The Spirits #69: The Dry Daiquiri
~ Cocktail Gestalt ~ Boring Machines ~ The Pleasures of Sobriety ~ Funky Bird ~ Different Trains ~
~ THE DRY DAIQUIRI ~
40ml light rum
10ml Campari
20ml lime juice
15ml passion fruit
15ml honey syrup
Whack all the liquids in a shaker with a couple of cubes of ice and give them a ‘whip’ shake. (Normally I say loads of ice, but if you just put in a couple, you can control the amount of dilution while providing a lot of aeration!). Now pour into an Old Fashioned glass and fill that with ice. Stir until optimally cold. And garnish it just as fancily as you choose. Half a passion fruit is fine, but a lime wedge would do just as nicely. I used mint.
Some Dry Daiquiri Notes:
1) The above recipe comes courtesty of the bartender Felix Cohen, whose Manhattans Project drinks-by-mail service I recommended a few months back. Here’s what he has to say about it:
I don't actually know where this drink originated from - it seemed to arrive ex nusquam about 6 months ago on my Facebook feed of hip london bartenders. Perhaps by some sort of cocktail gestalt, as it was just the drink I wanted to drink: fun, but with a light bitter backbone, and a passion fruit drink that didn't come with a shot of prosecco. It's easily lengthened with a touch of soda or tonic, perfect for summer and - if you don't love it - use the passionfruit puree for those Pornstar Martinis.
Funnily enough, when Felix posted it on his Instagram the other day, I found that it was just the sort of drink I wanted to drink, too.
2. Felix opened a brand new bar in Margate this week! It’s called Daisy and it specialises in “silly little fruity drinks” (see above), which is a good thing to specialise in as far as I’m concerned. Here’s what the Isle of Thanet News had to say about it. I am very fond of Margate; as was JMW Turner: “The skies over Thanet are the loveliest in all Europe,” he said.
3. The original specs say 15ml passion fruit purée. This is something that you can buy from bartending specialists in pouches. It’s perfectly OK but the discerning home drink might prefer to use 1/2 fresh passion fruit. You can also use plain old sugar syrup as opposed to honey syrup but the honey just lends it a little extra richness.
4. Do you have an excellent and slightly surprising recipe based on the 12 bottles we keep in our mutual Spirits cabinet? Feel absolutely free to tell me about it.
HAPPY FRIDAY EVERYONE.
🖊️I am Richard Godwin.
🧋My instructions for sugar syrup, ice, grenadine etc are here.
🧑🏫 My 10 RULES FOR MAKING COCKTAILS are here.
⚗️ My bottle recommendations are here.
📃 The full A-Z recipe archive is here.
➡️ Please find a round up of organisations helping Ukrainians here.
And you like The Spirits, do please forward this to all of your friends.
🥕 I WAS rather proud of myself the other day. I managed to go to a garden party, 4pm-9pm or so, and maintain a pleasant level of sociable inebriation throughout without getting needlessly smashed. I even woke up on the following morning feeling quite reasonable. This is surprisingly hard to do if, like me, you are pathologically incapable of refusing alcohol when offered. How did I do it? I began with a Margarita (copiously iced) and then spent the rest of the party sipping carrot juice - yes, carrot juice, a bottle of which happened to be lying around. Towards the end, I might have helped myself to a small tot of tequila… but that was about it. I fear this feat will be unrepeatable.
🍃I DON’T have anything big to say this week. After a period of manic-overwriting, I don’t seem to be able to put one word next to another. The wind keeps muddling my thoughts. So I thought I’d write this week’s Spirits ‘Notebook’ style, as if I commanded some sort of personality column in the Times or something. A tapas of half-cooked ideas!
🍹THE Dry Daiquiri seems to have been invented (pace Difford) in 2007 by Kevin Armstrong, most recently of Satan’s Whiskers. Jamie Oliver featured it in his magazine at some point, too, which may have helped spread its fame? Other than that I can find no mention in the annals. But it’s not hard to see why it was ripe for rediscovery. It’s fun but sophisticated and in the same loose ‘bitter sour’ family as two favourites of mine, the Jungle Bird and the Siesta. It’s also a good simple twist on a classic, and as Alice Lascelles remarked over a clarified coconut and grapefruit Ramos Gin Fizz at Soma the other day, these are invariably the cocktails that one wants to drink.
🚇AS THE son of a London Underground civil engineer, I am childishly excited at the prospect of finally riding on Crossrail, aka The Elizabeth Line, due to open next week. Hell, even the updated Tube map fills me with delight. Back in 2013, I had the chance to see the line being constructed: I wrote a piece for ES Magazine about Phyllis, one of the 1,000-ton boring machines that excavated the 21km of new tunnels. At that point, it was 30 metres underneath Speakers’ Corner making its way east, as its twin, Ada, approached from the east. “Come 2018, we will be able to zip from Heathrow to Tottenham Court Road in half an hour, Paddington to Canary Wharf in a quarter of an hour,” I wrote, somewhat hopefully as it turned out. But better late than never. Maxim: always take the chance to go underground when offered.
🐦FOR weeks, Beck’s song Sissyneck from his 1996 album Odelay has been playing on a loop in my head, prompted by a bird on my street that has absolutely nailed the whistled introduction (itself sampled from The Moog and Me by Dick Hyman). I finally managed to capture this funky animal while taking out the bins last night. It’s actually in the same key. But I suppose the headline news is that the avian kingdom has discovered the blues scale. Where this leads I cannot say, but I’m excited to hear what comes next.
😔 AS FAR AS I’M concerned, that was the best thing I have tweeted in ages. It received zero likes.
👽 THE sci-fi movie Annihilation on Netflix is excellent, by the way - if a female-centred riff on Tarkovsky’s Stalker sounds like your bag. It’s based on the novel by Jeff Vandermeer and directed by Alex Garland (author of The Beach, screenwriter of 28 Days Layer, director of Ex Machina) and it’s about an inexplicable extraterrestrial visitation called the ‘shimmer’ that lands in Florida swampland one day and starts causing wild cellular mutations on all living things in its vicinity. I can’t stop thinking about it. Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Tessa Thompson are all excellent in it; and visually, it begs to be seen on a big screen. Apparently, though, it bombed with American test audiences whofound it a) too intelligent, b) too female and c) not enough superheroes. Garland, to his credit, refused to recut it and so the studio, Paramount, sent it straight to Netflix. Hopefully, the slower-burn appreciation will eventually count for something though. I now can’t wait to see his new, one, MEN.
🧒I ALLOWED my eight-year-old, Teddy, a teaspoonful of my Dry Daiquiri as I was putting him to be the other day. He slightly worryingly declared it the best thing he had ever drunk and promptly offered to pay me £2(!) to make him a non-alcoholic version. I subbed out the rum for fizzy water and the Campari for cinnamon syrup for want of anything more Campari-flavoured - and it still work rather well. I think this just goes to show that passion fruits are amazing things and really deserve better than the aforescorned Porn Star Martini.
PLAYLIST
In honour of the exciting expansion to London’s public transport infrastructure referenced above, here are some songs about trains. Choo choo!
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 WRITING
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WHAT I’VE BEEN READING
An amazing profile of Tom Cruise by Jeanne Marie Laskas from 1990, as recommended by Oli Franklin-Wallis. (Life)
I love it when Johanna Thomas-Corr hates a book this much. (Observer)
Helen Lewis’s Substack, which usually arrives when I’m writing this one, is always full of interesting links and takes, this week especially so. On the Great Replacement theory, the Amber Heard case, language games and more. (The Bluestocking)
…oh and she also commends this poem, I Long to Hold the Poetry Editor’s Penis in My Hand by especially, this poem by Francesca Bell. (The Rattle)
Chris Mandle also write a highly enjoyable Substack about cooking. (Scraps)
SHOPPING LIST
Rye (or bourbon), raspberries, sugar, grapefruit.
👀
I think I may have taken you too literally on my first attempt. I used half a passion fruit, seeds and all. Second attempt with sieved passion fruit was much better, although I only got 15ml from my supermarket passion fruits
Coolio!