Well hey now… With the exception of some frost, snow and freezing temps, Spring has sprung up here in the Adirondacks! (That’s me being optimistic - It’s the best you’re gonna get.)
Anyhoo, Spring means warmer temps leading into summer and that means we are on the cusp of another fine Daiquiri season. Ah, the Daiquiri - three ingredients that have become the grandfather of flavor balance - lime, sugar and rum. Simplicity, personified.
Some of you may immediately think of the sticky sweet blender abomination of the 70s and 80s, but those are Daiquiris in name only, resembling nothing of the original Cuban cocktail. What we were thinking cocktail-wise in those decades escapes me.
Origin
We can trace the simple sour’s origins back to just before prohibition in a small Cuban mining town. John D. Rockefeller had an iron mining operation not far from the small coastal town of - you guessed it - Daiquiri. An American engineer named Jennings Stockton Cox is widely credited with inventing the drink, but Cubans had been mixing some form of rum, lime and sugar for centuries before, so that claim seems a stretch.
Diffordsguide.com has this to say:
“Drinks legend has it that another engineer called Francesco Domenico Pagliuchi was viewing mines in the region and met with Cox. During their meeting, they set about making a drink from the ingredients Cox had on hand: rum, limes and sugar.
Pagliuchi was also a keen scribe and correspondent for Harper’s, the American monthly magazine. Hence, in 1948, after an obituary in the newspaper El Pais stated that a bartender named Emilio “Maragato” Gonzalez, the deceased, was the inventor of the “Daiquiri”, Pagliuchi wrote a letter giving his eye-witness account of the Daiquiri cocktail’s creation by Jennings Cox.”
Check out www.diffordsguide.com and look up “daiquiri” to read the letter.
And The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails writes:
“According to Cox’s step-granddaughter Carmen Puig, who in 1970 told the story to Time Life cookbook author Linda Wolfe, Cox improvised the drink for some American visitors after discovering he was out of gin. He did have Bacardi Carta Blanca rum, fresh from the distillery twenty-eight miles away in Santiago, ‘but he feared that it would not be to the taste of the Americans. To disguise the rum somewhat, he picked limes from a tree in his garden, added some juice and some sugar to his rum,’ then swizzled it all in a pitcher with shaved ice. He may have had some help in the process: as Robert H. Lyman Jr., who was on of the six Yanqui engineers on Cox’s staff at the mine, recalled in 1935, the drink was more of a group creation with credit to be shared among the ‘Siete Solteros,’ the ‘Seven Bachelors’ as Cox and his crew were known. In any case, ‘It was an immediate success.’”
Whether or not Cox invented the cocktail - on his own or by committee - it’s a sure bet that he was the match that lit the fuse for its explosion of popularity to come.
Rise of the Planet of The Daiquiri
Cox began running his new concoction to the bars of Santiago and in 1908 a bartender at the San Carlos Club converted the drink from a pitcher with shaved ice to a single serving cocktail and named it “Ron a la Daiquiri”. This version, mixed with brown sugar and served over ice in a champagne flute eventually started popping up in Havana, where bartenders once again tweaked the drink into the recipe we know today - shaken with white sugar, lime and served ‘up.’ During prohibition, Americans found themselves traveling to Cuba for libations and the Daiquiri became an instant classic.
Shortly after the repeal of prohibition came the invention of the blender and thus ushering in the frozen Daiquiri. A version invented by a bartender named Constantino “Constantine” Ribalaigua caught the fancy of Earnest Hemingway, who spent about as much time drinking them as he did writing. Ribalaigua’s version, called “Daiquiri No. 3” was frappéd with maraschino and grapefruit juice. Hemingway tweaked it a bit more buy negating the sugar and doubling the rum, which came to be known at the “Papa Doble.” Even JFK would later remark that the Daiquiri was his drink of choice. It was all the rage.
Until…
The 1970s’ desire for fast, sugary, frothy and flamboyant cocktails transformed the drink into something hardly recognizing the original. The drink basically stayed this way until the early part of the 21st century when bartenders rediscovered the simplicity of rum, lime and sugar. The Daiquiri was once again in its glory and is now considered one of the top five cocktails ever invented.
Recipe
The Daiquiri
2 bar spoons of cane sugar or 1/2 oz of simple syrup
Juice of one half lime (roughly 1/2 and ounce)
2 oz of white rum.
Shake with ice and strain into a chilled coupe.
Resources:
Difford’s Guide for Discerning Drinkers - www.difordsguide.com
The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails - Edited by David Wondrich with Noah Rothbaum (Oxford University Press 2022)