In Search of The Lost Daiquiri

Would somebody please tell me just when in the heck it was that we Americans got the idea that a daiquiri is a strawberry Slurpee with a little rum in it?

Eric Felten, author of How's Your Drink? might be able to answer this. I don't know. But it's a damn shame.

I walked into Colonel Brooks' Tavern the other day. Colonel Brooks' Tavern is about the closest thing I have to a neighborhood bar. It's a little too far to walk, so it just barely qualifies, but here in northeast Washington, D.C. it's quite a popular little spot. And by the way, the food there is excellent. I highly recommend Colonel Brooks' if you're ever in Washington.

Just don't order a daiquiri. I tried. "We don't make daiquiris," the bartender told me. "We don't do frozen drinks. And we don't have strawberries. We just don't make daiquiris. It's too much trouble."

Well, as the dreary Steve Martin used to say, Excuuuuuse me.

I didn't want to argue with him; it was lunch time and he was busy. I ordered a martini instead. But had it not been lunch time and had he not been swamped with customers, I would have tried to straighten this young man out.

Folks, a strawberry daiquiri is a specialty drink. The original recipe for a daiquiri had nothing whatsoever to do with strawberries, nor did it have anything to do with Slurpee machines. Jeez, the next thing that bartender is going to be telling me is that they don't have any little paper parasols.

A daiquiri is supposed to be one of the world's most basic cocktails. In fact it is one of six basic drinks listed in David Embury's Fine Art of Mixing Drinks. The idea of a cocktail bar simply refusing to make one is unconscionable. Colonel Brooks, send your bartenders back to school!

Okay, class, sit down. The daiquiri, sans strawberry and Slurpee machine, was supposedly invented in Cuba in the early 20th century. "Daiquiri" is the name of a beach in Cuba. The original daiquiri consisted of two or three ounces rum, the juice of two limes and a teaspoon of sugar poured over a tall glass of cracked ice. Stirred, not Slurpee'd. Later it came to be shaken. But the frozen, strawberry-flavored rum Slushee that passes for a daiquiri these days, a contemporary favorite of underage girls and wimps who can't handle alcohol, was not even an abomination in anyone's mind at that time.

Daiquiris became very popular in the United States during World War II. Wartime rationing had made stuff like whiskey and vodka hard to get, but because of FDR's "Good Neighbor" policy with Latin America, rum from south of the border was plentiful. In Evan S. Connell's marvelous novel Mr. Bridge, which concerns a well-to-do Kansas City family on the eve of World War II, when Mr. Bridge decides to have a little fun with his teetotaling housemaid, he "corrupts" her by offering her a daiquiri, which she finds that she likes, a bit too much, as it turns out.

And then there was Ernest Hemingway, the Babe Ruth of drunks. Hemingway drank everything, but there was a special place in his heart for the daiquiri, not surprising as he spent so many years living in Cuba. There are many moments in Hemingway's fiction that I find highly implausible, and one of them is a scene late in his posthumous novel Islands in The Stream. After drinking double daiquiris all afternoon, the book's main character, a painter named Thomas Hudson, still has the mojo to go home and have spirited sex with his estranged wife.

In the immortal words of Dorothy Parker, "And I am Marie of Roumania."

Hemingway was, in fact, so fond of the concoction that he whipped up his own recipe for it. Now, I know I have posted this recipe before, specifically last summer when reflecting upon my pal Chris McDonald's and my trip to Kansas City to attend the 13th International Ernest Hemingway Society clambake and jam session there. But in view of this cultural emergency, I feel compelled to post it again. There we were, Chris and I, sitting in the bar of the Marriott Country Club Plaza hotel, tinkering with graphics for the presentation he would give the next day at one of the conference's breakout sessions.

Suddenly, Chris gets one of those happy notions he gets every now and then. "Let's try a Papa Doble, Hemingway's special daiquiri," he suggested.

In the Age of the Internet, nothing's easier. The hotel bar had Wi-Fi, and within moments Chris had pulled the recipe for Hemingway's special daiquiri off some cocktail website. With his usual panache and southern charm, Chris mosied over to the bar and asked the bartender to make one for each of us. The bartender was obliging, and we ended up having two apiece. They did NOT involve strawberries, and although they were served, according to Hemingway's instructions, with shaved ice, they didn't come out as sissy little Slurpees, either. NOTE TO COLONEL BROOKS' TAVERN: You don't need a Slurpee machine. A blender, or even a cocktail shaker, is perfectly adequate for a Papa Doble.

Sissy little Slurpees, indeed. As if Ernest Miller Hemingway, captain of the hairy-chested team of literature, would traffic in sissy little anything. This is a man's drink. Okay, it's also a woman's drink, if she's man enough. And I know plenty of women who are, by the way. (But my wife Valerie is not one of them. When I made one of these for her, I had to wimp it down by cutting the rum portion in half, and even then she couldn't finish it.)

In any case, here is the recipe for the great Papa Doble Daiquiri:

3 ounces white rum

The juice of two limes

The juice of half a grapefruit

Six drops of grenadine (cherry brandy can be substituted.)

Pour over crushed ice and either blend or shake. Serve in a margarita glass.

Got it? Colonel Brooks'? Well, in case you need encouraging, consider: I was in Greenville, NC the weekend after Thanksgiving. Chris lives in Winterville, just over the hill across the tracks. While I was there Chris and I dined out at the L.A. Lounge, a high-end restaurant-and-bar that just opened in Greenville last spring. Terrific place, by the way. The decor is Early Rat Pack, and there is a special menu of exotic drinks. I'm happy to report that Chris, who is a schmoozer and a flirt like you never saw as well as being a well-above-average golfer, managed to get friendly enough with the management of this place as to get the Papa Doble on their drink menu.

So, if you're ever in Greenville, NC (and speaking of the Rat Pack, the birthplace of Ava Gardner is not far away) drop in at the L.A. Lounge and order a Papa Doble before you order your steak. I promise you they won't say "Gee, we don't have strawberries." Sheesh.

Or, I should say, cheers.

Of smoked hocks, winter nights and paying it forward

Years and years ago there was a Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon which began with the voice-over narrator, the incomparable Bill Conrad, proclaiming, "Everybody can do something! For example, Homer Noodleman of Sioux Falls, South Dakota can put six flashlights in his mouth!"

Bullwinkle's special talent was that he could remember everything he ever ate.

Well, I can't remember everything I ever ate, but fortunately I can remember how I was taught to cook some of the things I've eaten, and that's where our story begins today.

I have this friend, Holly Inder. Now, when I met Holly many years ago her name was Holly Brayton, and I'm still inclined to call her that, because frankly, I only met her ex-husband once and the encounter was so forgettable that I can't even remember what he looked like, much less anything he said. Everybody can do something, as Bill Conrad said, and one thing James Inder did very well was blend quietly in with the furniture. So to me, Holly will always be Holly Brayton. I don't really know who Holly Inder was. A mistake, would be my best guess.

With that by way of non-sequitur, Holly and I were talking the other day about split pea soup.

Holly and I met in late 1985, when we were both preparing to go overseas with the foreign service for the first time. Now, Holly was a foreign service brat; she grew up overseas, then went to work in State Department telecommunications when she was in her twenties. Her father had been a telecomm technician during his own career; she was more-or-less following in his footsteps. I was 30 when I joined the foreign service and had never been overseas in my life.

Consequently, Holly has been to a lot of places I've never been. She stayed in the foreign service after I quit nine years ago, and continued to travel.

So when I get an opportunity to whip on Holly a place I've been that she hasn't, well, let's just say it's like taking the trick in a gin game. I like it.

So there we were, talking about split pea soup. Holly says to me, "There's a place in California I've heard about, where there's a restaurant that serves nothing but split pea soup."

"Buellton," I said, with an inward gloat.

"You've been there?"

"Yup. The town is called Buellton, the restaurant is called Anderson's, and yes, split pea soup is the premier item on the menu," I said.

Then, unable to resist savoring the moment a bit more, I added, with just a touch of world-weariness, "Buellton. Yeah, it's right off Highway 101 north of Santa Barbara on the way to San Luis Obispo. I ate there with my dad a couple of times on our way to Arroyo Grande to visit my aunt and uncle. Not far away from Buellton is another tourist attraction, Solvang, a fake Danish village. You can buy all kinds of baked goodies there."

I was lovin' this, as they say in the marketing department at McDonald's.

But I was just warming up.

"Yeah, Anderson's makes some of the best split-pea soup you ever tasted," I told Holly. "I don't know if it's available in other states, but in California you can buy it canned in the grocery store. Yeah, it's good." Then, with a pause for effect, I added, "But mine's better."

Anyone out there old enough to remember Walter Brennan on the old western series The Guns of Will Sonnet will recognize how I savored this moment. Remember the scene where Brennan, as old Will Sonnet, has the following exchange with Claude Akins?

Claude: Ah, you Sonnets. I wish I had the third one in front of me right now.

Walt: You mean James? Now that's a foolish wish, mister. From what I hear, James is the third best shot in the west.

Claude: The THIRD best?

Walt: James is darn good. But he's better. (Jerks his thumb at Dack Rambo, his grandson.) And I'm better'n both of 'em. No brag, just fact.

Yesiree Bob, my split pea soup's bettern' Anderson's. (Spit.) No brag, just fact.

And there's a darn good reason for that. Family tradition.

That is correct. My grandmother taught my mother how to make split pea soup, and my mother taught me. And my grandmother was the best cook who ever lived. Ergo, when I make split pea soup, I'm making it the way my grandmother did, and there's no better. Anywhere.

I can prove it. I did. I told Holly that I had put up a big pot of split pea soup just the day before, and that I would bring her some the next time I saw her. Well, I happened to be going down to Landmark Mall a few days ago to do some Christmas shopping, and Holly doesn't live far from there, so I took a Tupperware container of my split pea soup with me in the car, ran it over to Holly's place and dropped it off.

She called me the next day to tell me that it was every bit as good as I said it was. And that's saying something, because Holly is a better-than-average cook herself, and moreover, one of those women who don't mind admitting when a man can cook something better than they can. When she lived in Guam a few years ago, Holly had a boyfriend named Frank, so she told me, and this guy, an ex-Marine, really liked to cook. When he and Holly weren't canoodling, they were cooking. "But Frank was a better cook than I was," she cheerfully admitted.

Well, I can say this with all confidence: not all of my kitchen experiments turn out well. I really screwed up the mashed potatoes on Thanksgiving this year. But I can say with all confidence that nobody, and I mean nobody, makes better split pea soup than I do. Because when I cook this stuff, my grandmother is looking over my shoulder. Dante, steered through Hell by Virgil, had no better guide than that.

So make a list, run to the grocery store, get out your kitchen utensils, follow these instructions and prepare to go to heaven. But don't forget the Beano.

How good is this stuff? When my father was 90 and we were having trouble getting him to eat anything at all, he would polish off three bowls of this soup if I put it in front of him. That's how good it is.

Oh, by the way, I wouldn't dream of serving split pea soup without cornbread on the side. You know cornbread. In some parts of the east they call it johnny cake. In a future blog posting I'll tell you about the time I introduced a roomful of Russians to cornbread. Anyway, included with my split pea soup recipe is also my cornbread recipe, for those of you who don't mind going the extra mile rather than just grabbing a box of cornbread mix at Safeway.

MY GRANDMOTHER'S (AND MOTHER'S) SPLIT PEA SOUP

Ingredients:

Two 8 oz. packages of dry split peas

1 large onion

4 large carrots

2 smoked pork hocks or smoked ham hocks

Salt

Pepper

Garlic powder

6-8 bay leaves

Soak the dry split peas overnight, or at least for a couple of hours. They will expand, and you'll need to add more water. Then dump them in a soup pot and bring them to a boil. When they come to a boil, turn the heat down low and let them parboil until they're soft, usually 45 minutes to an hour. A whitish foam will arise from the boiling peas. Skim it off and throw it away.

Dice up the pork or ham hock as best as you can and put it in a saucepan with about two cups of water. Start it boiling too, then let it simmer on low until you have soup stock.

When the peas start to get nice and mooshy, drain some of the water out of them and add the soup stock. If you're using smoked pork hock with a bone, fish it out and chop as much meat off of it on a chopping board as you can. Throw the meat in with the peas and stock. Then dice up the onion and carrots and add them to the soup.

Then add the seasonings. salt and pepper to taste, maybe a tablespoon of garlic powder (less if you don't like garlic) and then add the whole bay leaves. Just let the bay leaves float in the soup.

Simmer on low heat for about another hour. Then turn the heat off, cover the soup and let it cool for three hours. When it cools, it will be thick -- almost as thick as soup that comes out of a can, Add as much water as you need to get it to the thickness you like, re-heat and serve. Remove the bay leaves before serving.

One great thing about soup: the more it's re-heated, the better it gets.

KELLEY'S CORNBREAD FROM SCRATCH:

Ingredients:

1 cup white flour

1 cup yellow corn meal

1 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. baking soda

1 cup milk

1 egg

1/3 cup sugar

1 tbsp. cooking oil

1 tsp. salt

Pre-heat oven to 375. Combine all the ingredients in a mixing bowl, whip or mix until you get smooth batter, pour the batter into a greased 8 X 8 square baking pan, and bake for 20-25 minutes. I like to spice my cornbread up by adding such things as salsa, grated cheese, diced jalepeno or bits of bacon. Experiment with your own ingredients, but the basic batter stays the same.

And for making a kitchen smell wonderful, nothing rounds this meal out like a freshly-baked apple pie. I'm back in my mom's kitchen on a November night just thinking about it.

Home On The Range

When it comes to the war between men and women, I'm usually ready to do battle. And my most frequently-fought battle is against the cliches women toss around about men. You know, like the one that says we're all slobs. I'm actually rather fastidious, prefer monastic neatness to clutter. And my pal Doug in Reno, hoo boy. This guy makes Felix Unger look like a bear in a cave. When we were roommates years ago, we had the tidiest apartment in Vacaville, CA.

By contrast, my last girlfriend before I moved in with Doug was a slob's slob. Fruit bats keep the eaves of the buildings where they hang out cleaner than Jamie kept her half of our place.

But there's one cliche about men I will not argue with. Every guy in the world thinks he's the best chili-cook on the planet. I don't get it. Does it have something to do with the atavistic notion of the chuck wagon on the cattle drive? Beats me, but there are two things every guy thinks he makes better than every other guy: meatloaf and chili.

I once participated in a chili cook-off in Brazil. I lost. Yeah, well, this "cook-off" was fixed: the guy who won was passing out free shots of tequila. How sneaky is that? My chili was better than his. I was using real beef, for one thing. The guy who won was using hamburger. Puh-lease.

Chili purists do NOT put beans in their concoctions. That's for amatchoors. What I usually do, if I'm trying to impress a crowd, is cook up a pot of pintos and put it alongside the no-beans chili, and anyone who wants beans can add them.

Okay, now that I got all that off my chest, I made a huge pot of chili last Thursday for my wife Valerie's office Christmas party, which I am not going to call a "holiday party." The village atheist around the corner can kiss my big fat hairy French-Canadian ass if he doesn't like it.

Now, I was preparing this chili for a party, not a cook-off, which means two things: (1) I had to make a LOT of it, and (2) Of course I was going to cut corners. What does a roomful of Washington, D.C. real estate agents know about chili?

For one thing, I did throw in beans. When you're making chili for that many people, you need an extender, and anyway, knowing what I do about these east coast people, e.g. that most of them are "spice wimps," I wanted to add something that might take the "edge" off the crushed red pepper that I wasn't about to leave out completely, east coast spice-wimps be damned.

I didn't follow any recipe; I just threw this chili together. But it was one of those miraculous mornings when everything does indeed seem to "come together." When my neighbor Donald L. Williams came by around noon, as I was putting the finishing touches to this pot of chili, I asked him to step inside and taste it. "I'm afraid it might have just a touch too much 'heat' for this D.C. wimpy crowd," I told him. "Taste it and tell me what you think."

Donald took a bite. "You done GOOD, son," he said. "This is mother!@#$%n' good."

Donald's native eloquence, not to mention his honesty, warmed my heart, as I'm sure my chili warmed his.

"Great. I'll save some for you," I said.

The party crowd seemed to agree with Donald. I hauled more than a gallon of this stuff into the condo where the party was being held, and when the festivities broke up about three hours later (I was also tending bar), I think I had maybe a quart left to bring home. The revelers went through my chili like locusts. Even the wimpos who thought it was a tad spicy finished off their bowls of it nonetheless.

"Well," I said to myself, "You'd better get this concoction codified." And, by the way, when I was scraping the leftovers into Tupperware the following morning, I couldn't resist plunging my spoon in and tasting, tasting, tasting. Even COLD this stuff was good. Whatever I did, I did it right.

So, here, one mo' time, is one mo' guys' chili recipe. Trust me on this one. Just trust me (he said, taking off his Indiana Jones hat).....

KELLEY'S SURE-TO-KEEP 'EM COMING BACK CHILI

Ingredients

5 lbs. ground beef (you can cut back on these proportions of course. Remember I was cooking for 30.)

1 large onion

1 large green bell pepper

3 cans of Hunt's tomato sauce

1 large can of Hunt's tomato paste

3 cans of diced tomatoes with green chiles.

2 tablespoons salt

2 tablespoons pepper

2 tablespoons onion salt

3 tablespoons cumin

1 tablespoon crushed red pepper

3 packages pinto beans

2 cups water

Start parboiling the pintos before you do anything else. They need to simmer until they're almost mushy. Then start browning the ground beef, adding the seasonings as you go until all the meat is cooked and seasoned. (Be careful with the crushed red pepper. A tablespoon will be too much if you're only making this for four people.) Take the browned and seasoned ground beef and dump it into a pot. Dice and add the onion and green bell pepper, then throw in the tomato sauce, tomato paste and diced tomatoes with green chiles. Once the beans are reasonably soft, throw them in too, stir and let the whole mess simmer for about an hour. When it cools, it's going to get thicker. That's when you'll want to add water to achieve whatever degree of thickness you prefer. Re-heat, load in the car and head for the party. Make sure the lid is on tight in case you run into cross-town traffic.

Wine suggestion: a good cold Sam Adams lager.