It remains one of the minor curiosities of digital modernity that every recipe blog insists on beginning with a 5,000 word ethnography of the Hugo Spritz, SEO-optimized invocations of Tuscan terraces, grandmotherly hand-gestures, and the precise terracotta shade of sunset, only to resolve in instructions amounting to little more than "insert beverage into rectum."

Meanwhile, I occupy a less celebrated corner of culinary praxis: crouched in the dirt, literally on my hands and knees, begging the search bar to reveal how many meprobamate tablets one is meant to dissolve into a lukewarm gin glass to properly constitute a Miltini.

There are no Medium posts, no Substack manifestos, no "Ultimate Guide to Recreational Tranquilizer Mixology (2024 Edition)." The epistemic silence is total. The Hugo Spritz has a cathedral; the Miltini does not even have a footnote.

And so we encounter, yet again, the asymmetry of knowledge production: the internet, glutted with spritz-bloggers optimizing for engagement, yet barren when it comes to cataloguing the rituals of genuine desperation. Borges, in his Library of Babel, anticipated this imbalance: an infinity of recipes for lining the pockets of the prosecco-producing class, but not a single one for escape.

You're wondering why you can't find a Miltini recipe online? One trick for finding out historical information is to search archive.org. That quickly turns up a 1956 article [1] with the recipe: a Miltini is a six or seven-to-one Martini [i.e. ratio of spirits to vermouth] with a Miltown substituted for the lemon peel or olive.

The dramatically overwrought article continues: "It is doubtful if any other creation of the mid-20th Century so typifies this frantic, uncertain era in which no man can know what the next hour will bring." and suggests that a hermetically-sealed shaker of Miltinis should be placed in time capsules "so that posterity can know what real cool cats we were and how extraordinary the civilzation we wrought."

Personally, it sounds a bit like an urban legend. As the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia said: "Unlike most drugs, its name was easily pronounceable and, better still, lent itself to punsters and jokesmiths on TV screens in the homes of millions of people. Example: 'Miltown Berle,' or 'The Government is giving out a Miltown with every income tax blank,' or 'Use a Miltown instead of an olive to make a Miltini'".

[1] https://archive.org/details/palm-springs-desert-sun-1956-11-...

[2] https://archive.org/details/sim_business-review-federal-rese...