More Martini Lore

Max Rudin’s piece in the July/August issue of American Heritage was a masterly study, but one martini fact went unmentioned, the third ingredient to the famous cocktail—the olive, onion, or lemon peel! I don’t know who was responsible for introducing the olive or the lemon peel, but I’ve always been informed the onion made its debut at the bar of the Players Club in New York. The famed artist Charles Dana Gibson ordered a martini with an olive, but the bartender had run out of olives so he substituted a pearl onion. Thus was “The Gibson” martini born.