The Daiquiri Cocktail

The Minnesota winter has worn off, and the Daiquiri is gradually supplanting the whiskey sour in my cocktail rotation. I’ve never been much of a rum drinker in the past (I can’t explain that), so this turnabout is unexpected, and welcome. I’m chalking it up to education, broadened interests, and a fascination with classic cocktails.

The Daiquiri is certainly a classic, the first to be invented outside the United States. The story is that it was first mixed in 1896 by Jennings Cox, a steel company engineer in Daiquiri, Cuba, who had run out of gin. The coincidence that Daiquiri, Cuba is only a few miles up the coast from Guantanamo Bay may help to explain how the recipe was quickly transported to the Army and Navy Club in Washington, DC, where there is reportedly a plaque commemorating Cox’s achievement.

The Daiquiri

Joseph Lanza, in his 1995 history The Cocktail, declares that the earliest printed mention of the Daiquiri is from 1920, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (English majors take note!) I checked the reference, and it isn’t just a Daiquiri—it was an order for a table full of doubles. Quite an entry onto the literary scene for an unknown foreigner.

The Daiquiri Cocktail

• 2 oz. light rum (Cruzan, 10 Cane)
• ½ oz. lime juice
• ½ oz. Demerara syrup

Shake all ingredients well with ice, and strain into a cocktail glass. Express and garnish with lime.

One other item from Lanza: he reports a drink called “la Creole”  in the 1892 The Flowing Bowl; he describes it as “a drag-queen relative to the Daiquiri,” and quotes the recipe thus: “Ornament with fruits in season, put a little scoop of ice cream on top, and serve.”

Another way to dress up a Daiquiri is Jeff Berry’s Ancient Mariner—two kinds of rum, two juices, and the delightfully complex Allspice Dram.

“The Daiquiri Cocktail” at cold-glass.com : All text and photos © 2010 Douglas M. Ford. All rights reserved.