I’m half crazy (from this heat).
Daisy de Santiago.
With high summer approaching it is good to have a cracking summer cooler to hand. But what makes one? A good hot weather drink starts cold and stays cold and that that happens at its most chilly when you shake with cubed ice then strain over crushed ice. Your cooler shouldn’t be too strong – although plenty of Tiki ones are – especially if it is for day-time consumption. Hydration being important we want a decent water content but all that ice and relatively light touch on the alcohol are already leaning into that. A nice cooler has light and refreshing ingredients so we should leave our long aged and deeply flavoured spirits and liqueurs on the shelf and reach for light rums, gins and the more fruity/floral/herbal liqueurs. It should also be fairly easy to make, especially as you might be on holiday without fancy tools or a blender. That’s a lot to consider but fear not for I have the perfect summer elixir in hand which comes from Charles H. Baker in 1939 via Martin Cate to our frosty glass.
Charles H. Baker was a globetrotting food and drink writer with a flowery, verbose, conversational style that seemed at least a generation past its sell-by date. Yet there is much to be gleaned from his books (and gleaned we have) at least one of which is handily back in print. In The Gentleman’s Companion: Being an Exotic Drinking Book or Around the World with Jigger, Beaker and Flask gushes about the Daisy de Santiago served to him at Bacardi HQ in Havana, Cuba. Times have changed since then. Let’s break down our summer cooler’s simple name. A daisy is a drink from the sour family of cocktails that is sweetened not with a syrup but with a liqueur. Santiago de Cuba is Cuba’s second city on the south coast and the location of Bacardi’s erstwhile distillery. The Daisy de Santiago doesn’t show up much after WWII and I think we need to credit Martin Cate for its resurrection in his superb 2016 Tiki cocktail book Smuggler’s Cove. Martin adds a little soda water to the shaker while Baker adds it later which is a cunning upgrade in my opinion. What this does is effectively a substitution for blending as the soda provides both the extra aeration and dilution blending provides for the poor blenderless. And as you have no doubt notices that extra dilution and simplicity of construction are two of our key asks in a summer cooler. For those worried about shaking with soda water be assured it is possible with a small amount just be sure to seal and hold the shaker tightly as the effervescence somewhat counteracts the vacuum effect that normally keeps a shaker sealed. He also puts the Chartreuse in the shaker rather than floating it and adds the teaspoon-and-a-half of sugar syrup that Baker calls “optional” but I reckon modern tastes are aligned to that*. You can reduce or skip it if you like things very tart. So far so good. All nicely streamlined and simplified. But then Catey messes with the rum and boy do things get controversial when Martin talks rum, having himself developed a whole new categorisation of rum that some think genius yet others can’t quite get behind. I fall in the latter camp while admiring the effort on an eternally thorny problem**. Cate calls for a “blended lightly aged” rum (type number 2 in his book) which would be anything from Appleton Signature or Mount Gay Eclipse to El Dorado 3 or Diplomatico Blanco. Uh, uh. This needs to be Cuban rum and there is no Cuban rum in Smuggler’s Coves rum categories! Now I understand he is located in the USA where Cuban rum is under stupid embargo but if you are trying to recategorise all the world’s rum you can’t just ignore the existence of one of the very biggest producers that is extremely available worldwide. Bacardi is, incidentally, now a Puerto Rican rum and largely uninteresting (as is their US “Havana Club” FYI). Of course I tried it Cate’s way with some Appleton Signature but to me the best results were with bona fide Cuban rum like Havana Club 3 Anos/Original or, if you are feeling a bit spendier Havana Club 7. For those of you *sigh* without access to real Cuban rum try some Plantation 3 stars or El Dorado 3 but not US “Havana Club”. For the “daisy” component Yellow Chartreuse is called upon and that I fear means it is time for update for the ongoing Chartreuse Crisis. I wrote a couple of years ago that I hoped the shortage would blow over but even here in the “core markets” it is still difficult to find and to boot the price has pretty much doubled. Yikes. On the plus side some alternatives to the real monky spirit have hit the market (as well as the ones I discussed in ‘23) and I’ll likely try some when current stocks are used up. I’ll be sure to let you know what I make of them.
‘Nuff said. Recipe:
Daisy de Santiago.
1.5oz / 45ml Cuban rum (see text).
0.5oz / 15ml Yellow Chartreuse (or alternative).
1.5 tsp Demerarra syrup to taste.
1oz / 30ml fresh lime juice.
1oz / 30ml Soda water.
Shake carefully (with a firm grip) with ice and strain into a double Old Fashioned glass packed full of crushed ice. Garnish with a sprig of mint.
Toast the summertime.
*There are also reasons to believe that limes were smaller 80+ years ago and recipes of the time called for “the juice of one lime.” Even today the amount of juice a single lime gives up is quite variable leaving us the need to rebalance older recipes and, indeed, adjust to taste.
**One I largely avoid by recommending specific rums and figuring my readers are smart enough to find similar alternatives as necessary.
