Don’t rum away if you’re a fan of classic cocktails: July 19 is National Daiquiri Day!
It’s also the 200th day of the year, which means our food challenge continues to roll right along. Reaching our 200th challenge feels like a momentous occasion, much the way that # 100 did. We’re more than halfway there and loving every minute of this! And this weekend is tricky, since we’re going camping. Tent camping, too – no wussy cabins and stoves for us. Luckily, our food challenges over the next couple of days lend themselves well to the Great Outdoors.
Daiquiris are considered one of the “6 basic drinks” listed in David Embury’s The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks. They consist of rum, lime, and sugar, and may be served blended (frozen) or on the rocks. In 1898, Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders stormed the town of Daiquiri, Cuba during the Spanish-American War. The military’s greatest coup from this invasion turned out to be a cocktail recipe named for the town: it was given to the Army and Navy Club, and soon became a popular drink with U.S. soldiers thanks in large part to wartime rationing of whiskey, vodka, and other spirits in the 1940s. No such ban on rum existed, so our brave boys made do with daiquiris. The cocktail was also a favorite of writer Ernest Hemingway, who – let’s face it – never met an alcoholic beverage he didn’t care for. In his novel Islands In The Stream he wrote, That is what we are. No one in between. How could we be wrong? Sail away with me to another world, where we’ll rely on each other, uh-huh. Oops…wrong Islands In The Stream. My bad. What HEMINGWAY wrote was, It reminded him of the sea. The frappeed 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 marl bottom. That was almost the exact color. How poetic! Ernest even came up with his own version, dubbed the Hemingway Daiquiri. What the name lacked in originality it made up for in rum: Hemingway’s drink had double the alcohol and none of the sugar. The author once downed 16 of these in one sitting. The drink was also a fave of John F. Kennedy, which means it was also probably a fave of Marilyn Monroe and the mob, right? Frozen daiquiris made with a variety of flavors became popular over the years thanks to their convenience and versatility, but I’m thinking those Mafiosos prefer the good ol’-fashioned shaken and pulverized version, if you know what I mean.
Since campsites don’t usually come equipped with blenders, we had to get creative and buy a “pouch” from the grocery store. This premixed daiquiri is frozen in advance, and when you’re ready to drink, you simply cut open the package and suck it down. Mmm! Nothing screams “wilderness” like a roaring campfire, marshmallows on a stick, and a frozen daiquiri. I’ll have to add a photo of our actual beverage later. Bottoms up! (Which is probably something JFK said to Marilyn, but now we’re beginning to sound like a gossip column so we’ll just end things there)…
Related articles
- Bartender Questions: In Defense of the Daiquiri (esquire.com)
- My First Daiquiri (cookiethieves.wordpress.com)
- Dish of the Day: How to… make the perfect Daiquiri (blogs.independent.co.uk)
Eat My Words 
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