Why not start your festive Purim meal with a classic Martini?
You need only two ingredients: dry vermouth (white wine flavored with herbs and spices) and gin (a liquor flavored with juniper berries). The proportions vary from tradition to tradition (as New York Times critic William Grimes has noted: “it is the cocktail of a thousand idiosyncrasies”). As a start, I’d recommend using a 3:1 ratio between the gin and the vermouth. The usual procedure, followed by bartenders around the world, runs as follows:
(1) Pour the two ingredients into a glass filled with ice
(2) Stir well
(3) Strain into a Martini glass (a stemmed glass with a cone-shaped bowl – but any glass will do)
(4) Finally, drop a green olive into the drink.
However, in the spirit of “v’nahafoch hu” [“and it was reversed”, Esther 9:1], I’d suggest placing the olive into the Martini glass from the outset, and then pouring the drink on top of it. Fans of James Bond may of course prefer their Martini “shaken, not stirred” – in which case additional possibilities for reversal present themselves!
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