The Spirits #105: The Mary Pickford
~ The Mender of Nets ~ America's Sweetheart ~ Pallid Pomegranate ~ Maraschino Histories ~ The Time I Gave Azealia Banks a Lift Home ~
~ THE MARY PICKFORD ~
30ml light rum
30ml pineapple juice
5ml maraschino
5ml grenadino
Place the above in a shaker. Add the ice. And then shake it all up. Double-strain into a chilled coupe. Garnish with a maraschino cherry.
Some Mary Pickford notes:
1. According to my sources (Manual del Cantinero, Pujol & Muñiz, Havana, 1924), the Mary Pickford was originally made with gin, actually. However, rum became standard when the drink took off in the 1930s. By all means make it with gin if that’s all you have.
2. I have also seen recipes with just grenadine and recipes with just maraschino. So either would be OK, I think? My current batch of grenadine was made with a rather pallid pomegranate otherwise I think this might have come out a little pinker.
3. But don’t forget the cherry! I’m sorry to say that I had run out of cocktail sticks so mine fell to the bottom of the glass. But this meant that I had a pleasant surprise when took my last sip of this delightful drink.
🖊️I am Richard Godwin.
🧋My instructions for sugar syrup, ice, grenadine, orgeat, etc are here.
🧑🏫 My 10 RULES FOR MAKING COCKTAILS are here.
⚗️ My bottle recommendations are here.
📃 The full A-Z recipe archive is here.
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MARY Pickford was the first million-dollar movie star, the darling of the silent era, America’s sweetheart though she was actually Canadian. Look at the oceanic sigh the opens this one-reeler from 1912 and you’ll see why the early movie-goers loved her so. At this point in her career Mary Pickford was making about 40 or 50 such films each year and yes, they were mere one-reelers, but still. What work-rate! I can’t help feeling that while cinema gained multitudes with the advent of sound, it lost a certain something in the vaudevillian expressivity of those early silent stars, their sheer get-up-and-go. I mean:
(I swear that is the exact same face I make when I think someone is taking a picture of me but then realise it is a video.)
Anyway, back in the high days of the cocktail, no one rivalled Mary Pickford in the American' public’s affection - except perhaps Charlie Chaplin. And the whole business of screen acting and modern celebrity owes a lot to Mary Pickford. She would go on to found United Artists alongside Chaplin and her second husband, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Pickford and action-man Fairbanks (star of Robin Hood, The Mask of Zorro, etc) meanwhile became what some historians believe to be the first Hollywood portmanteau supercouple, the Brangelina of their epoch. Their Beverly Hills home was called ‘Pickfair’ and was the first private residence in L.A. with a swimming pool.
Like Chaplin and Fairbanks, Pickford became a cocktail too - a form of immortality that any one of us would crave. Apparently the drink is supposed to come out the colour of Pickford’s famous curls though whether these were grenadine pink or the subtler gold of the above cocktail, I cannot tell from these black and white images. What we do know is that the high days of the Mary Pickford cocktail arrived in Havana in the 1930s, where it was a mainstay of the menu at La Florida under the great Constantino Ribalaigua Vert. It would appear that Pickford was not there for its creation as is sometimes supposed - apparently she did travel to Cuba in the 1910s but didn’t like it much, finding that the climate did terrible things to her curls and never returned (according to the impressively exhaustive Mary Pickford Foundation).
However, Basil Woon, in his classic When It’s Cocktail Time in Cuba (1928), did his best to push the drink to Americans fleeing Prohibition:
“Six of you visit the Florida and order Mary Pickfords. A boy is put to work squashing and squeezing the pineapple. Meanwhile another boy fills six glasses with ice to frost them. When the pineapple juice is ready Constantino pours it into a huge shaker, takes the Bacardi bottle and, without looking, pours a quantity in the shaker. Then, still apparently without a glance at the shaker, he does the same with the curacoa [sic] or grenadine. The drink is shaken by throwing it from one shaker and catching it in another, the liquid forming a half circle in the air. This juggling feat having been performed several times, Constantino empties glasses of ice, puts them in a row on the bar, and with one motion fills them all [until] each glass is filled exactly to the brim and not a drop is left over. It’s worth a visit to Havana merely to watch Constantino operate.”
I can’t promise that mine are as good as El Rey de los Coteleros’s - but oh my, it is a tasty sip. It is not, perhaps, the most complex of cocktails and it is not one that is revived much. Like Pickford herself, it is a glamorous relic. But beyond that surface sweetness there are hidden depths.
PLAYLIST.
I couldn’t resist a Mary Pickford-inspired list right here - so here are some songs that take the name of some famous person or other. (Thank you for those who made suggestions on the site formerly known as Twitter). It’s a bit more banging than previous lists! Specifically the opening 1-2-3 of Paris Hilton (a mid-00s Trash-era throwback; I love how increasingly enraged that bridge section becomes), the supremely addictive Elvis Presley by dancehall princeling Skeng, and then Anna Wintour by Azealia Banks who I consider to be one of the greatest geniuses alive today. True fact: I once gave her a lift home. Can you imagine, clearing the passenger seat of babywipes? Deciding what music to play?
WHAT I’VE BEEN READING
How timely. Fellow booze-writer Henry Jeffreys, who you may remember from the Pimm’s recipe the other week, just wrote a delightful history of maraschino and the Habsburg Empire. I am quoted in it! Henry’s book, Vines in a Cold Climate, about the English wine revolution, is out any moment - and his Substack is a delight, too. (Drinking Culture)
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