirling a drop of vermouth in the glass, then tossing it out before filling the glass with gin. Similarly, in the 1958 movie Teacher's Pet, Clark Gable mixes a martini by turning the bottle of vermouth upside-down before running the moistened cork around the rim of the glass and filling it with gin. Surrealist director Luis Buñuel was another supporter of the drink, including his personal recipe into his Oscar-winning 1972 film Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie and in his memoires, which consists basically of "coating the cubes", a method of adding the flavor of vermouth by pouring the vermouth in separately then pouring it out before pouring in the gin. Also, atomizers similar to those used for perfume were sometimes used to dispense a token amount of vermouth.I myself prefer to murmur the word "vermouth" at the gin bottle in a seductive fashion.
posted by selfnoise at 2:56 PM on April 26, 2006