The Spirits #50: The Gibson

~ Why would you put an onion in it you weirdo? ~ Gibson Girls ~ He'd come in third in a two-horse race ~ The Queen's Martinis ~ Saudade ~

📚 THE SPIRITS (i.e. the book that inspired this newsletter) is available once more! You can find it at: Bookshop.org, Foyles, Blackwells, Hive, Waterstones, Amazon and even WH Smith. Makes a great Christmas present.

---

~ THE GIBSON~

50ml gin
15ml French vermouth
Lemon zest
A cocktail onion

Cut a strip of peel from a lemon, hold it over a cocktail coupe and twist it so that it releases a zesty spray over the glass - which you must now place in the freezer. (Discard the lemon). Now, in a mixing vessel of some sort, add the gin and the French (i.e. extra dry) vermouth, fill halfway with ice and patiently stir for quite some time until you feel the picture jolt a little. Strain this mixture into your icy, lemony coupe and garnish with a cocktail onion. Or three onions, speared on a stick, if you really like onions. Be sure to get a little onion juice in there but don’t over-do it.

Some Gibson notes:

1) The lemon business. Not canonical but I just really think that spritz of citrus adds something, you know?

2) I used Bombay Sapphire Premier Cru Murcian Lemon Gin (fancy) and Martini Extra Dry Vermouth (not so fancy). Martini Extra Dry Vermouth is, as its name would suggest, extra dry - almost too dry for this, I found. I added a small dash of sweet white vermouth (La Copa Blanco) and I fancy it was an improvement. My point is: a little sweetness in the vermouth sets off the onion well. Noilly Prat is probably your best bet, if you keep the sort of household that has vermouth options.

3) The hand is my wife’s. She loves Martinis but considered the onion an abomination. She made me eat it and then brush my teeth. Just to warn you.

AND HELLO. Welcome back, in fact. And sure, you can sit up the bar. Oh this old thing? That’ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss

✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨

---

I am the journalist Richard Godwin and this is my cocktail newsletter. You will find instructions for making sugar syrup, grenadine, orgeat ice, etc here and my 10 RULES FOR MAKING COCKTAILS here. I have also assembled some bottle recommendations here - and here is the full archive of past cocktails. Scroll to the bottom of this page to find out what to get in for next week’s cocktail.

Please consider hitting the SUBSCRIBE button to become a member of the ✨THE CABINET✨. This way you will learn about exciting things like Maraschino and Green Chartreuse and Apricot Brandy. Oh and if you opt for the priciest ‘Founding Member’ option, I’ll send you your own signed copy of my book with your very own bespoke recipe in it.

Please share The Spirits with anyone you reckon might be into this sort of thing. And feel free to @ me with your creations!

---

EARLY on in Shirley Jackson’s novel Hangsaman (1951) the character Natalie, having just started university, writes to her father and asks him what this drink is that everyone seems to be drinking; this Martini thing. Like any good father, he writes back by return of post with a full and detailed description. Gin; vermouth; ice-cold… but you know all that stuff by now, though, don’t you? It is his final thoughts to which I draw your attention: “[It] is possible to refine one’s position with regard to the Martini by discarding the traditional olive, and passing along further stages of refinement through the black olive, the twist of lemon peel, to the final, most effete, pearl onion.” 🧅 (My emphasis; my emoji).

The drink you have before you is, then, a Martini Plus, a Martini Squared, the final, most effete version of the cocktail that is, surely, the final, most effete cocktail. It is said to have been invented by the magazine illustrator Charles Dana Gibson, whose pen-and-ink drawings of the archetypal new American woman of the early 20th century became known as ‘Gibson Girls’ (see below). I want to be a Gibson Girl, I think. Anyway, one evening at the Player’s Club in New York, Gibson requested something a “little different”. The bartender popped an onion into a regular Martini and pretty soon, everyone was asking for “Gibson’s Martini”.

I found myself drifting into a Gibson state of mind a few weeks ago after the author Andrew O’Hagan posted one on his Instagram - from the Connaught Bar, no less - with the hashtag #kingofmartinis. A strong move, I thought. In his Hollywood novel, The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, O’Hagan has Frank Sinatra drink a Gibson at Natalie Wood’s house in Sherman Oaks. “It was Sinatra’s favourite drink - I got that from his valet,” O’Hagan told me, when I asked him what it was about the Gibson, exactly, that made it king.

“I just seems so right to have a little tincture of vinegar in a good Martini, a spike of pickle, an extra crunch,” he elaborated. “There are very few places in London that understand The Gibson. You get a good one in Brown’s and a decent one in The Wolseley. The cocktail bar upstairs at Rules is underrated and I had a sublime one there one night. When I say one I mean two.

So Sinatra drank Gibsons. So too, you will recall, did Roger Sterling in Mad Men. As does Beth Harmon, the chess genius in The Queen’s Gambit. (There’s something very mid-century about the Gibson; like jell-o salads or devilled eggs). It is Beth’s alcoholic (and chronically sick) adopted mother, Alma, who introduces her to the drink, on an aeroplane, no less. “Is that a Martini?” Beth enquires. “A Gibson,” she is corrected. “I find the onion more refined than the olive.”

An onion? Refined? Well, consider this. I was suffering on my sick bed last week - hence the week’s delay on this post - but I did make a valiant attempt to get this recipe out to you all the same, and sent my wife out into the night in search of a jar of cocktail onions. She returned, bless her, with a jar of Sainsbury’s pickled onions. Now, I am a huge fan of a pickled onion. Pickled onion Monster Munch is in my Top Ten crisps. And is there a more intensely English flavour combination that a sharp hunk of cheddar against one of those eyewateringly pungent, crispy, malty-vinegary orbs? There is not.

But it would be fair to say that pickled onions are not anyone’s idea of refinement. Or onions at all. In a drinking context, onions make me think of Joseph Mitchell’s descriptions of McSorley’s Old Ale House in New York. The proprietor, Old John, would eat onions as if they were apples. “Good ale, raw onions, and no ladies” was his motto. Raw onions seems fairly likely to lead to “no ladies”, in any case.

Now, the tart, tiny pearls that adorn the Gibsons at the Connaught, Rules, etc, are a touch elevated from alliums such as these … but they’re not actually so different. An onion is an onion is an onion. And the onions in the bottom of a Gibson are still a little forbidding, still a little overstrong, still a little what-is-that-doing there? But here, I think, lies the charm of the thing and the key to true refinement. It lies in taking something rough, something that clearly shouldn’t work and through sheer, defiant, I-know-what-I’m-doing confidence, styling it out. It’s an onion. And we’re going to drink it.

On a mixological note, I should add, the Gibson is quite different from a Martini. Olives are usually preseved in brine; onions in vinegar. A splash of olive juice adds salt. A splash of onion juice gestures in the direction of the sour. This is perhaps why an extra touch of sweetness works well here. Not too much but just enough.

And this is why the Gibson is one for the connoisseur. And it’s possibly why the Gibson’s IMDB page is even more storied than that of the Martini. I think of Cary Grant, sinking a Gibson on the train in North by Northwest. And there’s a still more iconic party scene in All About Eve. It is the Gibsons that she incessantly drinks that vinegar all of Bette Davies’s tart rejoinders. “Fasten your seatbelts - it’s going to be a bumpy night.”

Naturally, when I had recovered from my evil bug, I made a Gibson with a basic pickled onion and was pleasantly surprised. But I must say - I prefer a cornichon.

---

PLAYLIST

Now, I couldn’t quite bring myself to do a James Bond Martini post - I do strive to make this thing as untopical as I can. However! Having actually rather surprisingly enjoyed No Time to Die the other day, I thought a James Bond playlist might not go amiss. Or rather an Alter-Bond playlist, non-Bond-Bond, songs from James Bond films that never were, featuring Dusty, Nancy, Amy, erm, Belle and Sebastian, and the rest.

THIS PLAYLIST UPDATES AUTOMATICALLY EACH WEEK. The idea is, you download it and return to it each week in your Spotify. If there was an old song you’d like to hear again, you’ll find it RIGHT HERE in the ongoing archive of 2021 playlists.

---

WHAT I’VE BEEN READING

I am an unabashed admirer Andrew O’Hagan’s writing, drinking and overall esprit. His latest novel, Mayflies, is out now in paperback. And here is his latest essay, about tracking down the children painted by the amazing Scottish painter, Joan Eardley. (LRB)

At 95 and with ailing health, the poor old Queen has been ordered to give up her favourite drink - the gin Martini, which she is reported to have drunk EVERY NIGHT(!) going back a long time indeed. I think the moral of this story is clear. Drink a gin Martini every night and you too will live to 95. (Vanity Fair)

Amelia Tait is a poet; here she is on why the Muppet Lord of the Rings should exist (The Face)

I read this piece on the new fantasy series The Wheel of Time as research for an interview I did this week… but I share it here as it’s such an eye-popping insight into the extremely expensive world of BIG TV. Amazon Studios are pumping UNTOLD MILLIONS into this thing, all because Jeff Bezos wanted his own Game of Thrones. Should have made the Muppet Lord of the Rings instead, maybe (GQ)

I enjoyed this appreciation of Adrian Chiles’s Guardian column! (Gawker)

This just in! Ed Cumming on the rise of the “Baby Stag” (Guardian)

Oh and I wrote this about doorbells. (Sunday Times).

---

SHOPPING LIST

Brandy, cinnamon (sticks), golden caster sugar, whole milk (almond milk/oat milk/rice milk/ etc all fine). And nutmeg.

🥛