Once Works Well was pure technology. Now it seeks merely to divert.
Pansy subjects - Verse! Opera! Domestic trivia! - are now commonplace.
The 300-word limit for posts is retained. The ego is enlarged

Friday 8 August 2008

Two: not enough; three: too many

A mountie pursues a criminal through frozen wastes. Always the criminal is one jump ahead. The mountie has an idea. He sits in a clearing, takes out a bottle of gin, a bottle of vermouth and a jar of olives. As he opens the gin, the criminal rushes out from the trees. “No, no, no! The vermouth goes in first, stupid!”

I am able to invoke the mystique of the dry martini in Works Well because it is the product of liquid technology, better known as chemistry. When the tastes of gin and vermouth are mixed they create a third taste. There’s a technical chemistry name for this but I forget. Too old, too many martinis.

The Americans invented this pillar of civilised society but they continue to be in danger of corrupting it. All these jokes about wafting the cork of the vermouth bottle over the gin. Why not just drink straight gin? Also, a martini on the rocks (as opposed to the rockless martini straight up), much favoured in the Land of the Free, continuously dilutes the drink as the cubes melt.

Given that there are metaphorical criminals out there, hiding in the trees of blogland, I wouldn’t be fool enough to say which are my preferred martini proportions. However, the gin should be Tanqueray and the vermouth Noilly Prat. Also I must confess to my personal Albigensian heresy – I have been drawn to the Gibson, where two silverskins replace the olive.

4 comments:

Professional Bleeder said...

Alcohol is, of course, an oxygen nucleophile. Adding two alcohols together would be a Nucleophilic reaction. Presumably a state of equilibrium is reached when you are lying flat on the floor!

Roderick Robinson said...

Can I pay you to come up regularly with techno-word comments like that? They would give my blog the plausibility it so singularly lacks. Thanks anyway.

Professional Bleeder said...

It Sounds wonderful, but I feel I should have added "or something like that"

Lucy said...

You have to put the gin and the glass in the freezer, and the Noilly in the fridge. and pronounce the 'll' nin Noilly.

I can't drink the things, but our friend who does has everyone in his acquaintance well trained so we have all the props mises en place as above before he arrives. I like the soaked olives though.