The Spirits #25: The Paloma

~ The Forbidden Fruit ~ Hybridisation ~ Stray Dogs ~

~ THE PALOMA ~

50ml tequila
25ml lime juice
15ml agave syrup
50ml grapefruit juice
<100ml fizzy water

Shake up the first four ingredients (with ice, if you like but it’s not actually all that necessary). Strain into a tall glass filled with (fresh) ice, top with fizzy water, and stir really well. Garnish with fresh grapefruit and/or lime. I put some rosemary in the above example. Not sure why tbh. A salt rim wouldn’t go amiss too.

Some Paloma pointers:

1) This is a fancy-ass Paloma. You can make a basic Paloma like this: purchase a can of grapefruit soda, like Squirt, Ting, Jarritos Grapefruit, San Pellegrino Pompelmo, hell, maybe even Lilt. And use that as a mixer for a double shot of tequila.

2) You can make a furtive Paloma by, buying that can of grapefruit soda, taking a sip, discreetly adding a tot of tequila and going about your usual business free from police interference.

3) No tequila? Use gin. Also: an extra 25ml of Campari in the above is SENSATIONAL.

4) A salt rim isn’t a bad idea here.

5) As ever, one sweetener will sub in for another, so don’t sweat it if you don’t have any agave syrup: basic sugar syrup or honey are both fine.

Is it Friday already? I could have SWORN the last breath I took was on Wednesday? No? Oh well. MUSIC. And welcome.

You will find instructions for making sugar syrup, grenadine, ice, etc here and my 10 RULES FOR MAKING COCKTAILS here. I have also assembled some bottle recommendations for a cabinet here - and this here is the full archive of weekly specials. Do please share the Spirits with anyone who might like it - and feel free to tag me with your creations on Instagram ou même Twitter!

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THERE were once, I gather, only three kinds of citrus fruits: citrons, mandarins and pomelos. It is thought that all of the modern citrus fruits you find in the supermarkets today are the result of the interbreeding of these three citrus Titans, which sometimes happened deliberately, at the behest of farmers, and sometimes quite naturally, when the farmers’ backs were turned. As far as I understand it, the evolution of the grapefruit went something like this: Pomelo + mandarin = sour orange. Sour orange + mandarin = sweet orange. Sweet orange + pomelo = grapefruit. There’s a separate branch that goes: sour orange + citron = lemon too. This partly explains why the boundaries between different citrus fruits are often so different to demarcate, either linguistically (see the persistent confusion of lima/limon in Spanish) or in a marketplace situation. In many of the places where limes/lemons grow, it’s much harder to tell the difference.

But it’s particularly hard to tell with grapefruits. They are mysterious. Don’t taste a thing like grapes for a start. The actual word “grapefruit” wasn’t coined until 1830 in Barbados and refers to their bunch-like appearance on trees. The excellent French word pamplemousse comes from the Dutch “plump lemon”. It doesn’t taste much like lemon either! Grapefruits were sometimes thought to be the ‘Forbidden Fruit’ of the Bible, hence the (now sadly defunct) Forbidden Fruit liqueur, which was made from pomelos/grapefruits. The Ruby grapefruit only appeared in the early 20th century - some Floridian grapefruits wandered out of a Texan plantation, cross-pollinated, came back pink and made their owner a fortune.

And the grapefruit has magical properties too. ‘Grapefruit Diet’ was one of the original Hollywood diet crazes, since grapefruit is thought to have fat-burning properties. Lolita’s mother Charlotte Haze eats grapefruits each morning and Humbert Humbert hates her for it (“that economically halved grapefruit, that sugarless breakfast…”) Grapefruit also contains high amounts of furanocoumarins, which inhibit the body’s supply of cytochrome P450 enzymes, which, long story short, means that washing down Xanax, Ritalin, Adderal, Viagra, Valium and many other drugs with a big glass of grapefruit juice will give you 10x the dose. Which leads the author of this lively Atlas Obscura mini-history of the grapefruit to make the stunning discosure:

It’s hard to tell from the statistics, but it seems all but certain that people have died from eating grapefruit.

Grapefruit is also my favourite fruit, I think - and yes, I do think about these things a lot as one of my seven-year-old’s favourite talking-games is to ask and compare Top Fives of pretty much everything. (He is appalled by grapefruits). The fastest way to eat a grapefruit is to cut it into eighths, like halftime oranges, and suck, messily. That way you avoid ingesting too much of the pesky white pith. But if you feel like being a little more elegant, take a sturdy breadknife, saw off a disc of skin at top and top and bottom so that just a few pearls of flesh are exposed, and then carefully saw around the surface so that you are left with a raw, glistening sphere, especially sinister if it’s a ruby variety. Then slice into a bowl and serve drenched in Angostura Bitters.

You see how effortlessly grapefruit entersCocktailia? I discovered this excellent combination by actually reading the Angostura Bitters label one day. Don the Beachcomber, the inventor of the Zombie and a billion other ‘Tiki’ concoctions, had a “secret” ingredient known as Don’s Mix that no on could figure out for years… until it was decoded as two parts white grapefruit juice to one part cinnamon-infused sugar syrup. In her Flavour Thesaurus, Niki Segnit provides a recipe for a Grapefruit Cheesecake with a Cinnamon base, and also commends the combination of grapefruit and blue cheese: “Modern in a obsolete way, like the Skylon or flying cars”. Grapefruits other good friends include: gin, Campari, Aperol, yellow Chartreuse and - most especially - tequila and (especially) mezcal. They just seem made for each other.

Much like the grapefruit itself, the Paloma’s origins are mysterious and knotty. It is closely associated with the American grapefruit soda Squirt, which was first exported to Mexico in the 1960s - but it seems to have developed informally as a party-type drink in the 1990s as a simple highball, a two-ingredient drink. The first known references is in Nancy Zaslavsky’s 1997 book A Cook’s Tour of Mexico, which refers to it as a Lazy Man’s Margarita. Which is about right. You might think of it as the Mexican version of the G&T - and it is, to my mind, every bit as good. If only they made grapefruit soda in those small tonic-type cans I would make it much more often. But then again, the fresh grapefruit version is a step up still and one of the few long drinks that truly hits the spot from first to last.

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PLAYLIST

Paloma, as you know, means ‘dove’ (and also pigeon… another example of divisions between categories being much more fluid than first appear!). I put together a playlist of bird songs a while back but why not let’s lean into animals, beasts, creatures.

CW: Loud Sleater-Kinney.

Please note: if you follow this playlist it will automatically refresh each week - so make the most of it while you can! You can find a masterlist of all songs featured so far here.

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WHAT I’VE BEEN READING

John Berger’s Why Look at Animals? (The Bookshop)

…a wonderful and quite mind-expanding essay that was recommended to me by the director Elizabeth Lo, whom I recently interviewed about her film, Stray, which follows the stray dogs of Istanbul. (The Guardian)

And having finished The Glass Kingdom, I fell upon Ed Cumming’s interview with the Bangkok-based British author Lawrence Osborne from a few years’ back. (The Guardian)

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SHOPPING LIST

Rhubarb, sugar, gin.

🥃 🍸 🍊  🍋