Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world you walked into mine, fellow Deadsplinters. My apologies to “Casablanca.”
Here’s a look at gin. There are no surprises, I wouldn’t think, but it’s a handy compendium.
*A note on method: This assumes you have a bar strainer and some different glassware. Where I call for orange juice it should have no pulp. You know what would be really good is if you juiced your own oranges and then strained, but that is a time-consuming pain in the neck and yields surprisingly little for the effort it takes.
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The Eye Opener
A favorite, apparently, in the freewheeling, hungover Prohibition era of the 1920s.
In a juice glass, because you’re having this at breakfast, pour halfway up with (bathtub) gin and fill the rest of the way with orange juice. Add an ice cube, if preferred, and your hands are steady enough to wrangle the cube out of the metal ice tray.
Consume with a slice or two of plain white toast and/or a fried egg.
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The Gimlet
As easy as the Eye Opener but more socially acceptable. Something about not drinking it out of a juice glass at 7 AM on a Wednesday morning before you have to catch the 7:48 from Westport. In a big glass or pitcher filled with ice pour 3 or 4 parts gin to one part lime juice. Juice the limes yourself if you want but strain the lime pulp before adding. Stir, and then pour into a coupe/cocktail glass. This is quite alcoholic, you’ll notice.
Garnish with a slice, not a wedge, of lime.
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The Gin and Tonic
So simple a child could make them. We have the British military to thank for G ’n Ts. In the 18th and 19th centuries gin was a ration staple and quinine was distributed to ward off malaria for those serving/marauding/brutalizing “in the tropics”. Problem was quinine is quite foul. Someone had the bright idea to combine it with the gin ration. Tonic water is quinine’s descendant.
Fill a Collins or highball glass with small ice cubes. Pour in 1 part gin to 2 parts tonic, more gin/less tonic depending on how far along you are in life. Drink fast enough so that the G ’n T doesn’t get watery from the melted ice cubes. If a party guest, refrain from speculating out loud about the state of your hosts’ relationship, their taste in interior decor, or if at a wedding, stick close to neutral topics, like traffic patterns and how hot/cool it’s gotten lately. G ’n Ts loosen lips.
If making yourself, squeeze a lime wedge into the drink and let the husk float around.
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The Gin Sunrise
This is the gin version of the beloved Tequila Sunrise. If I hadn’t bought all that tequila at the duty-free the last time I flew out of Mexico I could make those, but I can’t. No questions, please.
Fill a highball or Collins glass with ice. Pour in enough gin to about 1/3 or 1/2 (if you’re me) of the way up then add enough orange juice to come up about 1/2-inch from the top of the glass.
Stir, then carefully add a little grenadine around the edge of the glass. Not too much. A quick once-around letting it dribble in. Don’t plop the grenadine into the middle of the glass. You’ll see the grenadine sink to the bottom and push its way up, creating the sunrise effect.
Garnish with a maraschino cherry, of course.
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The Orange Blossom (my version)
In a cocktail shaker or something similar, fill with ice, add 2 parts gin, 1 part sweet vermouth, and 2 parts orange juice. Stir, do not shake. Strain into a martini glass.
Garnish with a slice of orange.
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The Martini
I hesitate to even wade into this. It’s theoretically very simple but there are 1,000 ways to do it.
The original might be the Bradford à la Martinel. (H/T Difford’s Guide, https://www.diffordsguide.com/g/1121/martini). To summarize, fill a shaker 3/4 of the way with shaved ice, add 1 part gin and 1 part vermouth, a peel of an entire lemon, and a couple of splashes of orange bitters. Shake this all around, strain into a glass, and plop in an olive.
This is what I do: I use 2 parts gin/1 part vermouth, if that, sometimes even less vermouth, I don’t put the lemon peel in the shaker, and I don’t use an olive. I sometimes forgo the bitters altogether. Basically 2:1 gin/vermouth in shaved ice, shaken, strained into a martini glass (more about those later) and then I add a little lemon peel as a garnish or put it in the drink itself.
The less vermouth the “drier” the martini. You can use sweet or dry vermouth, I use dry. The famous “dirty martini” has a little olive juice in it (NOT olive oil, as I tried to tell a friend of mine but did he listen?) It will have an olive, or two, or three in it. I cook with and eat olives all the time but I don’t like olives in drinks, I don’t know why.
By the way, this is heresy, but you can substitute good vodka for gin and do any of the above.
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About the martini glasses: The V-shaped ones we know now are fairly recent. In the era of the “three martini lunch” martinis were served in coupe/cocktail glasses, those shallow round glasses champagne used to be served in. A man weighing 200+ pounds and used to drinking heavily could polish off three martinis during a heavy lunch and, while bloated, probably wouldn’t be noticeably drunk. In “Mad Men” those are how martinis are served, era-appropriately, and not in the V-shaped version, and certainly not in the giant V-shaped versions that have taken over 21st-century America.
Thank you Cousin M! One can never, ever have too many excellent cocktail recipes. I’m fond of a gin drink called Satan’s Whiskers.
I don’t care for gin so I’ll substitute vodka. I like dry vodka martinis. And a vodka gimlet is the perfect summer drink.
…based on learning to make them for a grandparent I’d offer the following as an alternative for the G&T method
– take a half-pint glass tankard (i.e. one of those thick glass mugs with the dimpled sides that look somewhat like the pattern on a waffle)
– put in a slice of lemon (if you’re of the grandparent’s school of thought, that is – I prefer the wedge of lime squeezed & dropped in the way you mention but I also like a different brand of gin so YMMV & all that)
– pour in the gin over the ice until it’s level is about 1/3 up the tankard
– top up with tonic water
…basically the larger, thicker glass & the large quantity of ice is intended to keep the ice mostly frozen until after you’ve finished the drink so it isn’t watered down…& also to some extent to make it seem like you aren’t using as much of that extra space to sneak in more gin that your kids think you should be drinking at your advanced age
…all I really know is people have often told me I make a good gin & tonic even if I end up using a different kind of large, thick glass since those tankards don’t seem to be as easy to come by these days?
4:1 Gin/Lime juice…damn!
I mean OF COURSE I am going to try it but…damn!
It’s not for the faint of heart but the lime juice makes it deceptively tasty. We usually have lime juice around, I cook with it and make drinks out of it, so on rare occasions I’ll join the Better Half in partaking of “his” gin. This is what I make for myself.
Gin is great stuff, but it always reminds me of John Cheever’s short story The Sorrows of Gin , one of his great Connecticut suburban tragedies. Sigourney Weaver and Edward Hermann were in a great adaptation of it.
https://archive.org/details/thesorrowsofgin
I know rich suburbanites still drink, but they don’t make ’em like they used to.
The irony of this is I don’t drink a lot of gin but my fellow pandemic cellmate does, so I make these for him. At this point it is the only liquor that still gives me hangover headaches. I don’t know why. Also, when we (used to) have large parties I like to serve punches, because it’s an economical way to get a crowd in a tipsy mood, but I’ve never found one for gin that’s palatable. It’s a very strange drink but I have really fond memories of it. It’s the first hard alcohol I ever tasted. I had a bunch of older friends in high school and at a high school graduation party the parents were serving gin and tonics. The drinking age was 18 at the time and I guess they assumed I was 18. I was 16. It was a beautiful June day, the graduate’s older brother was a DJ-manqué so there was a lot of dancing in the yard, and they had an in-ground pool, a rarity for the town, so we got to cool off in there. It’s a wonder none of us drowned.
But it was one of those events where a kid would think, “This is the way I want to live. I will go to college and get a good job and have an in-ground pool and have parties like this.” As it turns out, starting in college more years ago than I care to imagine, I’ve always lived in apartments in cities so my swimming pool activities are confined to visits to the suburbs or on vacations here and abroad. But whenever I’m near a pool I can’t help but order/make a gin drink. It’s a strange, Pavlovian response.
Ew! I’m not even a drinker (other than occasional wine) and I knew that. I mean… the olive oil would just pool at the top. Gross.
This is the same friend who microwaves brie, whom I mention in my FYCE post about baked brie en croute. I love him like a brother but when he has people over I stick to wine that I have brought myself, to share.
An old girlfriend and I used to make something akin to your “eye opener,” but we’d also add 7-Up.
Wow. I first came across the Eye Opener at this party where I didn’t really know anyone and got chatting with an elderly woman. I said to her, “It looks like we’re running dry. Can I go to the bar and get you another?” Gin and orange juice. I had to go back because there wasn’t enough gin in it to her liking. She said to me, “This is called an Eye Opener, because people used to drink these at breakfast long before you were born, I’m sure. It was a different time…”
Yeah, it was just an experiment but we wound up drinking them that whole summer.
…I think previous generations may have been hardier…because I also gather some used to drink a “cocktail” called the “pink gin” that was just neat him with some angostura bitters?
…pretty sure that’s more than I can cope with, anyhow
A variant is still drunk in Britain. An English friend will order them. It’s called a “Pink Lady Cocktail.” It’s even less appetizing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_Lady_(cocktail)
But she’s like me. Why live in 2021 when the past is so much more fun. We were once in this remote seaside hotel in the middle of nowhere (Somerset) that had a bar and she ordered one and the bartender didn’t bat an eye and whipped one up, which leads me to believe that they’re not that uncommon. This was more than a few years ago so I don’t know how common they are anymore. The bartender was a character. He had a really heavy Somerset accent so he spoke the way Americans think a pirate talked. “And d’ye know what’s to blame for all this bloody inflation? De-ci-mal-ization. If we still had good English shillings and pence we’d have nonna this.” England “decimalized” in 1971, and even at the time that was quite a ways in the past.
…I expect some people still order those…the pink gin thing was something people in my grandparents’ generation drank…mostly but not entirely “when they were younger”…so my guess is that the pink lady would still be in at least some bartenders’ repertoire…at least in the home counties?
I love gin; gin’s my favorite.