The king’s martini glass
Eric Felten
It has taken the new old king all of one week to bore everyone silly.
His majesty, King Jug-Ears III, bores so thoroughly from a distance that it is hard to imagine the somnambulant effect the old boy has in person. Dinners at the palace must be tricky affairs: Combine the droning of the tedious monarch with a drink or two, and I dare you to try keeping your eyes open. I count myself lucky never to have been so challenged.
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But here I am, disparaging Chuckles the Third when what I really should be doing is offering him an apology. I have done him an injustice. I have assumed the worst of him. The man is such a tiresome toff that, had I been asked, I would have reflexively declared him a teetotaler. And I would have been wrong.
Not only does Charles drink, but he is said to favor the king of cocktails, the martini.
This should be a feather in his crown, but somehow, it merely contributes to the sense that Great Britain’s new monarch is tiresome. Why? It is part of the royal routine to have a martini before dinner. So far, so good. The king is particular about proportions — he insists on what the cocktail cognoscenti refer to as a “Fifty-Fifty,” a drink made of equal parts gin and dry vermouth. So far, still so good. What’s the point of being king if not to be able to have your martini just the way you like it? But then, we are told he brings his own martini glass, which I take to be a beverage too far.
When it comes to martinis, I am particular, too. And I fear I am tiresome, disappearing from the preprandial banter to detail for the waiter exactly how I would like my martini. It’s rude, in a way, or at least precious. I regret the fussiness as a sort of bad form. I find myself thinking of Raymond Chandler’s hard-bitten detective, Philip Marlowe. When told by a high-society (with an emphasis on high) lady that she doesn’t like his manners, Marlowe replies, “They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings.” And for all that, I can’t imagine taking my fussiness to the eye-rolling extreme of bringing my own glass along. Then again, I don’t have any footman who need make-work.
The king’s martini routine could be said to be a break with recent tradition. The king’s mother and grandmother also had drinks before dinner, and neither was said to have experimented much with cocktail innovations or even just variety. They were both Dubonnet cocktail drinkers. As one might suspect, given the name of the drink, a Dubonnet cocktail is made with the French aperitif wine, Dubonnet (while we’re being particular, it is most important that the Dubonnet in question be the red variety, not the white), and gin. As with Charlie’s martini, the hard liquor and the fortified wine of the Dubonnet cocktail are combined in equal measure.
But none of the above compare with the tipple favored by Queen Victoria. She preferred to have combined, in a tumbler, claret (red wine from Bordeaux) and Scotch whisky. The novelist Kingsley Amis imagined, complete with dialect, what the queen’s servant, bodyguard, and (ahem) special friend, the Scotsman John Brown, might have had to say about Victoria’s cocktail: “Och, Your Majesty, dinna mak’ yoursel’unweel wi’ a’ yon parleyvoo mouthwash — ha’e a wee dram of guid malt forbye.’”
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I’ll stick with a martini myself. But, avoiding the example of Charles, I will try to be less particular about the matter of gin and vermouth. And I’m not about to start schlepping my own special glass.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?