Daiquirí is also the name of a beach and an
iron mine near
Santiago de Cuba in eastern Cuba, and is a word of
Taíno origin. Historians widely agree that the cocktail was invented by an American mining engineer named
Jennings Cox, who was in Cuba (then at the tail-end of the
Spanish Captaincy-General government) at the time of the
Spanish–American War of 1898. It is also possible that
William A. Chanler, a
US congressman who purchased the Santiago iron mines in 1902, introduced the daiquiri to clubs in
New York in that year. Originally the drink was served in a
tall glass packed with cracked ice. A teaspoon of sugar was poured over the ice, and the juice of one or two limes was squeezed over the sugar. Two or three ounces of white
rum completed the mixture. The glass was then frosted with a long-handled
spoon. Later the daiquiri evolved to be mixed in a
shaker with the same ingredients but with shaved ice. After a thorough shaking, it was poured into a chilled
coupe glass. The Daiquiri was subsequently refined and popularized by Emelio “Maragato” Gonzalez and Constantino “Constante” Ribalaigua Vert in Havana. The basic recipe for a daiquiri is also similar to the
grog British sailors drank aboard ships from the 1780s. By 1795 the
Royal Navy daily grog ration contained rum, water, ¾ ounce of lemon or lime juice, and 2 ounces of sugar. This was a common drink across the Caribbean, and as soon as ice became available this was included instead of the water. Consumption of the drink remained localized until 1909, when
Rear Admiral Lucius W. Johnson, a
U.S. Navy medical officer, tried Cox's drink. Johnson subsequently introduced it to the
Army and Navy Club in
Washington, D.C., and drinkers of the daiquiri increased over the space of a few decades. It was one of the favorite drinks of the writer
Ernest Hemingway and U.S. President
John F. Kennedy. The drink became popular in the 1940s.
World War II rationing made
whiskey and
vodka hard to come by, yet rum was easily obtainable owing to U.S. President
Franklin D. Roosevelt's
Good Neighbor policy, which opened up trade and travel relations with Latin America, Cuba, and the Caribbean. The Good Neighbor policy, also known as the Pan-American program, helped make Latin America fashionable. Consequently, rum-based drinks (once frowned upon as the choice of sailors and down-and-outs) also became fashionable, and the daiquiri saw tremendous popularity in the US. == Variations ==