The Spirits #48: The Porn Star Daiquiri
~ Bookbookbookbook ~ Vanilla and Passion ~ Remembering Douglas Ankrah ~ Out on the Last ~ Bad Art Friend ~
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~ THE PORN STAR DAIQUIRI ~
One passion fruit plus an extra half for the garnish
50ml white rum
10ml lime juice
10ml vanilla sugar syrup (2:1)
Champagne! (optional)
To make vanilla sugar syrup, place circa 200g sugar and 100ml water in a pan, heat until just below boiling, and stir until the sugar is fully dissolved. Turn off the heat, split one vanilla pod and drop it in, cover, and leave to cool/infuse for a couple of hours. Then strain into some sort of receptacle and it will keep for a month or so in the refrigerator. You can make a much quicker, though less intensely vanilla-y version of this by simply adding vanilla extract to a basic sugar syrup.
Freeze a cocktail glass to begin. Scoop out the innards of a passion fruit (this usually adds up to about 20-25ml of pulp/seeds) and place in a cocktail shaker with the rum, lime and vanilla sugar. Fill said shaker about halfway to the top with ice and then perform the eponymous action, i.e., shake the damn thing. Now fine-strain - through a tea-strainer - into your frozen glass. Float a passion fruit half atop the cocktail. If you want to be “authentic”, by all means, enjoy a shot of chilled champagne on the side.
Some Porn Star Daiquiri Notes:
1) This is of course a rum-based reboot of grandmother’s favourite, the Porn Star Martini. To make one of those comme il faut, you should shake up 45ml vanilla vodka (e.g. Absolut Vanilla), 15ml Passoa passion fruit liqueur, 30ml passion fruit purée and 10ml vanilla sugar syrup, strain and serve as above.
2) I actually used Cabby’s spiced white rum for this, since one of its main spices is vanilla and I thought, why not? It was delicious. You could alternatively infuse a regular white rum with a vanilla pod for this, if you like. I can hardly stop you. Or indeed try it with dark rum.
3) If you can’t be bothered making vanilla syrup just use regular sugar syrup and a drop of vanilla extract. Please note: vanilla extract > vanilla essence.
4) Prosecco will do. Don’t tell anyone but the “champagne” in the picture is actually a sample can of something called a “hard seltzer”(?) that someone sent me, mixed with some sweet white vermouth. I didn’t really feel like opening a whole bottle of fizz midweek funnily enough, and while one can quite easily buy Porn Star Martini in cans, one cannot easily find sparkling wine in cans. This country!
CUE MUSIC! HELLO THERE I HAVE COME TO FIX YOUR DISHWASHER…
📯 I am the journalist Richard Godwin and this is my cocktail newsletter. You will find instructions for making sugar syrup, grenadine, orgeat ice, etc here and my 10 RULES FOR MAKING COCKTAILS here. I have also assembled some bottle recommendations here - and here is the full archive of weekly specials. Scroll to the bottom to find out what to get in for next week. Please consider becoming a member of the ✨THE CABINET✨ for the full experience. This way you will learn about exciting things like Maraschino and Green Chartreuse and (coming eventually…) apricot brandy.
IT’S quite funny when you think about it that despite all of the great advancements in cocktails these last couple of decades, despite all the best efforts of bartenders with the vermouth and the mezcal and the rosehip infusions, despite all the beautiful rooms and artful lighting, despite the grown-up shimmer of sophistication that you and I feel on a Friday late afternoon, when we take the shaker down from the shelf and place a couple of coupes in the freezer… well, despite all this, the most popular cocktail in the land is the Porn Star Martini. Not the Negroni or an actual Martini or even an Aperol Spritz. But a sweet 1990s confection with a dumb name and a free shot on the side.
Yes it’s true. Type #cocktail into Instagram on a British Friday night and I guarantee, you will see poorly lit Porn Star pic after poorly lit Porn Star pic. Why look, here is a whole account dedicated to “Shit P.orn Star Martini pics”. Above is national treasure Scarlett Moffatt modelling one circa 2015. And don’t think this is confined to Northumbrian reality TV stars either. I’m CERTAIN that I read a story somewhere about Prince William and Kate Middleton enjoying a Porn Star in their student days though when I Googled this the only reference I could find was my very own book so… don’t trust me on this one. But even Marks & Spencer makes a ready-to-drink version - though they were forced to rename it the ‘Passion Star Martini’ as it is against the law to link alcohol and sex in advertising, the one having absolutely nothing to do with the other.
And nor is the Porn Star Martini merely a British phenomenon. Here is a map (source here) that shows the most Googled cocktail in almost every nation on Earth. Yellow for the Porn Star:
So yes, the Porn Star is also the most popular cocktail in Ireland, Holland, Albania, Nigeria, Chad, Namibia, South Africa, India, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Taliban-controlled Afghanistan(!), Mongolia, Guyana, the Philippines and Papua New Guinea to name but a few, making it the most searched for cocktail in the world - with 18.4 million searches overall. We must of course allow that some of those searches were auto-filled in by mistake - I mean, you try typing it into Google: PORN STAR COC... and you may see how an excitable internet user in Kampala or Kandahar might find themselves contemplating recipes for passion fruit-based drinks with a slight feeling of disappointment. But my own prediction is that when the Porn Star Martini truly “breaks” the American heartlands the number of searches will only rise.
(Small aside: what do Madagascar and Ukraine have in common? A love of the Bramble!)
Anyway, notwithstanding my aversion to both oversweet cocktails and, actually, the porn industry and its role in perpetuating violent and regressive patriarchal norms within 21st century popular culture… I find the Porn Star Martini’s popularity “funny” and not “appalling” because well, it’s a drink. Though do read some Catharine MacKinnon while you sip, by all means.
And of course the stupid name has almost everything to do with the cocktail’s popularity. It was invented by the late London bartender Douglas Ankrah in the early ‘00s, who christened it that because: “The cocktail was so sexy and looked like what a pornstar would drink.” It became a sensation at the Townhouse Bar in Knightsbridge, where Ankrah served after co-founding the celebrated (and now defunct) L-A-B on Old Compton Street, largely because people find it funny to say “TWO PORNSTARS PLEASE!” But the name alone would not have carried it. As Ankrah noted, the cocktail is a looker. The colour, the garnish, the texture: there’s a reason everyone photographs it. Perhaps even more importantly, it comes with an extra shot: a sidecar of champagne (or, more likely, prosecco) designed to be drunk as a sort of palate-cleanser between sips. “People think they’re getting two drinks in one,” Ankrah said. If British people like anything more than a bit of oi-oi, it’s the feeling they got something for free.
Can I bear to admit it’s quite a nice cocktail too? Yes! My friend Emma actually bought me a bottle of Passoa passion fruit liqueur for a recent birthday with the malign intention of converting me from a Martini aesthete into a Porn Star drinker - and well, I’m glad she did. Passion fruit and vanilla, what’s not to like? (Ankrah’s original recipe actually consisted of vanilla pod-infused vodka and vanilla sugar syrup plus passion fruit liqueur and passion fruit purée - so that’s two levels of vanilla and two levels of passion fruit all at once). Most bartenders these days add in a little lime juice to make it more of a classic sour though Ankrah insisted that passion fruit was itself tart enough.
But passion fruit liqueur, passion fruit purée - these are bartender ingredients, not home drinker ingredients, which helps explain why the PSM is such a “night out” cocktail. What I have done in the above recipe is merely to sub out vanilla vodka for white rum and omit the passion fruit liqueur and purée because, well, one passion fruit is about 25p and as a home drinker, I tend to favour easy-to-find fresh ingredients over hard-to-find expensive ones.
The melancholy end-note to this is that Douglas Ankrah died just a few weeks ago, aged 51 - much younger than he really should. He was a well-liked figure and a pioneer of the modern London scene but seems to have had mixed feelings towards his most famous creation: a vast global success, but one which he found it hard to capitalise on, despite various attempts. He said that he was like a band who wrote a great song… but which was best known in some shit cover version. “I would love to see young bartenders become more ambitious, not just to create cocktails but to take it to market,” he told Difford’s Guide. “Otherwise someone else will do it for you.” He has a point. But really. Who among us could claim to have created something that brought so many millions of people so much pleasure?
PLAYLIST
I was considering doing a big old filth fest full of songs like this one and that one but hey, this is a family cocktail newsletter! So here is a suite of songs about going out and having a good time at the weekend. Profitez!
[NOTE: I WILL UPDATE THIS IN A COUPLE OF HOURS’ TIME, BEAR WITH!]
THIS PLAYLIST UPDATES AUTOMATICALLY EACH WEEK. The idea is, you download it and return to it each week in your Spotify. If there was an old song you’d like to hear again, you’ll find it RIGHT HERE in the ongoing archive of 2021 playlists.
WHAT I’VE BEEN READING
Bad Art Friend (NYT)
Is it so wrong to have sex with animals? (LRB)
And I interview Dior’s Kim Jones. (ES Magazine)
SHOPPING LIST
Brandy, absinthe, bitters, sugar.
🍷