The writer Bernard DeVoto spoke eloquently about the martini: “You can no more keep a Martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there. The proper union of gin and vermouth is ... one of the happiest marriages on earth, and one of the shortest lived.” Martini recipes are a staple of any bar, and the best martinis hark back to a long and glamorous tradition.

The martini, a combination of gin and vermouth (or vodka) may have begun life as the Martinez, a California drink that added cherry juice to the mix, but no one knows for sure. Other versions argue that the drink began in the nineteenth century, the turn of the twentieth century, or in 1912, named for Martinez, the Martini brothers, or a bartender named Martini di Arma di Taggia. No matter the origin, martini recipes were common by Prohibition when bathtub gin made it the United States’s favorite cocktail.

The best martinis arose after Prohibition, when variations like apple martini recipes and other variants made the rounds of glamorous hotels and parties. Luminaries like Winston Churchill, H.L. Mencken, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemmingway, and Franklin Roosevelt all hailed the drink as their favorite alcoholic indulgence, lending an aura of celebrity to the mix of gin and vermouth. Later, fictional James Bonds’ love of martinis, shaken not stirred (technically making the drink a Bradford), made the martini ubiquitous, and few parties of the 1960s and 1970s lacked martinis. Flavored versions, like apple martini recipes, kept the drink fresh. Today, the sight of a martini glass and an olive on toothpick is an almost universal signal for cocktail hour.