Serious blogs are apparently not supposed to be of the “what I had for dinner last night” variety. Do I care what people think a serious blog is supposed to be about? No! I can think of few things I care less about, in fact.

So here is the ultimate “what I had for dinner last night” post. (Except it was not last night, but some nights ago.) (Oh, sorry, co-bloggers!) People asked for this, and so here it is….. It is the promised report on my noodle dish experiments, inspired by my wonderful Walkabout culinary experiences in Taiwan, described in several posts earlier (see e.g. here, here, here……)

A disclaimer: This is not really a recipe for beef noodles (beef “lo mien”), as I am not giving you measurements and the like. I am giving instead suggestions about things: ingredients and procedures….. I’m telling aspects of what worked best for me after a few attempts, a least so far. I’m also celebrating the “jazz” aspect I’ve noticed in Chinese cooking, which is the wonderful serendipitous aspect: I never use exactly the same things every time….. There are some broad themes for the framework, but some of the details can be swapped for others…. For example, I just like throwing in the butternut squash later on….. some nights I don’t…I use something else. And my green leafy vegetable can vary a lot too…..I just get a variety of things on the market on the weekend, and open the fridge and see what I feel like on the night.

A further disclaimer: I’m not a chef or a cook, and nor am I trying to be one! Any real chefs who know me, I apologize for this encroachment on your turf! (e.g. Mark B, if you’re reading, sorry!) However, I have cooked a lot, since I was young, and I’m going to assume that you can cook just as well (or whatever) as I can. So think of this not as a cooking lesson, but as though I’m telling you about a new song or melody I learned. Not teaching you to sing. (If you don’t cook…this might not be the place to learn.)

Your results may vary.

The day after I returned from Taiwan, I went to Chinatown. I wanted to find a good Chinese grocery store when I could get excellent ingredients and try to reproduce the flavours I’d been tasting on the walkabout. I found one after asking some people on the street. It’s fantastic (although I get funny looks whenever I walk in – I’m the only non-Asian I’ve ever seen in there so far – people are fine with me once they see I’m just shopping like everyone else) and full of excellent things…. at great prices….. including a wonderful butcher, and stacks of fresh noodles. After a bit of reading around for what the key themes and flavours are, I then went to the store and created a new supply of important sauces and other ingredients for my cupboard and fridge, and I’ve been experimenting with cooking in this style for a while now….

So take a nice bit of high quality flank steak and cut it into strips, against the grain. Pop the strips into a bowl, sprinkle a bit of cornstarch in, coat the pieces with it and then put in some dark soy sauce. It’ll sit there for a while and the sauce will penetrate into the meat, during the preparation of the other things. Start a nice big pan of water on the stove….. you’re going to cook some noodles in a few minutes….

A sauce for later: Some blobs of thick oyster sauce…amazing stuff…..never ever thought of using it before. Put also in some light soy sauce…. a spoonful or two. Mix that with a cup and a half of beef stock. You’ve either made the beef stock yourself from tasty beef bits in an earlier session and saved it in the freezer/fridge, or you’ve gone and bought some off the shelf. Good to have a supply ready at all times. This time, I did not have any stored, and so I used some good off-the-shelf stuff….Trader Joe’s does an excellent one, for example….it is not a specialist item.

Now, another fun part. Chopping stuff up with a big knife. First, garlic. Aside: People often get troubled by garlic….getting the skin off. No problem: Just take the cloves of garlic and crush them under the knife…… then they come right off. Ta-da!

Chop ‘em up nice and fine in a few seconds.

That water should be boiling by now. Take your desired quantity of fresh noodles (of a type that you like….I’m using some thin, white, flour noodles…lovely and soft and floury….) and drop them gently in, perhaps adding a pinch of salt… stir and agitate them a touch with something pointy (chopsticks, spoon, whatever) to separate them… and in a very short time they’ll be ready.

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Saturday night, and I’m doing a bit of blogging after clearing weeds in the garden. Shouldn’t I be getting ready to go out on the town and live it up a bit? Perhaps. I’ll see how I feel in an hour or so. Let me tell you a bit more about my Taiwan wanderings. I’m cheating a bit by borrowing (heavily edited and abridged!) extracts from one of the other blogs I keep…this one being a real diary that lives on my laptop, which I started while on Walkabout as a means of clearing my head (the point of the trip): essentially talking to myself (I recommend it).

At some point in my stay in Hsinchu on my Walkabout, I began to look for places that served good coffee, where I could sit and do a bit of thinking and some work, (sometimes both!). Both coffee and atmosphere are two important fuels for this type of work, at least for me. (This was before moving to Taipei and finding the various excellent tea and coffee places near National Taiwan University that I began to haunt regularly. I think I mentioned those in earlier posts about the trip. See e.g. here and several others.) Apparently coffee bars took hold rather recently in Taiwan and have become quite popular (often in combination with tea bars, but even as a thing unto themselves), although this was not so evident in the part of Hsinchu I was in.

It turned out that I spied this potentially nice coffee place right next (a few doors down from) to my hotel in Hsinchu, and one lunchtime I thought it would be nice to go and sit there and have some coffee. It was not clear whether the place really did sit-down coffee though, maybe only serving over the counter bulk coffee (no tables really set up… possible counter seat or two, but not really sure), and so I thought I would go in and do a bit of a mime to get across my question (as I’d grown accustomed to doing). So in I went, and the proprietor was chatting with someone over the counter. I thought I’d wait, but they broke off and I started to try to say something when the customer (a knock-you-over-the-head-with-a-bat-pretty young woman) spoke to me in English and so I asked her the question. So she asked the proprietor (a charming older lady with no English) and it was established that I could have a cup of coffee there for $100 NT and could sit. I tried to talk to the customer a bit more by asking her if she had a recommended coffee she liked, etc, but then we ran out of things to say before she had to run off, and that was it. She left. (I kicked myself for the rest of the day for not asking her if she wanted to join me for coffee, and wondered at the fact that I’d missed an opportunity to reach out and make a new friend. Getting slow in my old age, I guess.)

The proprietor took an awfully long time to make the cup of coffee, and I stood there on my own in the store, thinking that it would be really ironic if all of this resulted in a really lousy cup of coffee….

Eventually she brought it. It was excellent. It was in a rather special cup which she seemed rather proud of, and we had to fiddle a bit to set me up a table properly. (taking a large bag of beans off the only one that was close to flat on the floor and so usable). For the rest of the time I was there it was clearly a big deal that I was sitting and drinking coffee, for every time one of her regulars came in to get some beans, there was a long conversation, and then they would both turn and look at me for a moment, and then carry on talking. (Also, she came over and glanced over my shoulder at what I was writing, not knowing that I could see her doing this -I’ve eyes in back of my head, in case you are wondering-…..I was playing with a conjecture at the time and drawing lots of pictures and scribbling equations…wonder what she thought that all was?).

As you can see from the pictures, the place was very charming, as coffee places go. It turned out that this was typical of the dedicated coffee places (I went to others later, and in other cities). They’re just chock-a-block full of bags and bins of coffee, coffee paraphernalia, bizarre-looking coffee-extracting equipment (including lots of fancy round glass flasks straight from a science lab in a 1950s SF movie). It is an aspect of the atmosphere that I had not anticipated, and was rather welcome, since I’m quite a fan of ….paraphernalia.

Well here’s the more unexpected part of the story. (more…)

Well, all you other single types out there on Valentine’s Day night, why not dream with me a bit about food? It’s rather pleasant to share my memories of more excellent food from the south of Taiwan, the city of Tainan. I’ve already told you a bit about it in previous posts, (see here, here and here) so this continues the story. Recall that – after dashing off after my seminar in Tapei, a four and a half hour bus journey – I’d just arrived in the city late at night, and was promptly taken off to an excellent restaurant, where we spent some considerable time eating into the wee hours (and a rather drunk restaurant hostess was trying to seduce me with the aid of Taiwan beer)….

That first meal was the first of several where I could really dig deep into the considerable and wonderful culinary depths of the culture. For the next 48 hours I’d not be just sampling things I could figure out how to order on my own…I’d have help (such as with that last meal) from a fellow food lover, my dear friend Huei-Shih Liao, who lives in the city. So I could discover the really advanced stuff, get things that aren’t even on the menu, and learn a lot about the food and history too. It was actually Huei-Shih I came to see in Tainan (having met her in Taipei back in 1997), and to meet her husband and young daughter. The fact that Tainan also happens to be a fantastic historic city with arguably the best food in Taiwan was just a lucky bonus. It was enough for me to see my old friend in her home country again. That was the highlight of the whole Walkabout actually.

Well, anyway, the next excellent meal was in the morning. In a specialist breakfast place somewhere in the city (there are several by the side of the road), and I got to try several of those tasty eggy-things I recall from my first random samplings in Taipei eight years ago (see here). Basically, delicious variations on spring onion omelettes and savoury pancakes of some sort.

A major component of the meal that I would never have been able to appreciate without Huei-Shih’s patient guidance through the menu: Soy milk drinks of various sorts. Perfect accompaniment, along with hot milky tea (which I knew about from the last visit and am addicted to)!

After that, visits to temples and old forts…. excellent, but more later… let’s stay with the food here. I’m a big fan of buns of various sorts (steady now…), and dumplings….. basically the whole range of soft, warm, yielding things you bite into to reveal some delicious filling or other. There is an infinite variety there that you can pick up for lunch or just a quick restorative snack between temples. Actually, it is quite common to find really excellent food places near temples. This is not an accident, I’m told. The visit to the temple would be followed by a stop for a good meal, going back numerous generations, so why not have them conveniently adjacent to each other, to this day?

I love the containment paraphenalia associated to the food as well. The kit. The equipment. Case in point, those woven containers that the various dumpling sorts come in….. Have a look. Lovely. I just love those. I think I’ll get some for my own dumpling experiments later. (Which reminds me… my noodle experiments have been going very well. I should report on them some time.)

That night (after wandering around Tainan’s original street, packed with edible goodies (more…)

Just so you don’t get into too much of a comfort zone with the wonderful tasty food I’ve been describing to you recently (see here and here and more to come) from my Walkabout, here’s a scene perhaps a bit less familiar (at least to the Western eye) from a street market in Tainan:

You can walk along with them on a stick and eat them like a lollipop. Squidelicious! (or is it Octopussilicious!? Although the top bits look squiddy to me, I can only see eight legs/arms/tentacles/whatever, not ten, unless two are hidden in each case?)

I should apologize to PZ Myers right now, since he’s a fan of these critters, I recall…. and ask him “what type are they exactly, PZ?!”

-cvj

So you’ve got the idea by now (if you’ve been reading about my Walkabout) that Taiwan is wonderful for food. Taipei is said to be the most important city on the world map of Chinese cuisine for the sheer quality, quantity and variety. That may well be true enough…..

But the real Source is Tainan, in the South of the island. Getting -at the last minute- the opportunity to go there, I gave a seminar on the 23rd December to the String Theory group (essentially all of the Taiwan string community came…this was part three of a series of talks), shut down my computer, excused myself as best and genuinely apologetically as I could, and grabbed my bags and headed for the door. A while later, after fortifying myself with a bowl of beef noodles (what else?) at Taipei Main Station, I headed for the bus, and the four and a half hour journey from Taipei to Tainan. There’s a bewildering variety of bus stops, and several bus companies to figure out, and getting on little shuttle buses to go to the other place to get the main bus….. and lots of yelling of destinations which I could not understand….I will not claim that I figured this all out myself……the brother of the friend I was going to stay with was also travelling this way, and so he offered to accompany me. I was dreading the bus journey, to be honest. It is not that I can’t do long bus journeys – as a student, to save money on home visits, I regularly took the marathon nine hour one leaving from from London Victoria at midnight, headed to every busstop between London and Preston – but that it was a bit cold, I only had my jacket, and I was not as well prepared in my mind for it either… I was not really in the mood for it, but it was the only way to get there and I was certainly going to go and was prepared to put up with whatever hardship it entailed.

When the bus actually showed up, and I boarded it, I felt a bit silly about being apprehensive. It was not so much a bus as actually twelve fat -FAT- soft beds on wheels! With large (ish) TVs with lots of movies. And massagers built into the chairs. And curtains. And blankets. Yes…..there’s so much room to recline these guys all the way back and put out the leg rests because there are only. twelve. seats. Fantastic. Did I mention how much I love Taiwan?

Four and a half pleasant hours later, having gorged on incomprehensible kung-fu movies (helpfully dubbed and subtitled from Cantonese to Mandarin), and got about half an hour’s shut-eye, the bus pulled up at a street corner in the middle of somewhere or other, and we were in Tainan.

Not much later – about 1:00am – it was time to begin the real business of why I was there…. to spend time with my friend and eat my way around Tainan. My food guide (this was going to be way deeper culinary exploration than I could do on my own) for the two days I’d be there, the dear friend I came to visit, was reassured a day earlier when I told her that I was not looking for Western food of any sort. I wanted to try what was considered good to eat by the locals, and she should not assume that my palate was unable or unwilling to try things. This cleared the air, and I heard her (over the phone when we had the conversation) breathe a sigh of relief, as this meant that she could really have some fun exploring some of her favourite places and sharing some of the tastes of Tainan with me. (I don’t think she was fully convinced until later though…. she seemed to be often surprised when I asked for certain foods, or enjoyed certain flavours that were considered to be only to local tastes.)

So stopping only to pick up my friend’s husband from home, we went to the restaurant of a friend of theirs to start with. While spending my time untangling myself from the establishment’s (shall we say, to avoid blushes) extraordinarily friendly hostess (who was also trying to drink me under the table… goodness knows what lay in wait for me there…), I worked my way through just the first of many excellent meals in Tainan:

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The recent issue of Symmetry Magazine (a joint publication of SLAC and Fermilab, devoted, by their own assertion, to the dimensions of particle physics and worth taking a look at) has a humorous article on graduate student cuisine. The Symmetry editors polled a set of particle physicists and asked for their best and most memorable graduate student culinary experiences and then published the results.

You have probably been wondering, keeping you up at night no doubt – Just what do graduate students eat anyway? Or, you might wonder – Why could this possibly be interesting? Eating well as a graduate student typically poses serious challenges: students have little time or money. Most of us who have been through the experience look back, shake our heads, laugh, and wonder – How did I live through that? Most of you current students probably wonder – How am I going to live through this!? Those of you planning to attend graduate school, well, here are some enticing recipes just for you:

Broiled Pigs’ Feet
From Johns Hopkins University physicist Jonathan Bagger

“I lived with four housemates in Princeton. We had an ongoing competition to see who could make the cheapest meal. The winner, at 17 cents a serving, was pigs’ feet. Not cooked the way pigs’ feet normally are, but simply broiled.”

Place pigs’ feet in preheated broiler (or oven at 450°F) Broil until done. Place artistically on plate and serve. Yum!

Perhaps you’re looking for something a little more typical:

Noodles à la Kephart
From Fermilab physicist Bob Kephart

“Noodles à la Kephart got me through graduate school at SUNY Stony Brook.”

* Boil a large package of macaroni.
* When cooked, add a brick of Velveeta cheese and a package of the cheapest hot dogs* you can find, cut up.
* Stir.
* Empty into dish.
* Eat for lunch and dinner each day for one week.
* When finished, return to Step 1.

May be garnished with canned peas, eaten cold from can.
*Caution: Do not read ingredients on hot dog package.

Here’s my contribution to the article:

Graduate Student Beef Stroganoff
From SLAC physicist JoAnne Hewett

“During my graduate student days my diet consisted of food that was cheap and quick to prepare. My main staple was Kraft Macaroni & Cheese at 29 cents per box. Other favorites were hotdogs with a slice of cheddar cheese wrapped in a piece of whole wheat bread; frozen fish sticks (fish was touted as brain food); tuna casserole; and taco salad. Once every couple months, on the weekend, I would make a humongous batch of spaghetti. The sauce consisted of a jar of Rague to which I added a pound of real hamburger meat and spices from a jar labeled ‘spaghetti spices.’ I considered this spaghetti absolutely delicious. It was a real treat.

“For fancy dinners, for example when I was cooking to impress somebody or when my parents visited, I made what I called `Graduate Student Beef Stroganoff.’ It is a hand-me-down recipe from physicist Tom Rizzo when he was a graduate student. My mother pretended to like it and copied the recipe. She still has that original recipe in her file, and here’s a picture of it. I wonder if she’s ever made it? The recipe is in my handwriting, with notes added from both my mother and Tom Rizzo.”

Well, I spent 24 hours in bed yesterday, very ill, and unable to eat anything. I just drank lots of water. Today, I’m quite a bit better, but while my system is recovering, but I’m staying off food for another day. However, I’m at that stage where I can think about food, and in fact I can dream happily about it.

When I dream about food, a likely place to feature is Taiwan, where I was on my walkabout, as described earlier. One of the things I love about the place is the remarkable variety of high quality and delicious food which is available everywhere, and at a wide range of times of the day. I’ll focus on smaller places for now…. street food and small places selling noodles and dumplings. A typical street-food scene is something like this:

This is an alleyway maybe one step off the main road, and is in fact part of a long line and network of alleyways which are similarly packed with stalls, stands, and hole-in-the-wall places selling little edible pieces of heaven.

My favourite thing to do in a new location is find a place that I can get good beef noodles. The first day I was there (in Hsinchu) I asked one of the local physicists, John Wang, to point out a few places he liked (as a sort of starter), and from then on I was happy. I like having a place that I like, that does the meal the way I like, and then I just show up there regularly to sit and think by myself for dinner or lunch, over a nice hot bowl of beef noodles (“really good noodles”). It got to the point that the couple who run (own?) the place recognised me with a smile as I came in and started preparing the food before I sat down. I don’t know why I like it so much (it started years ago in 1994 with a braised beef soup at a restaurant on Nassau street in Princeton…don’t remember what it was called…. opposite a supermarket… is it still there I wonder?) but I really can’t get enough of it. The characters describing beef, noodles, and soup, are easy to remember, and so it isn’t hard to order what you want. After a while, you learn to recognise other things pretty quickly too. I’m also a fan of noodles with the other commonly featured meats, pork, chicken, etc, (those two are lighter and work very well as a late breakfast), but the beef is my favourite for dinner, with its darker and denser texture.

One thing that I like a lot about the whole food culture there is the variety and/or serendipity you can get between different places. The beef noodles you get a couple of doors down might be rather different from the ones you got at that other place. It’s definitely the same dish, and no less delicious…..just different. I like that…it’s a sort of jazz culture brought to food. You have your standards, and everybody knows and loves them, but everybody plays them differently.

Everywhere you go, especially at night, you’re likely to pass some sort of food-preparation activity:

I did not stop to see what that was, but they looked like they were having a lot of fun preparing it.

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Well, the garden is a mess, front and back. So much of a mess that I’d be embarrassed to have anyone visit me at home right now (so I won’t). And I don’t know when I’ll get to it. Maybe next weekend. For example, the fig trees have dropped their large, floppy leaves everywhere and now stand naked. They need pruning, as does almost everything else. Exceptions include the citrus trees, and the camelia bush that is about to burst into flower.

I stepped out into the back garden for the first time in a month and was rewarded with the sight of this fully-laden orange tree. Last Spring, I planted the lemon tree and the lime tree, but I did not plant this fellow, but it’s quite faithfully producing each year with no encouragement from me (I think it will need some feeding though….these seem smaller than they were last year).

So, what shall I do with these? I don’t know what the variety is. It might have been intended by the planter (whoever that was) to be purely decorative, but these oranges made an interesting (fairly standard recipe) marmalade last year. But I suspect that, given their unusual taste, they may be better suited to other recipes.

Thoughts anyone? I got some excellent discussion (thanks all) on the case of the lemons in the other thread, with recipe suggestions (thanks Janet, Amara), including the unexpected appearance of the food professional, Rochelle Foles from whose book one of the earlier recipes came! That’s just the kind of variety I like to see here….. thanks all!

I’d be happy to hear thoughts from everyone again….

-cvj

It’s that time of year, when the media overwhelms us with list after list of the “Best fill in the blank of 2005″. I fully admit to being hooked on these (sometimes cheesy) lists – it’s a combination of nostalgia and curiosity on my part. To me, one such list stands out. In fact, it is downright important: the annual top 100 wines of the year as compiled by the Wine Spectator. It comes pretty close to bringing total hysteria to my household. It is published every year in the December 31st issue. If I see it in the store before it has arrived in my mailbox, I buy it – one can’t have too many copies of the pull-out form of the list. This year, I learned that Mark received his copy a full TWO days before me, and seeing my agony, he was kind enough to xerox the pull-out for me.

The editors of the Wine Spectator tasted and rated 12,400 wines in 2005. (If I don’t make it in physics, I’m going to apply for that job!) They rated 2500 as outstanding, which translates to gathering at least 90 points on their 100 point rating system. They started with this set of 2500 outstanding wines and evaluated each on 4 criteria: quality, value, availability, and excitement. I’m sure there was plenty of discussion (perhaps more tasting??) before they finally arrived at their top 100 picks. The roundup spans 13 countries (note that I count California and the Pacific Northwest as 2 different wine countries).

Each year, upon finally getting my hands on this list, my first task is to see how many of the wines I have tasted. The count this year was about average (the year I had only tasted 2 Chardonnays was heartbreaking): 12/100, corresponding to numbers 3, 16, 30, 33, 42, 49, 53, 69, 77, 78, 80, and 85 for the insanely curious. Note that the wines tend to be less expensive if they are further down the list. (I’ve been keeping track of this Best of list since 1991 and have only had 2 of their #1 wines – one of which is still cellared!) I highly recommend 2 of these wines: #69, Fairview Goats do Roam in Villages 2003 from South Africa (no, I’m not joking, that is the actual name – it’s a pun off the French Cote du Rhone) and #77, Sebastiani Cabernet Sauvignon Sonoma County 2002. I snared a case of each (long since sold out in the Bay Area) and it’s almost all gone….these are very quaffable wines. Goats was $11/bottle and the Cab was $12.

My next task is to memorize the compilation and scour the local wine shops for other wines on the list! It’s a frenzy cause I have to beat out everyone else. The process has begun and I managed to capture the last bottle of #18, a 2003 Aussie Shiraz for $15, sitting on the rack in my local shop. In fact, the wine shops will now contact their distributors and also try to nab as many of these bottles as they can – they will be featured in the January newsletters and I will be able to pick up a couple more (with reasonable prices).

I could go on about whether wine magazines with their rating scales do a service or disservice to the wine community – case in point: the Number One wine of 1999 was the 1996 Chateau St Jean Cinq Cepages – the price for that wine immediately shot up to ~$75 and has stayed there since, while I have a 1994 bottling in my cellar with a $13 price tag still on the bottle. But I think I will save that discussion for a later time and close with my personal top picks for the year.

My personal top wine of the year was one that I accidentally found in the back of my wine storage area – it was a 1992 Ridge Lytton Estates Zinfandel, which should have been drunk about 5 years ago, but was absolutely fabulous. The runner-up was a 2003 Oregon Argyle Pinot Noir Nuthouse Vineyard. Had that one in a restaurant and ordered it just for the name! Honorable mention goes to 2003 P.E.T.S. Vinum Petite Sirah at $11/bottle. That case is long gone. (Don’t even think about trying the 2004 – it’s not the same.)

Now that the New Year has arrived, I look forward to the wines released in 2006! May they be bountiful, delicious, and affordable.

It’s unusual, in this muddy imperfect world of ours, that we have the ability to conjure up perfection when the moment calls for it. Thank goodness, then, for the martini.

A simple enough thing: mix four parts gin and one part dry vermouth into a cocktail shaker over ice. Shake, and strain into a martini glass. (No need to rush; a tiny bit of dilution from the melting ice can help bring out the flavor.) Garnish with an olive or two. Simplicity is often a grace of perfection. Enjoy before dinner after a long day of solving equations, or later at night between sets at a smoky jazz club.

Really we should just stop there, and returning to our regularly scheduled string-theory-and-God blogging. But it is not in human nature to accept perfection in an appreciative stillness; we have to go mucking around, trying to make it even better. And thank goodness, or some enterprising bartender never would have invented the martini in the first place. Alas, mucking more often leads to tragedy than to triumph, and some wheat/chaff separation is in order.

The martini’s perfection is deceptive because of its near-inevitability. Every aspect of the cocktail manifests its individual degree of perfection, so we are hardly surprised (that is, not as much as we should be) when it all comes together so elegantly. Gin, originating in the Low Countries and elevated to iconic status in Britain, forms the foundation of this quintessentially American drink. The basic white grain spirit is enlivened by the slightly exotic flavors of juniper and other botanicals. It’s everything you want in a foundation: solid and agreeable, perfectly transparent without being empty or boring. Dry vermouth, a fortified wine that is quite acceptable as a separate aperitif, but only reaches toward divinity in its role as a secondary ingredient against the gin. And the olives, suggesting a touch of the Eastern Mediterranean, adding a worldly spiciness and lush green roundness to the austerity of the cocktail.

But the experience of a martini extends beyond the ingredients. We have, most obviously, the glass: a perfected artistic form, functional as well as attractive, borrowed shamelessly (and understandably) for a myriad of lesser purposes. We have also the mixing procedure itself; a proper metallic cocktail shaker is one of those accessories that is worth investing in. There is a myth going around, if you hang out on the wrong street corners, that shaking will “bruise” the gin. Rubbish, of course. But go ahead and stir if you like — you can avoid tiny bubbles that may cloud your drink, but you’ll miss out on the sensual pleasure of the act of shaking itself.

Now, let it never be said that I am a fundamentalist. A little deviation from orthodoxy can be a good thing. Indeed, replacing the traditional toothpick with an artistic metal pick can add a touch of class to the presentation. If you’d like to experiment with whimsical modifications of the traditionally-shaped glass, be my guest, although you’re operating at your own risk. It’s occasionally fun to use olives stuffed with blue cheese or garlic or — my favorite — a bit of jalapeno pepper. Heck, you could even replace the olives with a twist of lemon, although at that point you risk sacrificing taste for visual impact (a completely unnecessary compromise, in this instance).

But there are some roads that we have no good reason to walk down, and two of them have become all too well-traveled: dryness and vodka. Original martini recipes called for nearly equal proportions of gin and vermouth, and only later did experimentation reveal that a much smaller proportion of vermouth made for a more successful drink. Four-to-one is about right, although there is room for variations in taste. But this worthy discovery has devolved into a pointlessly macho competition about whose martini is the driest. Bartenders now regularly splash vermouth into their shakers and then pour it out before adding the gin, leaving behind a helplessly thin coating of the original spirit. The next step is to simply pour chilled gin into your glass while doing a Google image search for “vermouth.” There is a name for the resulting drink: it’s called “gin.” It’s not a cocktail, it’s just a straight spirit, one step removed from doing shooters of grain alcohol. The success of the martini comes from the symbiotic mixture of different spirits, as Fareed Zakaria has persuasively argued.

Vodka, of course, is a perfectly enjoyable spirit in its own right. It should be served as cold as possible, in shot glasses, alongside black bread and earthy Slavic accomaniments like caviar and pickles. The thing about vodka is that, in its purest form, it is basically tasteless. This makes vodka an excellent backdrop for all sorts of flavorings, which is why flavored vodka is so popular. (You’ll never walk into a liquor store and see flavored gin — at least, I hope not.) But it makes it useless for a martini, especially a dry one. Gin, dry vermouth, and olives all taste like something, and it is the miracle of those tastes working together that creates a transcendent cocktail.

And now we’ve come right up to the point where my inner cranky old man takes over from the face of youthful libertinism that I present to the world. Because, from replacing gin with vodka, it’s a short step to the multiple horrors foisted on the drinking public that appear on “martini lists” in many of our finest establishments. Look, you can drink whatever you want. And I have nothing against color or sweetness for its own sake. But if you mix together a concoction involving any sort of Kahlua or Frangelico or raspberry liqueur — call it what you want, but it’s not a martini. It doesn’t matter that it involves alcohol and is served in the traditional martini glass. It’s a mixed drink, but it’s not a martini. Just because you stick a tail on a watermelon, don’t make it a pig.

See, I like to think that words have meanings. And the word “martini” has a perfectly good referent — the above-discussed cocktail, worldwide symbol of elegance and sophistication. And this martini has certain qualities. And none of these qualities involves “fruitiness” or “sweetness.” Sorry. Martinis are astringent, challenging, an acquired taste of limitless reward. They are not fluorescent concoctions redolent of high-fructose corn syrup. Don’t get me wrong; some of these drinks can be quite enjoyable. I recently went to the Raw Bar here in Chicago and sampled the “Barry White martini,” which was appropriately dark and satiny and certainly not a martini. At Aquitaine in Boston I had something called the “Icicle,” made from Icelandic vodka and ice wine with a frozen grape — also enjoyable, also not a martini. Why use a perfectly precise word when you really mean something else?

The most successful non-martini cocktails take the lessons of the martini and use them in innovative ways. My personal favorite is the sidecar: three parts cognac, one part each Cointreau (orange liqueur) and lemon juice, decorate with a lemon twist. You can even put sugar on the rim without doing violence to the basic conception of the drink. Sidecars are a little sweet, but the fundamentally robust nature of the cognac provides an effective counterweight, and this would never be accused of being a frivolous drink. (Edging toward frivolity, we have the “between the sheets”: equal parts cognac, Cointreau, lime juice, and white rum, served with a twist. But it’s good, I have to admit.)

Still, the cocktail that in some ways is the most impressive is the Manhattan: three parts bourbon, one part sweet (red) vermouth, dash of bitters and a splash of cherry juice, served with a Maraschino cherry. You can see the basic similarity to the martini template: robust foundational spirit, secondary aperitif-oriented spirit, colorful garnish. But the martini, composed of ingredients of individual perfection, was destined to succeed. Meanwhile, the fact that the Manhattan works at all is a minor miracle. Its ingredients are individually barbaric — I mean, bourbon? cherry juice? — that work together in an impressive high-wire act, the coarseness of the bourbon playing off the sickly sweetness of the cherries. When it succeeds, it’s a feat worthy of our admiration.

These cocktails don’t try to sully the worthy martini name by pretending to be what they’re not; they succeed on their own terms. I’m even prepared to grant a place to the much-maligned Cosmopolitan (vodka, Cointreau, lime juice, cranberry juice), unless you try to call it a martini. The Sex in the City gals needed to be drinking something light and colorful — the transparent severity of a true martini would have undermined the mood.

Happy holidays. And if you can find a bartender that does right by you, tip well. You’ll feel good about yourself, and your status will be elevated in the eyes of persons of whatever sexual identification and preference you hope to impress.