Peppadon't Preach

There are few things as tiresome as a cocktail pedant. The Geneva Convention guarantees that every human being is entitled to enjoy a Manhattan free from a harangue about the variety of bitters used in the preparation. Martini pedants are a particularly irritating subspecies, what with the endless ways of saying how dry they want it. Yes, Ian Fleming's Bond would turn up his nose at the appletini, but if it helps paralegals get rooty with the Kim C*ttrall wannabees, who's complaining?

That said, there is a point beyond which revisions of a given recipe, food or cocktail, are not simply violations of good taste, but assaults on the semiotic conventions that make language work. A "Chicken Caesar" is a bad idea, but it at least involves cognizance of what a Caesar is. Serving baby carrots and aoili and calling it a "hearty summer Caesar" is an attack on the idea that words have referents. The Little Giant Peppadew Martini falls into this second category. The peppadew seems like a lateral move from the olive, but whatever. Food and food journalism would wither without being able to say things like "peppadew is the new chipotle," and if the peppadew is, indeed, like, so hot right now, why not put it in a drink?

Stuffing cheese into the  condiment you are using as martini garnish seems like a bad idea, as it's hard to see how contact with the vodka would not produce a whey-like slick on the surface of the cocktail. Where the whole thing goes off the rails is in the final instruction: "Shake well, strain into a 6-ounce martini glass and top off with equal parts lemon-lime soda and seltzer." This is  no longer a recognizable mutation of the martini, but a vodka & soda / vodka and sprite with a cheese-stuffed pepper. It may be a collision between what you tried to get your date to drink at your junior prom and chiles rellenos in a glass, but it sure as shit is not a martini. Language - pwned once again by T:!

Comments

[BK]

A martini is cold-ass gin and a wave of dry vermouth. Anything else is nouveau shite in a "martini" glass.

[J.R. Knight]

BK - agreed, although I give a pass to vodka substitution. Not my taste but we are not slaves to convention.

My theory is that people enjoy ordering martinis but most people don't enjoy the taste. It's all part of the delicate dance between people enjoying a cocktail and people trying to get loaded.

[Rose's Lime]

I'm sorry, Again, I've got to side with late Wittgenstein and the Times and against early Wittgenstein and the Fesser.

Language is a game in which we create meaning with each other, not a code to define what's in a non-existant glass in a non-existant cave that Fesser or some other board of taste claim to have absolute knowledge of.

Pointing out that "If it has cheese and a half dozen other ingredients in it, it ain't a Martini." No shit. Apple or vodka - yes. Dairy - no. We're all just playing the game.

If you have a gripe, I think it's more fairly with the playa, than the game. The Chocolate example is of an institution using it's weight to shift the dialog between what's chocolate and what's chocolatey. You could argue T: has the same institutional weight (though I think is overstating a little) and find fault with their journalistic ethics. Were this the case, you could point out to them they should write the bartender whips up this so-called "Peperdew martini"

Is that your gripe? Now explain to me how this is less pedantic than insisting a proper martini should be infused with juniper and not cardamom?

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