A few months ago, I wrote in this space about the cocktail olive, how pitted olives brined in jars had been introduced to the market in the late 1890s by a New York firm called Falcon Packing, and how they had been advertised as improving “the quality of cocktails, especially that of a dry martini.” The olive hadn’t just improved the dry martini. It had made the drink.
But there are those for whom garnish, whether in a martini or another drink, has always been suspect. There are multiple avenues of attack open to the garnish-averse. One of those grounds for opposition has long been the belief that garnish is a con. A grift. A way to rob the rubes of the liquor they have paid for.
Perhaps the purest expression of that complaint comes in Ian Fleming’s 1961 Bond book, Thunderball. CIA agent Felix Leiter and 007 are in a hotel bar waiting for the hour when they will board the bad guy’s big boat and snoop around looking for clues that will lead them to missing nukes. But first, martinis.
Leiter orders up a couple of dry martinis and says to Bond, “Just watch.” The waiter delivers the drinks, and Leiter calls for the bartender. “My friend,” says Felix, “I asked for a martini and not a soused olive.” He spears the giant olive garnishing the drink. “The glass that had been three-quarters full,” Fleming writes, “was now half full.” And, boy, did it make Mr. CIA mad. Leiter proceeds — when he and Bond should be getting prepped to hunt wayward nukes — to deliver an impassioned, self-righteous philippic on the subject of the crooks behind the mahogany and the many ways they can short-sheet a drinker’s bed.
He adds up the number of “measures” in a bottle of Gordon’s Gin and calculates how much water and how many jumbo olives it takes to cut the amount of real liquor in the glass roughly in half.
How about those nukes, Felix? Nope, they’ll have to wait. He’s not finished with the barman. He works the numbers and figures that all it takes for the bar to pay for the whole bottle of gin is to sell two martinis. It’s an outrage, and Leiter threatens to take the watery olive bath to the Tourist Board.
International super villains are on the loose with two stolen nuclear warheads, the baddies are threatening to blow up a major city, and Felix Leiter is threatening to sic the Tourist Board on a hapless barman. It’s enough to make one think that Felix Leiter works not for the CIA but for the FBI.
Finally, Leiter lets the bartender go his way. But by the time he returns with some proper martinis, the two agents are gone, finally focused on their mission. What? Oh, I am sorry. Fleming writes that Bond and Leiter are still at the table, where they have moved on to complaining about the audacity of the tipping racket.
This whole scene does nothing to advance the plot and nothing to burnish Bond’s image as a know-it-all sophisticate. Indeed, Bond expresses some amazement: “You got those figures right, Felix?” The savvy superagent had no idea that bartenders were inflating the value of his drinks by some four or five times. It’s not a good look for Bond, who is supposed to be so smart about everything involving bottles and glasses that he knows the vintage of Champagne he’s drinking by taste alone.
The only explanation for the scene that makes sense is that the complaint presented as Leiter’s is actually something straight from the mouth of Ian Fleming. One gets the feeling that Fleming had delivered the Jumbo Olive Speech at many a dinner party and considered his analysis so clever that he had to use it in one of his books.
Is it something Bond would care about? Fleming seemed to realize that it was beneath his hero to bully barmen by threatening to go to the Tourist Board. That’s why Leiter gets the soliloquy and not 007.
My own opinion on the matter is that olives, whatever their size, must be very cold so as not to render one’s martini tepid. And my advice, whatever it’s worth, for the CIA agents working on dissuading Vladimir Putin from using nuclear weapons in Ukraine: Save the martinis until you’ve saved the day.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
