Daiquiri

Wikipedia:

Daiquiri ( /ˈæəriː/; Spanish: daiquirí [dajkiˈɾi]) is a family of cocktails whose main ingredients are rum, lime juice, and sugar or other sweetener. There are several versions, but those that gained international fame are the ones made in the El Floridita bar in Havana, Cuba.

The Daiquirí is one of six basic drinks listed in David A. Embury's classic The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks. In the book, he also suggests some variations.

A similar cocktail that's very popular in Brazil is the Caipirinha, which includes cachaça, Brazilian sugarcane rum.

Origins

The name Daiquirí is also the name of a beach near Santiago, Cuba, and an iron mine in that area, and it is a word of Taíno origin. The daiquiri was supposedly invented by an American mining engineer, named Jennings Cox, who happened to be in Cuba at the time of the Spanish-American War.

Originally the drink was served in a tall glass packed with cracked ice. A teaspoon of sugar was poured over the ice and the juice of one or two limes was squeezed over the sugar. Two or three ounces of Bacardi rum completed the mixture. The glass was then frosted by stirring with a long-handled spoon. Later the Daiquirí evolved to be mixed in a shaker with the same ingredients but with shaved ice. After a thorough shaking, it was poured into a chilled flute glass. An article in the March 14, 1937 edition of the Miami Herald as well as private correspondence of J.F. Linthicum, one of the American engineers working for the Spanish American Ore Company near the town of Daiquirí who was present during the evolution of the recipe, confirm the recipe and early history. Mr. Linthicum told his children that the rum came at least in part from the ration provided by the British Navy to some of his fellow engineers working at the nearby bauxite mines.

Consumption of the drink remained localized until 1909, when Admiral Lucius W. Johnson, a U.S. Navy medical officer, tried Cox's drink. Johnson subsequently introduced it to the Army and Navy Club in Washington, D.C., and drinkers of the daiquirí increased over the space of a few decades. The daiquirí was one of the favorite drinks of writer Ernest Hemingway and president John F. Kennedy.

The drink became popular in the 1940s. Wartime rationing made whiskey, vodka, etc., hard to come by, yet because of Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policy (which opened up trade and travel relations with Latin America, Cuba and the Caribbean), rum was easily obtainable. The Good Neighbor Policy (also known as 'The Pan-American program'), helped make Latin America seem fashionable. Consequently, rum-based drinks (once frowned upon as being the domain of sailors and down-and-outs), also became fashionable, and the Daiquirí saw a tremendous rise in popularity in the US.

The basic recipe for a Daiquirí is also similar to the grog British sailors drank aboard ship from the 1740s onwards. By 1795 the Royal Navy daily grog ration contained rum, water, ¾ ounce of lemon or lime juice, and 2 ounces of sugar. This was a common drink across the Caribbean, and as soon as ice became available this was included instead of the water.

Variations

Frozen daiquiri

A wide variety of alcoholic mixed drinks made with finely pulverized ice are often called frozen daiquiris. These drinks can also be combined and poured into a blender eliminating the need for manual pulverization. Such drinks are often commercially made in machines which produce a texture similar to a smoothie, and come in a wide variety of flavors made with various alcohol or liquors. Another way to create a frozen daiquiri (mostly fruit-flavored variants) is by using frozen limeade, providing the required texture, sweetness and sourness all at once. Variations on the frozen daiquiri.

Baskin Robbins' "Daiquiri Ice"

In 1962, Baskin-Robbins introduced an ice cream flavor called "Daiquiri Ice," which uses a lime puree base and nature-identical rum flavor to imitate the taste of a standard daiquiri.