There are Martini purists who abjure olives and insist that lemon peel is the only proper garnish for the greatest of all cocktails. They are the ones who can be heard, when presented with an olive in their drink, repeating the well-worn line, “If I had wanted a salad, I would have ordered one.” Let me suggest that they are wrong. Not only is an olive the best and most correct embellishment for gin-and-vermouth, without the cocktail olive, the Martini would never have come to be the essential American drink.
It was about 1898 that the first accounts of olives being served in the bottom of Martinis appear, thanks in no small part to a New York company called Falcon Packing. Formed in 1895 by a New Yorker named S.J. Valk, Falcon put pitted olives in an elegant, coniform bottle. Ads for the curious new product were regularly running in newspapers and magazines by 1898, often suspiciously close to articles proclaiming the wonders of cocktail olives. “The bright, red, and tasty cherry that always goes with a cocktail has a strong rival as an appetizer,” wrote the Pittsburg Dispatch in 1899. The cocktail olive was all the rage in “swell uptown establishments. “Some say it improves the quality of cocktails, especially that of a dry Martini.”
Why, of all the hundreds of cocktails known to a decent bartender, did the olive work its magic with the dry Martini, a drink that until then was merely a variation on a drink that was itself a variation on a Manhattan? It was a question of sweetness.
An early bar manual, Cocktails, and How to Make Them had recently been published. It noted that “The cherry preserved in Maraschino and the small green olive are often dropped in the bottom of the cocktail glass.” The book suggested a principle for choosing which to use: “the cherry should go with the sweet drink and the olive with the dry.”
At the time, the Martini was a sweet drink, made with sugared “old Tom” gin, sweet vermouth and even “gum syrup.” The salty, savory taste of cocktail olives made for a clash of flavors when added to a regular, sweet Martini. But it proved to be delicious with a dry Martini – that is, a Martini made with the un-sweet ingredients dry gin and dry vermouth. The olive, by forcing changes in the making of Martinis, is arguably responsible for the newfound success of the drink – a success that soon became international.
In 1900 Paris threw a World’s Fair. Americans, displaying their national accomplishments, showed up with mixed drinks. The most remarkable of which “was a cocktail with an olive in it.” The foreigners were gobsmacked, “but they soon found out that the taste of the olive was fine after the liquor was gulped down.”
I thus present this case to the court of bibulous opinion. The cocktail olive was not a corruption of the Martini; rather, it was the essential ingredient that forced changes on the drink, rescuing it from its 19th century wanderings in the wilderness.
I propose we drink a toast to S.J. Valk and his Falcon Packing. He is the man who made the Martini.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
