Stirrings Dirty Martini

No cocktail captures the imagination like the Martini. So simple to make, yet the folklore surrounding Martinis have elevated its reputation to mythic proportions. Larger than life characters claim the Martini as their drink of choice, including FDR who once offered Stalin and Churchill a Dirty Martini, a classic gin martini with a touch of olive juice brine. If this perennial favorite is the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet, as H. L. Mencken said, then the Dirty Martini is the sensual side of cocktail poetry, a little dirty but still a beautiful thing to behold. When President Franklin Roosevelt repealed Prohibition in 1933 he celebrated with the first legal Martini, a Dirty Martini, two parts gin, one part dry vermouth, a teaspoon of olive brine, an olive and a lemon peel rubbed around the rim of the glass.