Drink: The Pauline
The first drink I ordered after entering Montana was a Pauline: equal parts gin, vodka, and dry vermouth, on the rocks, with a olives. I had to spell it out for the bartender at the Hole in the Wall in Miles City, because the Pauline is a rare drink–in fact, I think I am the only one who calls it that, and one of only two people who drink it.
The Pauline takes its name from my grandmother, a tough old Scot born on the flanks of the Crazy Mountains, my mother’s mother. When I came to visit her after some time at college, at the appointed cocktail hour, as she was mixing me a Squirt and maraschino cherry juice, my mom let slip that I had started drinking harder stuff. At that, Pauline promptly walked over to the sink, poured out my pop, and topped off the pyrex measuring bowl of liquor she was mixing. That night I’d start drinking martinis.
This cocktail was no fancy gin with some postmodern whisper of vermouth, or even the cold war vodka version. This cocktail was a shot each of gin and vodka from a plastic bottle (Lewis & Clark, I recall), topped off with a generous shot of vermouth.
An ounce and a half of vermouth: You would think it was a superfund pollutant, the way otherwise sensible liquor drinkers avoided it. But vermouth dates the drink, takes it out of the age of artisan gins and quadruple-filtered vodkas, back to when bartenders struck a balance between high-proof rutgut gin and the finer, more dilute vermouth. Vermouth–not just a whisper, but enough of it to flavor the drink–makes it a cocktail and not just a shot of booze. And when some apparently tough bartender rolls his eyes at my order, like I’m one of those who wants his gin spiced with organic juniper, or his subliminal vermouth atomized, I tell him that my grandmother’s been drinking that mix for twice as long as either of us has been alive.
Someday I’ll train a bartender to make a Pauline by name, but until then I’ll suffer the sideways glances, take my gin and vodka and vermouth and ice and olives, and toast my dear old grandmother.