the Cuban proof that three ingredients are enough: white rum, fresh lime juice, and sugar shaken hard with ice and strained into a chilled coupe, with nothing added and nothing garnished
Origin: Cuba
From the journey of Lime.
The daiquiri takes its name from an iron-mining settlement and beach east of Santiago de Cuba, and the usual story credits an American engineer, Jennings Cox, with mixing the first one there around 1898 when he ran out of gin. The story is probably too tidy, since rum, lime, and sugar had been drunk together across the Caribbean for two centuries in the form of punch, and what Cox and his contemporaries really did was to shrink the communal punch bowl into a single glass. It was Havana that perfected it. In the bars of the city in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, and above all at El Floridita under the Catalan bartender Constantino Ribalaigua Vert, the drink was stripped to its three necessary parts and refined obsessively: the ice cracked fresh, the lime squeezed to order and never wrung, the rum a light Cuban ron rather than a heavy molasses spirit, and the shake hard and brief. What survives is one of the two or three most exacting simple drinks in the world, because there is nowhere to hide. Everything depends upon the freshness of the lime and upon the proportion, and a daiquiri made with bottled juice or served over ice is not a lesser daiquiri but a different and much worse drink.
The proportions given are the modern standard of roughly four parts rum to two of lime and one of sugar; El Floridita's own were sweeter and shorter, and Ernest Hemingway, who drank there and was diabetic, took his with double rum, grapefruit juice, maraschino, and no sugar at all, a version still sold as the Papa Doble or Hemingway Daiquiri. Adjust the sugar to the sharpness of your limes rather than following the measure blindly. A light, clean, column-still rum in the Cuban manner is correct; a heavy Jamaican or Demerara rum makes a good drink but not a daiquiri. The blended, frozen daiquiri of the tourist bar is a separate invention, also Cuban and also from El Floridita, and is properly made with shaved rather than cubed ice; it should not be confused with this one.
Mapping Culinary History
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