MxMo LXXII: Drink Your Vegetables—Low Country Celery

Guest blogger Matt L. Miller sends us an original recipe in response to this month’s Mixology Monday, the theme of which is Drink Your Vegetables. I, Rowen, have the pleasure of hosting this MxMo here at Fogged In Lounge, and invite participants to create a drink around one or more vegetable ingredients in any form. Matt responds with a celery-salted Holland gin Martini illustrated by his photo and description below.



Low Country Celery

• 2 oz genever gin (Genevieve)
• 1/2 oz dry vermouth (Dolin)
• 2 shakes celery salt

Stir vigorously over ice. Strain immediately into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with one spicy pickled green bean (Tillen Farm).

Strangely, Anchor Distilling has found it necessary to add the following warning label to Genevieve, their genever-style gin: WARNING: This is NOT a gin for making martinis! It is a “Genever” or “Schiedam” style gin, for old-fashioned cocktail recipe mixing. Or enjoy it on the rocks! Well, I suppose some people had complained. But I’m an iconoclast, so I decided to make a martini variation despite the warning, having run out of more orthodox recipes for genever. Strongly herbal, of course, but with a real backbone from the rye. It needed salt to go with the genever’s funkiness. And maybe something bitter to cut the genever’s sweetness. Celery salt? Perfect! Leafy vegetables were brought out by the salt, the Dolin vermouth added some more flowery herbal notes, and the celery completed the salad. Oh, and a spicy pickled bean for fun and distraction.
MATT L. MILLER

Martini Time (and a Thyme Martini)

Greetings from the bleak shores of post-holiday confusion, where those of us in northern latitudes stumble around in the cold and dark, numbly bumping into things. (“Stupid parking meter!”) Martinis help a lot. It’s true that they increase the delirium but then you don’t mind it as much as you did before. They seem so astringent and boozy that you can’t help but think after a sip or two that they’re good for everything that ails you. (They’re not, but even so….)

And there’s something comforting in that trace of brine from an olive. Its savoriness is sort of bracing—like soup for people who drink. That’s why I like a garlic-stuffed olive. Big flavor. Substantial. Add a green herb and it’s practically a meal. I’ll just illustrate with a recipe here:

Thyme Martini

• 2 oz London dry gin
• 1 oz dry vermouth
• thyme sprig
• lemon peel
• scant pinch sea salt

Gently muddle a 2- or 3-inch sprig of thyme with a wide, thin piece of lemon peel and a pinch of sea salt. Add plenty of ice and the gin and vermouth. Stir and double strain. (Second one is mesh to catch the bits.) Garlic-stuffed olive.
ROWEN, FOGGED IN LOUNGE

This is exactly what it sounds like, a Dry Martini with stronger herbal notes. Think about going easy on the muddler since the thyme can get pretty assertive if you mash it hard. (I guess you could add more booze to dilute it. Heh.)

What’s that salt doing there? Why not extra olive brine? I gotta say I’m not crazy about the Dirty Martini for some reason. I understand why other people like them but to me, they always taste, uh, dirty. But a small pinch of sea salt in a cocktail like this is very nice indeed.

Matinee of the Gods

Not quite the twilight. More like that funny hour after the early show when you have to find a drink somewhere. Martini-Gordon-Vesper variation with aquavit.



Matinee of the Gods

• 1 1/2 oz London dry gin
• 1/2 oz aquavit
• 1/4 oz fino sherry
• 1/4 oz dry vermouth
• 1 dash orange bitters (Regans)

Stir with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Lemon twist.
SOURCE: ROWEN, FOGGED IN LOUNGE

Sort of a Martini but cozier.

Dry Rye Martini

I want to say right up front that I don’t approve of the trend of calling everything in a conical glass a Martini. Let’s call things by their own names. A Martini is a gin-vermouth combo. I’m prepared to call any added dashes and splashes a matter of taste, but the Martini has to have gin and vermouth—unless the gin tastes like rye, as in Dry Rye Gin by St. George Spirits, in which case, you would do better to call it a Dry Rye Martini. And if instead of dry vermouth you made it with Cocchi Americano—say a fair amount of it—you wouldn’t have a Dry Martini—though it could still be a Dry Rye Martini. Except that it wouldn’t be dry—only the Dry Rye would be dry. And the Dry Rye is gin, and dry, but not like a London dry gin. But it’s just as dry—you follow me?

Now don’t think for a moment that this is a Martini because it’s not. Except that it is. There’s the gin—but Dry Rye isn’t what I’d call a Martini gin. Except, I suppose, if you used it in a Martini recipe, which this is. You got the gin and the vermouth. And orange bitters. You don’t hear much about orange bitters in Martinis anymore. Why would that ever go away? But it seems to be coming back. I’m glad. Anyway, here’s the recipe. Have at it.



Dry Rye Martini

• 2 oz St. George Spirits Dry Rye Gin
• 3/4 oz Cocchi Americano (or Lillet will do)
• 2 dashes Regans’ Orange Bitters

Stir with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Lemon twist.
SOURCE: ROWEN, FOGGED IN LOUNGE

You can twist the twist and drop it in, or discard it if you find that your twist keeps ending up in your mouth near the end of the drink. But if that happens, you’re probably gulping. I won’t tell you not to drink too fast. That’s your own affair.

Aquavit and French

There are a few variations of the Dry Martini recipe remixed with aquavit. Here I’ve decided to follow the Martini proportions from the 1906 version by Charlie Mahoney that appears in David Wondrich’s Imbibe! So far, this is my favorite classic cocktail with aquavit. The spirit really shines, and the drink seems more assertive than the gin version. I have to say that for this particular ratio of spirit to vermouth, I actually like aquavit better than the original.



Aquavit and French

• 1 1/2 oz aquavit (Aalborg)
• 1 1/2 oz dry vermouth
• 1 dash orange bitters (Angostura Orange)

Stir with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Lemon twist.
SOURCE: BASED ON CHARLIE MAHONEY’S “MAHONEY COCKTAIL,” DAVID WONDRICH, IMBIBE!

The gin one calls for an orange twist. I had a lemon. The drink’s a bit small for the glass in the photo but it was the best one I had to capture the turn-of-the-century feel of this.

Summer and Smoke: Smoky Martini

There are several versions of this out there—some have vermouth, some don’t. This here’s my usual Martini but with a little scotch and a lemon twist. Mark Kingwell in Classic Cocktails calls it a Dashiell Hammett. I haven’t run across that name for it before, but as a fan, I could easily see Nick Charles or even the Continental Op enjoying several of these.



Smoky Martini

• 2 oz dry gin (Bluecoat)
• 1/2 oz dry vermouth (Dolin)
• 1 tsp smoky scotch (Peat Monster)

Stir with ice and strain into cocktail glass. Lemon twist.
SOURCE: COMPOSITE

Like the last one, this has just a touch of smoke to accent the other flavors. For one in which the scotch is intense, see the Dorini.

Gibson with Scrappy’s Celery Bitters

A fun product appeared in one of my favorite package stores: Scrappy’s Bitters. I was intrigued by the celery one, as I had been playing with the idea of making a batch of my own. The retail price at my downtown place was decidedly steep at $17.99—you can get a decent 750-ml bottle of spirits for that kind of money. But they must’ve figured cocktail nerds like me would buy it, and of course I did. Shucks—I’m just a fool for celery.

The odd thing about celery bitters is that it had been a defunct product used in cocktails of a bygone era, and we don’t know much about it or how it was used, but cocktailians today are eager to revive it. It just sounds like such a cool idea for savory and dry cocktails.

For my first Scrappy’s experiment, I went with one of my favorite Martini variations, the Gibson. The way Aunt Mary made one, the Gibson had no bitters, but I don’t think she would’ve objected to a hint of celery. She liked her vegetables.



Gibson with Celery Bitters

• 2 oz gin
• 1/4 oz dry vermouth
• 1 dash celery bitters

Stir with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Pickled onion.
SOURCE: COMPOSITE

One dash is enough. It’s nice stuff with good celery seed flavor but two dashes and a very dry cocktail like the Gibson starts to lose focus. The celery is best here as a subtle, dry, green note on the finish. Scrappy’s is more to my taste than the Bitter Truth Celery Bitters, which is very different in character—more like lemon verbena perhaps, and too pervasive for my taste.

Special thanks to my friends Flynn and Richard for their awesome pickled onions. I took them from a jar of pickled green beans they gave me. I hope to use one of the beans in a Bloody Mary post with the celery bitters if I can stop myself from eating them all.

The Nutty Rooster

Other cocktailians must get asked this a lot too: What’s your favorite drink? I dunno—the one in my hand? I wouldn’t even be able to decide on a favorite Martini recipe, though this variant of my own is up there. The inspiration seems a bit hazy at the moment though I must’ve been making a lot of Gordon Cocktails at the time cuz there was a bottle of dry sherry open. And I remember that a bottle of Beefeater, an old favorite, made a major contribution too.

Oddly, nobody ever asks me what my favorite gin is, though I wouldn’t be able to answer that either.



The Nutty Rooster

• 2 oz London dry gin (Beefeater)
• 1/4 oz Amontillado sherry
• 1/4 oz Cocchi Americano

Stir with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a generous orange twist.
SOURCE: ROWEN, FOGGED IN LOUNGE

Cocchi Americano has reappeared in San Francisco and not a moment too soon. Besides the giving me the pleasure of the drink in this post, my Twentieth Centuries and Vespers are a little brighter from Cocchi’s subtle but distinct cinchona edge. And I love the two apéritif wines, the Cocchi and the sherry, together. Orange oil makes a major contribution to the Rooster in its own right, so the twist should be nice and big.

That’s No Way to Make a Martini

Ever wish there were another flinty, Martini-like libation? Well, then you may have already found some incarnation of the Gordon, a gin-sherry combination that responds well to the various Martini treatments. The sherry is usually given as amontillado, though I happened to have a bottle of fino, which reminds me a little of Dolin dry vermouth. You can use a fair amount of sherry, though its nuttiness, especially in the case of amontillado, can overwhelm the gin.



Gordon Cocktail

3 oz gin
1 oz fino sherry
2 dashes orange bitters

Stir briskly in an iced shaker and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. A lemon twist is great with this, though here I've used a garlic-stuffed olive.