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Major events, people, places or things in the 19th earned their own cocktails named after them. From what we’ve seen in our research when this happens there is an explosion of drinks of the same name but very different recipes. We think this happened to the Aviation because around the turn of the century we see references to Aviation cocktails and several different recipes. Jacques Straub from Chicago listed his version with apple jack, absinthe, lime and grenadine in 1913. The first reference we found to an Aviation cocktail without the ingredients listed was 1911 Arizona sentinel and Yuma weekly examiner, November 23, 1911.

It’s not until Hugo Ensslin and his 1916 Recipes for Mixed Drinks do we land on what will eventually be the Aviation we know today. But even after Ensslin’s version we still see Aviation cocktails with different ingredients.

It takes Prohibition and the post Prohibition surge of cocktail recipe books by the likes of Harry Craddock and Patrick Gavin Duffy for Ensslin’s Aviation recipe to take the crown as the proper Aviation cocktail

Addendum: Mr. Douglas Stailey added to the story by remarking how Craddock who potentially revived the Aviation after Prohibition did not include the Creme de Violette in it. It was Patrick Gavin Duffy who knew Ensslin’s recipe brought that ingredient back in his own publication.

Also, apparently American Creme de Violette got its color not from violets like the French version but from toxic dyes used in manufacturing ink. This actually informs some of the tales I’ve heard in reference to the Blue Moon Cocktail

A gimlet is a common word especially even if you go back all the way to the 14th century you will find the word everywhere. This is because a gimlet was a tool used by brewers and vintners to bore holes into casks to release pressure inside. Gimlets were used in these trades commonly through the early 20th century and both the idea of the tool and its presence in the industry makes it an ideal candidate to be the name for a penetrating drink.

The second story involves a British navy surgeon by the name of Thomas Desmond Gimlette. According to the story he was the first to add lime juice to gin to get the sailors to take their lime ration. This is inevitably wrong because the British navy was already adding lime juice to their rum and gin since much earlier in the 19th century and Gimlette was a naval officer in 1879.

The story gets more interesting, however, when we include Lachlan Rose’s invention of a lime juice preserved with sugar in 1867. Rose was so successful in his enterprise that soon after he created his lime juice cordial he had a contract with the British Navy to provide the cordial in place of fresh lime juice for their ration. That’s still roughly ten years from the cordial invention to Gimlette’s active duty, not soon enough for him to crack open that first bottle of cordial and add it to gin and say, “Here, boys, fresh from the motherland!” But what we have seen over the years doing the show is that information moved differently back then and reasons something got attention were specific but even then took time to get around.

This drink doesn’t appear in print until 1920 from Harry MacElhone from what we found, and he adds the note, “A very popular beverage in the Navy.” So at it’s introduction it’s being attributed to the navy. We also see in The Admiral: the memoirs of Albert Gleaves, USN, a book written in 1934 about his experiences in 1920. This drink is heavily tilted to the British Navy experience.

As happens with these drinks that appear post Prohibition, immediately all of the other recipe books copy the original author and the drink reappears in all of the standard compilations at the time. By the 1950s it is everywhere getting an additional push by its appearance in Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye.

So we think the origins of this drink go way back possibly even the 18th century when the British were studying the effects of citrus juice in preventing scurvy among sailors, but the name doesn’t appear in print until 1920. The name, though, possibly was used as slang in the British navy all the way back to the 1880s

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If we just look at earliest mentions of the drink with the name associated with the commonly accepted ingredients for the early Martini we find the earliest article, one that suggests the drink as relatively new and growing in popularity, in the Washington Post, April 12, 1891

However, if we just go with the name we find a recipe for a drink called the Martini in Harry Johnson’s 1888 recipe book but it adds curacao and some gum syrup, but otherwise the other ingredients loosely match the recipe from 1891

But Harry Johnson’s recipe is actually more similar to another drink that was popular at the time…the Martinez. Earliest mention of the Martinez we found was in St. Paul daily Globe. (Saint Paul, Minn.), 20 Nov. 1887 and the drink was commonly described as a Manhattan with gin instead of whiskey.

So did the Martini derive as an offshoot of the Martinez? The timeline is all very tight and circumstantially the dates are close enough that it is probable and makes sense, but we don’t have any evidence to confirm this. We can tell where the Martini fits in the timeline so we know basically when it first came around, but we don’t have a solid origin story for this.

Addendum: In our conversation with Doug Stailey he pointed out another origin story for the Martini involving a New York guy named Frank Martine. Mr. Martine’s obituary in 1891 claims he was the inventor of the drink. Martine wasn’t a bartender. He was more of a man about town who like many of his chums spent his evenings in cocktail bars. The only aspect of the story that stands out is the date. He died in 1891 at the age of 47. If he divined a Martini in the mid 1880s there was plenty of time for it to become popular before he passed. It’s possible. It’s compelling, but not really any evidence to support it.

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