Luis Buñuel’s perfect recipe for a dry martini
Legendary filmmakers famed for their influential politically-infused surrealism that boasted storied careers spanning half a century don’t immediately jump out at those with a penchant for mixology, but Luis Buñuel still found the time to concoct a recipe for an impeccable dry martini.
The Spanish director may have died 40 years ago, but his legacy and influence is felt as strongly as ever in modern cinema, with a multitude of auteurs having cited him as an inspiration. David O. Russell voiced his appreciation for how he would “harmonize the colours so it’s almost black and white”, and even the controversial Gaspar Noé was won over by Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou, which he described as having “the funniest black humour I can think of”.
Martin Scorsese, Guillermo del Toro, and Edgar Wright are another three notable names in the industry to have sung his praises at one time or another, although it remains entirely unconfirmed as to whether or not they’ve taken their adoration to the next level and mimicked his style of martini-making.
Given the boundary-pushing nature of his filmic output and personal relationships with a staggering array of historical figures that included – but wasn’t limited to – Charlie Chaplin, Aldous Huxley, Pablo Picasso, and the aforementioned Dalí, his recipe for concocting a martini is unsurprisingly not quite the most straightforward and to the point.
And yet, he clearly must have been proud of it, considering it received its own dedicated passage in his autobiography My Last Sigh: “To provoke, or sustain, a reverie in a bar, you have to drink English gin, especially in the form of the dry martini. To be frank, given the primordial role in my life played by the dry martini, I think I really ought to give it at least a page.”
Clearly an important subject, Buñuel offers that “the ice be so cold and hard that it won’t melt, since nothing’s worse than a watery martini,” prior to suggesting that “the fruit of long experimentation is guaranteed to produce perfect results.” It’s hardly a quick process, either, with the ball needing to get rolling “the day before your guests arrive” when it’s advised to store “all the ingredients – glasses, gin, and shaker – in the refrigerator”.
The next step requires a thermometer “to make sure the ice is about 20 degrees below zero (centigrade),” he explains. “Don’t take anything out until your friends arrive; then pour a few drops of Noilly Prat and half a demitasse spoon of Angostura bitters over the ice. Stir it, then pour it out, keeping only the ice, which retains a faint taste of both. Then pour straight gin over the ice, stir it again, and serve.”
A laborious and time-consuming process for sure, but if it’s good enough for Buñuel, then it might just be the finest martini imaginable.
