The Martini | Alice Lascelles
Suzy Chase: When two podcasts collide, magic happens. Welcome to Dinner Party, the podcast where I bring together my two hit shows, cookery by the book and decorating by the book around here. We're all about cooking, sharing stories behind recipes, and creating a cozy home. I'm your host, Suzy Chase, a West Village wife, mom and home cook. Inspired by Martha Stewart trying to live in a Nora Ephron movie, surrounded by toile, plaid, cookbooks, decorating books and magazines. Cooking in my galley kitchen and living my best life in my darling New York City apartment in the cutest neighborhood in the city, the West Village. So come hang out and let's get into the show.
Alice Lascelles: I'm Alice Lascelles and my latest book is The Martini: The Ultimate Guide to a Cocktail Icon.
Suzy Chase: You write in the introduction, there's something particularly delightful about hearing the words, shall we have a martini? As soon as they're uttered, the ante is upped. There was a little charge of excitement. You and the asker are now in cahoots, and that's before you've even taken a sip. I love that. So the subtitle of your book is The Ultimate Guide to a Cocktail Icon. Why do you think this drink is such an icon?
Alice Lascelles: Well, I think the thing about the martini, it's been around for nearly 150 years, and over the course of that time, it has evolved and waxed and waned and really served as a kind of cultural prism in a way. So it's not just a recipe, it's a way of understanding some things about the era that it's living in. And I imagine we'll talk about some of those things as we go on, but I think it's like a sort of cultural magnet in a way, which is part of what makes it so interesting.
Suzy Chase: Are there any other drinks like that, that are sort of like cultural touchstones?
Alice Lascelles: I've definitely thought about this and I can't really think of one on that level. No.
Suzy Chase: So take me back to the first time you ever had a martini.
Alice Lascelles: It was about 20 years ago, and I had just got my first job on a drinks trade magazine, and I didn't know very much about journalism, and I knew even less about drinks. Unfortunately. I ran into this hospitality guru called Robbie Barr, who does bars for lots of the glam hotels around the world, and he was appalled at my lack of knowledge about cocktails, and he said, right, we're going to get you an education. And he swept me off to the Dorchester and sat me down on one of the very plush banquettes and ordered me a Vespa martini. And I can completely remember it now, sitting there on its expensive embossed coaster, just looking icy and delicious and magnificent, and it completely blew my mind.
Suzy Chase: Now, what is in the Vespa martini?
Alice Lascelles: So the Vespa is a recipe that was created by Ian Fleming for the bond novel Casino Royale, and it contains both gin and vodka and apertif called Kina Lillet, which is a kind of predecessor of Lile, which I imagine some listeners will be familiar with already, which is a kind of wine-based golden, apertif. So it's kind of like a martini with bells on basically
Suzy Chase: What's more macho than Ian Fleming and the martini?
Alice Lascelles: Well, that was something that struck me actually researching this book is there are masses of examples of women drinking martinis, but there are very few examples of women actually writing about them. MFK Fisher is probably the only person who's written in any detail about the martini that I'm aware of, but I would love to hear from people if they can think of other female writers who've written about them. There's the famous Dorothy Parker. I love to have a martini too at the very most, three I'm under the table and four I'm under the host. But actually that quote could have been falsely attributed to her, so we're not even sure about that one. So yeah, there's a real absence of female voices in the whole discussion around the martini, which I hope is something I'm helping to change.
Suzy Chase: What initially hits you about the martini? Like what pulled you in?
Alice Lascelles: Well, the first thing that hit me was the alcohol probably. But yeah, it's just incredibly glamorous. It is an uncompromising kind of a drink. It was very different to what I had thought of as a cocktail up until that point, which was something that sort of umbrellas in and lots of fruit and color and sweetness. You really felt you were in the presence of something a lot more sophisticated and iconic. So it made a big impression straight away.
Suzy Chase: You've had martinis and deli, Barcelona, Paris and Milan, and one very memorable lychee martini in a speakeasy hidden out in the back of a Panamanian hair salon. I am dying to hear about that.
Alice Lascelles: Well, I was in Panama a couple of years ago and we were walking around town one night and there was this beautiful kind of as year blue door. There are lots of these quite sort of old colonial looking, no sort of Spanish colonial looking buildings and these beautiful Azure blue doors and behind them was this really cool hair salon, but through the back door of the hair salon was this whole other bar like a proper speakeasy, and it was so exciting to sort of stumble into it and there was this wonderful drinks list drawing on influences from all over the world. And I ended up having a lychee martini, which had a little bit of sake in it, and it was the first time I'd had a lychee martini for absolutelsy ages, and I thought it was really delicious and sort of sophisticated twist on things. But anyway, the evening got very boisterous. We had a lot of fun. Me and my companions went to the dinner that we were supposed to be going to, but then ended up going back to the bar later on where things were really ramping up and we just had a really fun time. And there's something a little bit, I don't know, some of the bars in Panama City, there's a bit of a sort of rackety, kind of naughtiness about some of them. There definitely was that mood there. But yeah, that was a happy memory.
Suzy Chase: You write about the little rituals involved in the preparation. So you say the preparation is a lot of magic. Talk a little bit about that.
Alice Lascelles: Yeah, well, I think in this day and age where we're all in such a rush to get everything done and everything's on tap and on Deliveroo or speed dial or whatever, the cocktail really pushes back on that. I mean, you can find books that are about how to make a cocktail in under 30 seconds, but I think that's kind of missing the point about what a cocktail should be. It should be this moment. At the end of the day when you close your laptop and you switch off your phone and you put on a record and you light some candles and you get all your nice tools out and you take this moment to really just be present and enjoy the preparation of the cocktail, the martini call it choosing your ingredients, choosing your glass. That's a big part of it for me. I have lots of different glasses, zesting the lemon smelling, those lovely s-cent oils, stirring the ice and your nice Japanese mixing glass maybe, and just then sitting down with your martini, hopefully with someone else with a martini as well. And just spending a moment just to sort of be present really. I think that's part of the cocktails magic.
Suzy Chase: Now, if you're having a dinner party and you're having martinis and you're cooking, do you work in time to make the martinis in your dinner party schedule or do you have someone else make the martinis while you're cooking or vice versa?
Alice Lascelles: Well, fortunately my husband is very good at mixing martinis, so I'd probably delegate that to him or I'd do it and he'd cook. But the other thing you can do is pre-batch, pre-mix and martinis and bottle them and have them in the freezer. And I'm a big fan of pre-B batching cocktails. And definitely if I had more than about six people, I'd probably pre-batch my martinis because the most important thing when you're having people over what they're coming over for most of all is t-o see you hopefully. So that's the priority, isn't it? Always, I think rather than being too caught up in the preparation of the drinks or the food.
Suzy Chase: So speaking of pre-batching, could you break down the ingredients? -
Alice Lascelles: What I would do is pre-mix, let's say a gin for martini, but then you want to add a little bit of dilution as well to replicate the dilution that you'd be getting from stirring or shaking with ice. So you would make your martini and then add another kind of 15 to 20% water to the mix and then put that in a clean glass swing top bottle and just store that in the freezer. Put it in for maybe a couple of hours before your guests arrive, and then it'll be ready to go and you can literally just pour it into the glass. Freeze your glasses as well though.
Suzy Chase: Even antique glasses, can they hold up in the freezer?
Alice Lascelles: I'm trying to think of a glass I wouldn't put in the freezer. I did have someone say, oh, but weren't they crack? But that's never happened to me. I think they would only crack, wouldn't they if they had liquid within them that expanded when you froze them. I've put sort of rare Japanese glassware and all kinds of things in the freezer, and it's been okay, but I've got say my daily glass is just a sort of eight pound, what would that be? Like $9 glass that I use all the time. So they're pretty robust.
Suzy Chase: So 15 to 20% of water seems like a lot.
Alice Lascelles: Yeah, but that's what you are going to get from staring from ice. I mean, some people would prefer 10%. I mean, it's a matter of taste, but as a rule of thumb, it's about 15 to 20% on top.
Suzy Chase: So why not vodka?
Alice Lascelles: Oh, I'm a big fan of vodkatinis as well. Definitely. And actually if you look into the history of the martini, people think of the tini as this sort of low-rent kind of newfangled version of the martini, but actually people have been making tini since the 1930s or so. There's a recipe in the book that I really love called The Flame of Love, which was made in the 1950s for Dean Martin at the Hollywood Restaurant, and apparently they ordered one for everyone in the place because they liked it so much. Frank Sinatra did. And that's made with a rinse of sherry round the glass tip, the excess away. Then you flame a couple of orange peels into the glass, so you get those lovely scented oils, and then you just shake some vodka and pour it into the glass and just another orange twist. And that's a lovely, lovely variation on a tini.
Suzy Chase: What's the difference between a dry martini and a wet martini? I've never understood this.
Alice Lascelles: So the definition of a dry martini relates to how much vermouth you are adding. We think today the kind of standard martini today is pretty dry. It's about five parts gin to one part vermouth. But if you go back to the very earliest martinis around the turn of the 20th century, and they would've been made three parts, gin gins, two parts vermouth or even just equal parts. So they would've been very wet martinis. But I think now we're having a real vermouth renaissance and people are realizing that vermouth is something to be savored. And so it's definitely the wet martinis becoming part of the repertoire again, I think, and rightly so.
Suzy Chase: In the eighties, the name martini was hijacked and spawned a bunch of tinis. Chat a little bit about that and the evolution of the martini.
Alice Lascelles: The martini basically got drier and drier and more minimalist over the course of the 20th century. And then until you ended up with something called the Naked Martini or the see-through, which had no vermouth at all in it, which is kind of getting ridiculous, really. So there had to be a backlash, didn't there? And along came the eighties, which is an era of sort of un-subtle music outfits, perfume, everything was just sort of maximal. And this was also the era when bars saw a real influx of new products. So lots of quite day glow liqueurs and saccharin juices and new toys to play with basically. And bartenders worked crazy and created all of these cocktails, which they christened Martini simply because they were served in a Y shaped glass, which is the glass that we associate with the martini. But very few of them really bear any relation to the martini at all. I mean, the most famous being the espresso martini, which is actually a fabulous drink. And I think definitely a stone cold classic in its own right.
Suzy Chase: Oh my gosh, that's everywhere right now in New York City. And I kind of feel sorry for the bartenders because the tables of six girls get them, and it seems very laborious.
Alice Lascelles: Yeah, well, I'm always interested. My friends always call me up in a panic saying, I'm having a party this weekend and I want to make espresso martinis. And I always say to them, don't make espresso martinis for a big party, because it's really important to use really hot coffee because that's how you get the creamy head on It, and you need to shake it really, really hard. So that is a lot of work. I wouldn't make espresso martinis for more than four people, absolute max. So I always try and steer them away, and they always listen to me sweetly and then completely ignore everything I've said.
Suzy Chase: So the classic debate is shaken or stirred, which one is right.
Alice Lascelles: So my position on this is every way of preparing a martini produces a slightly different drink. It's important to drink what you like, but to know why you do it. So the first thing to understand is what you are doing when you are combining a martini with ice, you are doing two things. You are lowering the temperature of the drink, and you are also adding dilution. Now, if you shake it with ice, that's the most sort of energetic collision of ice and drink. You are getting the most dilution and you are cooling it quickly too. But the important thing is you're getting a lot of dilution, so you're probably going to get a sort of lighter style martini. It's important to use lots of ice so that it doesn't get too watery too quickly, so you get really efficient, chilling and a little bit of dilution.
If you stir a martini with ice, you are getting less dilution and you end up with a martini that's more concentrated and silky, which I think is kind of the sweet spot for the martini, really. So I tend to be more of a stirred fan. There are two other ways though of making martini. Some famous bars like Duke's in St. James's in London, in the west end of London, which is world famous for its Martinis, they just pour frozen spirits straight into a glass rinsed with the moose, so there's no dilution at all. So you end up with a martini that is fiercely strong, whoa, powerful, big and very, very strong and kind of delicious and silky concentrated, but definitely a false to be reckoned with. And there's a more old school way of making a martini, which is back in the early days of cocktail making, people would throw cocktails a lot more from shaker to shaker, which is a real art. And there are some bars like Baras in Barcelona where they keep that art alive, but it's probable that the earliest martinis were actually made like that, which would be introducing a lot of air and a lot of dilution to the drink. So yeah, so do it how you like, but just understand why you are doing it. And I think different occasions call for different ways of preparing.
Suzy Chase: Talk a little bit about the shape of the martini glass.
Alice Lascelles: A big part of the martini's identity really is the glass, isn't it? Rather than the actual ingredients that glass has come to be the sort of quintessential cocktail glass in a lot of people's minds, I think. But actually, it didn't exist until the mid twenties. Up until the mid twenties. Cocktails were really served in sort of embellished wine glasses, really glasses that were much more innate. And then in 1925, this new glass was premiered at the International Exposition in Paris, and it had all these crisp, clean, angular lines and was a totally new idea of a glass. It was designed by an Austrian architect, and it was actually originally intended for champagne, but it was very quickly co-opted by the cocktail of the age. And I think it's lines and this dynamism of its shape really captured something about the era that people were living in, which was this new age of engineering and speed and dynamism, I think is the real word. The martini has something of that too about it as well. I think together they really created this aesthetic combination that was really of the moment.
Suzy Chase: Have you ever seen one of those glasses in real life?
Alice Lascelles: That is a really good question. I have not. I'm straight away. I'm going to go and search one out after we finish this conversation.
Suzy Chase: It'd be cool to see. I think
Alice Lascelles: It would be really cool. Yes, definitely. I'm getting on the hunt.
Suzy Chase: So in the book you wrote, the twist delivers its charms upfront. The olive is more about promise. The mere side of it, salty, steeping away is enough to get your mouth watering. So what's the significance of the garnish?
Alice Lascelles: I suppose they both create a martini with a different personality, don't they? So the early martinis would've been probably garnished with a twist of some kind, and then olives became trendy. I mean, lemon creates this more sort of uplifting kind of sunny sort of a martini, doesn't it? That sort of centered martini. Whereas the olive, as I say, is more about this sort of anticipation of having the nice gin soaked martini at the end of the drink. So it's a much more savory kind of cocktail as well. That little bit of salinity, I think makes a martini really appetizing.
Suzy Chase: So I heard this thing on TikTok that says how many olives you get in your drink equals the sips of the drink. So if you get three olives, they said it means that you're supposed to finish that drink in three sips. Have you ever heard this?
Alice Lascelles: I have not. No. And I tend to try and stick care of TikTok altogether because all I ever hear about from TikTok is things like putting Parmesan cheese on your espresso martini and things like that. Horrible things like that.
Suzy Chase: I had to jot it down and ask. I had to. So now for my segment called the Perfect Bite where I ask you to describe the perfect bite of your perfect dish, you know what it might be the perfect drink, the perfect sip. What would be your perfect sip?
Alice Lascelles: Okay, well, I've got to talk about martinis, haven't I? There are over 60 different martini variations in my book, and I think part of the allure of this drink is it's incredibly personal drink and one that has evolved so much over history. The very first thing I would do is take my glass, probably a slightly vintagey looking coupe, not too big, because a lot of martini glasses are too big, which means your drink ends up getting warm before you finished it, which is not a good thing. I take my little coop and I put it in the freezer. That would be the very first thing. Then gin wise, I'd probably go for some sort of classic London dry style gin. So let's say Plymouth Gin, which is very historic, the only gin to be name checked in the Savoy cocktail book of 1930. And then for my vermouth, I'd probably use Noilly Pratt Dry, which is really the kind of non plus ultra of dry vermouths for a martini.
And then I would get my Japanese mixing glass and I would fill it right the way up with ice. So it was really good and cold. And I would do five parts Plymouth gin to one part Noilly Pratt Dry Vermoth, maybe a dash of orange bitters, which is a kind of pre-prohibition thing. And then I would give it a bit of a stir with my longhand bar spoon and pour that, and then maybe go for a lemon twist spritz over the drink thrown away, and then a couple of olives in the cocktail and then maybe served with a few extra olives on the side.
Suzy Chase: Nice. Where can we find you on the web and social media?
Alice Lascelles: It's all Alice Lascelles. My website is AliceLascelles.com I'm a very busy Instagram user, so that's probably the best place to find me. But you'll basically find me anywhere where there's a good martini being served.
Suzy Chase: L-A-S-C-E-L-L-E-S. That's right, yes. For anyone looking. So check out Alice's new book, The Martini to find out what the perfect martini is for you. And thanks so much, Alice for coming on Dinner Party Podcast.
Alice Lascelles: Thank you for having me.
Suzy Chase: Okay, so where can you listen to the new Dinner Party podcast series? Well, it's on substack SuzyChase.Substack.com You can also subscribe to Dinner Party for free on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Additionally, the episodes will be available on both Decorating by the Book and Cookery by the Book. Long story short, you'll be able to listen to it virtually everywhere. Thanks for listening. Bye.
