
In the 1930s, Cuban cocktails started to become popular in the united states thanks to the writers F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. This cocktail was invented in the late 1800s by Jennings Cox, an American mining engineer living in Cuba at the time, and is named after the Daiquiri Mines he worked in the east of Santiago.
These recipes are from the 1935 Bar La Florida from Havana, Cuba. The Bar took the original recipe and made three other variations using different citrus as the prominent flavor. This is the lemon-flavored Daiquiri #4. This is probably my favorite one out of the 4.
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It’s always nice to see the Daiquiris No. 2 through 5 mentioned, as those are rarely known by the drinking public.
A few small things though:
It seems you took the recipe from the faulty english translation of Constante’s book. Though im sure this makes for a tasty drink, there are certainly no lemons in any Cuban-made Daiquiri, that would be lime. I’m fairly certain that lemons would not even have been available in Cuba at that time. The original spanish recipe calls for “limón verde”, which translates to “Lime”. This is a common error with translations from spanish sadly.
Also traditionally cuban cantineros use granulated sugar rather than syrup. Not that it makes a huge difference, other than adding a bit of texture, but since you claim to use the original 1930’s recipe, any changes to it should be mentioned at least.
Cheers!
That is absolutely wonderful to know. Thank you! I will seek out these Spanish versions and adjust the recipes.
You’re right about making a note about the change from granulated sugar to simple syrup. I’ve done that with every recipe on this site that uses sugar. I tried to keep it equivalent so the sweetness would be the same. That was originally done because when I first added most of these recipes it was to a mobile app where each ingredient was a clickable item that could be saved to a database that changed what drinks the app told you that you could make. I made the choice that it would be too confusing to have two separate items for sugar and simple syrup. I tried writing exceptions where having sugar also meant you had simple syrup too but it ended up getting a bit too clunky. Because of that choice I’ve been a bit hesitant to do cocktails with unique ingredients like vanilla syrup or something because I don’t end up just writing the words but I have to build an entire object that represents vanilla syrup and take photos, write articles, etc. that not an issue on the website but in the mobile app that’s a thing. Very long winded explanation for why I made that sugar to syrup change lol.
I’ve been going back and rewriting my older articles and when there are changes like that I will write the original recipe line for line in one of the paragraphs above . Even though I started this website around a year ago I published most of these around 4 years ago in a mobile app. I’ll update these ones soon and I will look for the Spanish book too. Thanks again!