Are These Two Historical Martini-Esque Cocktails Just the Same Drink?
A pair of maraschino-inflected Martini-style cocktails with suspiciously similar recipes and complicated histories.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Martinez, and I offered two versions: One luscious and soft and extra sweet, with a pour of vermouth equal to the pour of gin — and one much drier and more aggressive, with a bigger portion of gin, and the slightly bitter Punt e Mes in the sweet vermouth slot.
One might reasonably wonder: If I was going for a drier, less sweet drink, why didn’t I just use dry vermouth?
The reason is that dry vermouth would have produced a different drink — and possibly two different drinks. I say possibly because these drinks have recipes that are so close that it can be quite difficult to tell them apart, even on paper.
Both of these drinks represent an evolutionary step past the Martinez and toward the dry gin Martini. Viewed together, they also serve as a sort of corollary to last week’s newsletter on Martinez variations. With those drinks, I argued that very small recipe and structure differences can produce drinks with quite distinct characters. But with this week’s cocktail pair, it’s closer to the opposite.
These drinks are the Turf Club and the Tuxedo No. 2, and their recipes are so similar that you could easily end up thinking you’re looking at a kind of Fight Club situation, in which the dark, weird twist is that they are actually the same drink. That might be a little bit of an overstatement. They are probably more like identical twins. But one could certainly be forgiven for confusing the two, for finding it hard to draw a clear line of separation between them.
The good news is that even if you can’t settle on a meaningful distinction, both drinks are delicious treats, ever so slightly sweeter and more flavorful than a dry Martini, but without veering into Manhattan-esque territory.
Turf Wars
The best way to demonstrate the fundamental similarity of these cocktails is to look back at Harry Johnson’s Bartender’s Manual.The 1900 edition puts the recipes for these two drinks almost next to each other, on pages 267 and 268.