Lessons in Mixology

Alice Slater on her quest to perfect her martini recipe, beginning with childhood instruction from her father

Apr 01, 2026

Good morning and welcome to Vittles! Today’s piece by Alice Slater is the latest in our Cooking from Life series, a collection of essays that offer a window into how food and kitchen-life work for different people in different parts of the world. Alice writes about how she found her way back to the martini, a drink she first made as a child for her late father.
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My father knew what it felt like to hold a beating human heart in his hands (‘like a fistful of worms,’ he said, due to the writhing junction of arteries and veins). When he arrived home from the hospital, an antiseptic chemical smell would cling to his hair and clothes, a bit like a freshly developed photo. If he wasn’t on call, he’d loosen his tie and pour himself a drink. Usually, this would be a glass of heart-healthy red wine, but once in a blue moon, he liked to make a martini.

My brother and I had no interest in medicine – I learned to write stories and Hank learned to write code – but that didn’t stop my father from sharing his med school wisdom. He taught me how to chop an onion with surgical precision, how to recognise the signs of carbon monoxide poisoning, and how to tie a knot with one hand (a useful trick in the operating theatre). He also taught me how to mix a bone-dry gin martini, presumably because he thought it would be a laugh to have a tiny underage bartender at his disposal, which I suppose it was.

He showed me how to apply a light vermouth rinse to the cocktail shaker, and explained that gin can bruise if you shake it for too long. I can’t remember exactly how old I was during this martini lesson, but I can’t have been more than twelve, because I had absolutely no interest in tasting the drink I made. I wish I could remember whether he preferred an olive or a twist, but that detail eludes me now.

I came back to martinis as an adult, in 2011. I was hanging out in the beer garden of the Oxford Arms in Camden when a gorgeous New Orleans native approached our table and asked if she could join us – an unthinkably bold social move in London. As soon as she sat down, the two of us sank into the kind of once-in-a-blue-moon conversation that made us both realise we were almost certainly destined to meet. Cocktails were in Nisha’s blood, and we spent many nights together drinking Sazeracs, Long Island iced teas and dirty martinis that were never quite cold enough or dirty enough for our liking. We soon figured out the best martinis were shaken in a clean jam jar in Nisha’s kitchen, where we could add as much brine as we liked without resorting to the kind of language that might encourage a bartender to lick his lips. We preferred vodka and didn’t think to buy vermouth, but I shared my father’s lesson about bruising gin anyway. When Nisha suffered a devastating loss, the kind of bone-rattling grief that reshapes the rest of your life, we chain-smoked and mixed martini after martini, refilling the olive jar with cold water to make the precious brine last. We spent many evenings sitting on Nisha’s kitchen floor drinking those watery dirty martinis, faces seasoned with the salt of tears.

During the pandemic, the corner shop opposite my house had a glut of blood oranges that remained in stock for an unseasonable number of months. I bought my first cocktail shaker and learned how to make sweet blood orange margaritas. It was a nice way to mark the end of the working week: chopping board bloody as an operating table, a peachy cocktail in hand, getting stuck into a long Zoom chat with my best friend Emily (who only lived a thirty-minute walk from my flat but may as well have been on Mars).

My thoughts returned to the dirty martini when Perelló olives took over the world in 2021. Bored of sticky margs, I experimented with a martini made with equal parts Perelló-infused vodka and the spicy liquid-gold Perelló brine, garnished with a single plump olive. The result was a proper slap-your-ass-and-spit-in-your-mouth kind of bev, murky as swamp water. My husband at the time declared it undrinkable, but I knew that I was on to something beautiful, and I wasn’t going to listen to a negroni-drinking naysayer. I was going to listen to Emily, a stained-glass artist and naturally blonde cockney, who said it was her platonic ideal of a dirty martini (incidentally, she still prefers her martinis mixed to this somewhat unhinged recipe to this day).

Two dirty martinis, both containing an absolutely normal amount of brine

Then everything changed. One afternoon, I found myself in a hotel bar, drinking a dirty martini mixed by a woman who really seemed to have her life together. She was wearing a crisp white shirt and her hair was perfect. My curls were a frizzy mess and I still had last night’s eyeliner smudged under my eyes. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to utter the words ‘extra filthy’, so instead I had ordered a simple dirty vodka martini and trusted her to take the wheel. She had tipped Belvedere, a generous 15ml of dry vermouth and a mere barspoon of nondescript green olive brine into a crystal-cut jug, stirred until the glass was etched with frost, then double-strained into a chilled coupe. The resulting martini was glacier water, clean and astringent. It was fresh, almost steely, with an immediate neurological effect, like an oyster or a line of coke. My head was turned. It was the kind of martini my father would enjoy.

The next time I found myself lured by the siren song of a dirty martini, I thought of that hotel bartender and bought a bottle of Noilly Prat, a dry vermouth aged in oak casks that are exposed to the salty sea air. Next, I discovered the joys of a split base – half cheap vodka, half expensive savoury gin. I learned, to my surprise, that my palate had sharpened and I preferred less brine than my previous filthy predilections. A generous dash of olive bitters was enough to provide that extra hit of salinity and deepen the savoury olive flavour. I learned that it’s bad luck to garnish a martini with an even number of olives, although this became academic when I realised I preferred the fresh zesty flavour of an expressed lemon peel cutting through the salt. While my father’s shaken martini was an aerated cocktail, cloudy as bath water, I began to stir mine in a frozen glass jug – a hat tip to the hotel bartender with the crisp white shirt – which allowed the ice to dilute the drink slowly and kept it crystal clear.

The resulting cocktail is dirty but looks clean – almost surgically so. It’s tailored to my palate, based on every martini lesson I’ve ever undertaken with every martini drinker I’ve ever admired. It reminds me of tearful nights with Nisha, Zoom calls with Emily, that beautiful bartender and, of course, martini lessons with my father.

‘The resulting martini was glacier water, clean and astringent. It was fresh, almost steely, with an immediate neurological effect, like an oyster or a line of coke’

I never had the chance to share a martini with my dad. The worms of his heart quit wriggling when he was just fifty-four, a cardiac arrest so sudden and so cruel we were told that even he – who a newspaper once described as a ‘miracle worker’ for saving a teenage boy stabbed directly in the heart – would not have been able to save himself. The trauma of his death will sit in my chest until my own heart stops beating.

The salinity of every dirty martini I make contains the slightest echo of that first martini lesson. But if, by some miracle, my father were to walk into my kitchen this evening, loosen his tie and ask for a martini, I wouldn’t make him the recipe I’ve perfected. In the twenty years I’ve had to endure of this life without him, I’ve learned something that I didn’t pick up from his tutorial: martini drinkers are particular. So, instead, I’d make him a bone-dry shaken gin martini, perhaps not with surgical precision, but with a lot of heart. Then I’d ask him whether he’d prefer it with an olive or a twist.

I’ve always wanted to know.

A Surgically Clean Dirty Martini

Keeping your spirits in the freezer, mixing in a frozen jug and using a generous quantity of ice will ensure a suitably cold martini. Serving in a frosty coupe will keep that chill until the last sip – as long as you drink your cocktail at the right pace. Drink too slowly and the last few mouthfuls will taste like straight paint thinner, too quickly and you risk immediate intoxication (as Marlowe Granados cautioned recently, martini drinking is serious business).

Ingredients

35ml frozen Four Pillars Olive Leaf Gin
35ml frozen vodka
5–10ml dry vermouth
a dash of The Bitter Truth Olive Bitters
lemon peel, to garnish

Method

Tip your gin, vodka, vermouth and bitters into a frozen glass jug, then add more ice than seems reasonable.
Stir eighty times (count your rotations), then double-strain into a frozen martini glass.
Squeeze a lemon peel over the surface of your drink, and rub it around the lip of the glass so the first mouthful is accompanied by a clean sniff of citrus.

Credits

Alice Slater is a writer and ex-bookseller from London. Her debut novel, Death of a Bookseller, was an instant Sunday Times bestseller and won Debut Crime Book of the Year at Capital Crime’s Fingerprint Awards 2024. She co-hosts the literary podcast What Page Are You On? Her second novel, Let the Bad Times Roll, is out now in paperback. All photographs in this piece were provided by Alice.
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