Consider it one of the great mysteries of cocktail history: the origin of the martini. How did the essential cocktail come to be? Did it evolve like some Galapagos rarity, or did it burst, like Athena, full-blown and irresistible from the head of Zeus? And even if we are to discover the when and the who of the martini’s invention, how do we explain the drink’s wildfire spread from late 19th-century semiobscurity to its early 20th-century status as one leg of the cocktail tripod: Manhattan, Bronx, martini.

The martini of the late 1800s was a many-sugared thing. Instead of a dry gin, it used a syrupy sweet gin called Old Tom; instead of dry French vermouth, it called for sweet Italian vermouth; and then, as if one’s teeth hadn’t already been turned to carious stumps, two more sweet elements were added: orange curacao and gum syrup (that is, sugar-water). The only constituent of the concoction that wasn’t sweet was the dash or two of Boker’s Bitters.