It’s widely accepted that Jennings Stockton Cox is the man who invented the Daiquiri in the Cuban town of, well, Daiquirií in 1898. But it was the bartender at the El Floridita, Constantino Ribalaigua Vert who crafted the drink for Tennessee Williams, Jean-Paul Sartre, Gary Cooper and of course Ernest Hemingway, made El Floridita in Havana the ‘Cathedral of the Daiquiri,’ and forever changed the drink.
Vert took the pre-prohibition Daiquiri recipe and created The Frozen Daiquiri. We’ll give you the recipe to both.
Regular Assed Daiquiri
Ingredients:
- 1 jigger (1 ½ oz) West Indies Rum
- Juice of ½ a lime
- 1 teaspoon powdered sugar
Instructions:
Shake with finely shaved ice and strain into a cocktail glass.
This is actually really good and the best part is you don’t need a blender. It’s like a whiskey sour with rum, but Daiquiri is such a better name than ‘Rum Sour.’ It’s also a lot like a margarita which, I suppose could be called a Tequila Sour with triple sec.
OK now for the Frozen Daiquiri, but I’m not going to give you the recipe for Vert’s Frozen Daiquiri, I’m giving you the Papa Doble, aka the Wild Daiquirií, aka Daiquirií Special, aka The Hemingway Daiquirí.
Here’s a passage about the drink from his posthumous book, Islands in the Stream:
He was drinking another of the frozen daiquirís with no sugar in it and as he lifted it, heavy and the glass frost-rimmed, he looked at the clear part below the frappéd top and it reminded him of the sea. The frappéd part of the drink was like the wake of a ship and the clear part was the way the water looked when the bow cut it when you were in shallow water over the marl bottom. That was almost the exact color.
Hemingway, Ernest, Islands in the Stream, p. 276
“I wish they had a drink color of sea water when you have a depth of eight hundred fathoms and there is a dead calm with the sun straight up and down and the sea full of plankton,” he said.
“What?”
“Nothing. Let’s drink this shallow water drink.”
So here’s the recipe for the shallow water drink from the book Papa Hemingway by A. E. Hotchner.
Hemingway Daiquirí
Ingredients:
- 2 ½ jiggers (3 ¾ oz) Bacardi or Havana Club rum
- Juice of 2 limes
- Juice of ½ grapefruit
- 6 drops maraschino
Instructions:
Fill a blender one-quarter full of ice, preferably shaved or cracked. Add the ingredients and blend on high until it turns cloudy and light-colored, “like the sea where the wave falls away from the bow of a ship when she is doing thirty knots.”’
Hemingway didn’t like sugar in his drinks, his body was a temple. OK maybe he wasn’t watching his figure, but he didn’t like sugar in his drink probably because he wasn’t a sissy.
I like the addition of the grapefruit and the lack of sugar doesn’t bother me. I will be honest, I used a silver rum and not a spiced rum which I think would taste better. Also, it was the end of the bottle so I only used 2.75 oz instead of the 3.75, which I think it needed to combat the grapefruit and give it more kick.
I didn’t hate it but I will say this, I need to try it again with the proper rum portion and a darker spiced rum instead of silver.
This drink is definitely a double, there’s a legend that Hemingway slugged 16 of these back in one sitting at El Floriditio. That’s 60 ounces of rum. That’s Wade Boggs drinking status right there.
Where I got the recipes and history on the daiquiri:
Contraband Cocktails by Paul Dickson
The Hemingway Cookbook by Craig Boreth
Islands in the Stream by Ernest Hemingway
Cheers!
