History is full of lies. So, too, is cocktail history. There was no Mr. Boston. Dr. McGillicuddy never went to med school. Dean Martin drank apple juice onstage. Lies.
Calling the Gibson a full on lie is unfair perhaps. Still, the origins of this gin and vermouth-based cocktail are steeped in deceit. The recipe, birthed in the Gilded Age, first appears in William Boothby’s The World’s Drinks And How To Mix Them in 1908. Like its cousin the martini, both San Francisco and New York lay claim to the Gibson.
The New York story alleges the cocktail was named after illustrator Charles Dana Gibson at the Players Club. As the story goes, Gibson asked bartender Charley Connolly to make a variation on the martini. Connolly, a bartender who apparently gave zero shits, replaced the olive with an onion, and called it a day. Most consider this tale apocryphal, if only to punish Connolly for his lack of creativity.
Gibson the man, however, was the perpetrator of arguably an even more malicious deception as an innovator in the field of unreal standards for American women. You see, Gibson created the Gibson Girl, an image that helped perpetuate the fun, sexy, impossibly proportioned, politically ignorant, ideal of female beauty and decorum that came to dominate the Gilded Age, and in many ways still exists today. Kind of like Gillian Flynn’s “cool girl,” but with Saratoga potatoes instead of chilidogs.
Another story tells of another Gibson, Hugh Simons Gibson, who worked as a diplomat for the State Department. Gibson was something of a teetotaler, but nonetheless wanted to keep up appearances with his martini-swilling colleagues. His solution: fill his glass with water and mark it with an onion so not to lose track of it among the many other glasses in the room.
A similar deception was allegedly employed by a banker named Gibson who would have a bartender serve him water during three-martini lunches, giving him a sober edge in negotiations while his clients got boozed up. The onion was once again used as a signifier. The lesson here: If you see an onion in someone’s glass, they are drinking water, and will most likely screw you out of something.
