Gibson (cocktail)

Gibson

IBA Official Cocktail
Type	Cocktail
Primary alcohol by volume	Gin
Served	stirred
Standard garnish	silverskin onion
Standard drinkware	Cocktail glass
IBA specified ingredients*	60ml (2 ounces) (6 parts) gin 10ml (0.33 ounce) (1 part) dry vermouth
Preparation	*Stir well in a shaker with ice, then strain into a chilled martini glass. Garnish and serve
* Gibson recipe at International Bartenders Association

The Gibson is a mixed drink made with gin and vermouth, and often garnished with a pickled onion. The oldest published recipe for the Gibson is found in the 1908 book, The World's Drinks and How to Mix Them by William Boothby. Boothby states, "Note – No bitters should ever be used in making this drink, but an olive is sometimes added." Since the earliest known definition of the word cocktail as a type of drink in The Balance and Columbian Repository from 1806 mentions that the type of drink is also called a "bittered sling" one could say that, by those traditional standards, the Gibson is a sling rather than a true cocktail.

William Boothby's 1908 Gibson Recipe

Other pre-prohibition recipes for the Gibson exist. They all omit bitters and none of them garnishes with an onion. Some garnish with citrus twists. Others use no garniture at all. No known recipe for the Gibson garnishes with an onion before 1922. Some sources persist in using other garnishment than the onion into the 1930s and beyond, but still none use bitters. According to pre-prohibition sources, the 'classic' Martini of today without any bitters is actually the Gibson. However, modern terminology favors reserving the Gibson name for the same drink only when garnished with an onion.

The drink is traditionally made with gin but the Vodka Gibson is also common.

History

The exact origin of the Gibson is unclear, with numerous popular tales and theories about its genesis. According to one popular theory Charles Dana Gibson is responsible for the creation of the Gibson, when he supposedly challenged Charley Connolly, the bartender of the Players Club in New York City, to improve upon the martini's recipe, so Connolly simply substituted an onion for the olive and named the drink after the patron. Other stories involve different Gibsons, such as an apocryphal American diplomat who served in Europe during Prohibition. Although he was a teetotaller, he often had to attend receptions where cocktails were served. To avoid an awkward situation, Gibson would ask the staff to fill his martini glass with cold water and garnish it with a small onion so that he could pick it out among the gin drinks. A similar story postulates a savvy investment banker named Gibson, who would take his clients out for the proverbial three-martini business lunches. He purportedly had the bartender serve him cold water, permitting him to remain sober while his clients became intoxicated; the cocktail onion garnish served to distinguish his beverage from those of his clients.

Another version now considered more probable of the origin story given by Charles McCabe of the San Francisco Chronicle states it is from San Francisco. In 1968 he interviewed Allan P. Gibson (1923–2005) and included the story in his Dec. 9, 1968 column, as well as in his book The Good Man's Weakness by Charles McCabe. A.P. Gibson remembered that when he was a boy, his great-uncle, prominent San Francisco businessman Walter D. K. Gibson (1864–1938), was said to have created it at the Bohemian Club in the 1890s. Charles Clegg, when asked about it by Herb Caen, also said it was from San Francisco.^[1] Eric Felton, writing in the Wall Street Journal, May 30, 2009 "A Thoroughly Western Cocktail" considers this version correct; he cites Ward Thompson, a Bohemian Club member whose mention of it in 1898 is the first recorded in print. Although bartenders' guides sometimes gave the recipe as 50/50 gin and vermouth, Gibsons in the early days were much drier than other martinis.

A third version, supported by Kazuo Uyeda in "Cocktail Techniques," states that Gibsons started as very dry martinis garnished with a cocktail onion to distinguish them from traditional martinis, but as the fondness for drier martinis became popular the onion became the only difference.

Cultural references

In the movie North by Northwest, Cary Grant orders a Gibson during a dinner conversation with Eva Marie Saint on board a train. In the movie The Net, Jeremy Northam orders a Gibson before a lunch conversation with Sandra Bullock while on vacation at Cozumel. In the television show Revenge, an author orders a Gibson from a female bartender whom he believes he interviewed as a child for a book about her father. In the television show Mad Men, the Gibson is the preferred cocktail of the character Roger Sterling. In the Raymond Chandler novel Playback, Philip Marlowe orders a Gibson during one of his visits to a bar. In The Stories of John Cheever, whose eponymous author was an inveterate gin drinker, the characters sometimes order Gibsons, as in the stories "Reunion" and "The Five-Forty-Eight." In the television series Get Smart, Maxwell Smart likes to have a Gibson before dinner, as depicted in the episode "Run, Robot, Run." Max's Gibson consists of "a touch of vermouth, four parts gin and a pearl onion." In the television show Frasier episode "Dinner at Eight", in which Martin takes his sons to the Timber Mill steak house, Niles and Frasier order Stoli Gibsons with three pearl onions. In the musical The Drowsy Chaperone, during a scene in which Janet Van de Graaff is taking questions from reporters, her Chaperone (while presumably drinking a Gibson) rhetorically asks, "Why in the world would anyone put olives in a gibson?" In the role-playing game Kingdom of Loathing, characters can create and consume Gibsons, accompanied by references to cyberpunk author William Gibson. The famed 20th century German architect, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe considered the double Gibson his favorite cocktail.

See also

• List of cocktails

References