Rum Drinks: 50 Caribbean Cocktails, from Cuba Libre to Rum Daisy

By Jessica Harris and Tara Donne

“Colorful, tropical themed pages . . . Fun, informative, and a good read for anyone interested in cocktails and the stories behind them.” —Okra, The Magazine of the SoFAB Institute
 
With recipes for fifty of the Caribbean’s classic and contemporary cocktails and fifteen traditional snacks to accompany them, Rum Drinks provides a tropical taste vacation. More than a cocktail book, Rum Drinks is your ultimate rum resource, including salty tales—from a history of the sugar trade to the sparkly heyday of the Cuba Libre—an island-by-island listing of Caribbean rums, and a guide to great rum bars all over the world.
 
Recipes include:

• Canchanchara
• Planter’s Punch
• Mai Tai
• Pina Colada
• Coquito
• Rum Bloody Mary
• Navy Grog
• Jamaican Coffee
• Hurricane
• Zombie
• Tchoupitoulas Street Guzzle
• And more!

“Harris understands the liquor’s intoxicating allure; if she didn’t, this book would not be half as charming and informative as it is.” —Epicurious

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 27, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452132747

Book preview

chapter 1

Rum: History in a Glass

The flowers were still blooming on

Papa Doc’s tomb and the eternal flame was flickering in the torrid wind the first time I tasted rum. I’d arrived in Port au Prince, Haiti, the previous evening and been whisked off to that gingerbread hotel, the legendary Oloffson, celebrated by Graham Greene in The Comedians. The hotel was every writer’s dream—with the flotsam and jetsam of the island circulating at cocktail time. Modern-day pirates rubbed shoulders with pale-skinned newcomers, their sharp eyes evaluating the worth of each summer cotton frock and gold-braceleted arm and calculating schemes and scams. Paint-daubed artists sought solace in the bottom of glasses, weary island-exiled writers fled from the blank page, socialites fought ennui, and white linen–suited Aubelin Jolicoeur, the model for Greene’s character Petitpierre, hovered: a celebrity in search of an audience. The sophistication was palpable.

With the hindsight of three decades, it seems somehow fitting that there, at the mahogany bar in the main room under the whirling ceiling fans, I had my first taste of Rhum Barbancourt—the first rum that I sipped in the Caribbean. Served in a snifter, the beverage was the color of good Georgian amber and it flickered in the glass. The taste, a combination of caramel and molasses, was deceptively light and the intense aroma of the alcohol would soon reveal that this was a drink to savor and sip.

No matter where you had your first Caribbean cocktail, whether it came in a coconut freshly lopped off the tree or in a frosted glass of etched Waterford, the sweet molasses flavor of rum was more than likely an ingredient. The memory may have faded, but the taste of rum will forever conjure up warm breezes, fluttering palm fronds, lilting bawdy calypsos, haunting bigines, deep turquoise sea, and romance.

I had my first Caribbean cocktail back in the days when every island’s airport welcome came complete with a plastic cup of something pinkish-orange, rum-infused, and wonderful enough to make even the most crotchety tourist forget the travails of baggage claim and hotel check-in. The concoction was never truly memorable—but it was always strong—and it signaled one’s arrival into a universe of cocktails that were and are legendary.

Since those halcyon days, I have traveled the Caribbean region through and through. I’ve sampled superb piña coladas at their alleged birthplace in Viejo San Juan in Puerto Rico, and savored how they can truly be transformed into the sublime when prepared from freshly made coconut cream, chopped fresh pineapple, and aged rum and served in a coconut shell on a pristine beach. I’ve become an honorary member of more than one of the region’s bar associations and indulged in my share and more of the drink called Corn and Oil (rum and falernum) with locals at Letzie’s in Christ Church, Barbados, the island where rum began its Caribbean journey. I’ve visited Hemingway’s Cuban spots and had a daiquiri or two at La Floridita and mojitos at La Bodeguita del Medio way before they turned up in pallid versions on almost every bar menu, back when travel to Cuba was legal for a few brief minutes under President Carter. I’ve stood on the lawn of Rose Hall in the evening amidst ghosts from the Jamaica’s plantation past while sipping a version of rum punch that harked back to those days. I savor the rhum agricole of the French islands since I learned to correctly dose out my white rum, sugar, and lime juice to make a ’ti punch and to create my own passion fruit–flavored rhum arrangés.

I’ve visited rum factories too numerous to note and been stuck behind cane trucks bringing the harvest home. I’ve learned to recognize the parallel row of palm trees that usually signal the placement of a former sugar estate, and know the smell of burning bagasse (cane waste). I’ve watched the cane growing cycle of tiny green shoots peeking from the rich chocolaty soil to the feathery flowers that signal the approach of harvest. I’ve judged bartending competitions and savored snifters from the Bahamas to Venezuela and I’ve even seen the green flash . . . twice! I remain intoxicated not only by the beverage, but by the history that is contained in each amber glassful.

Rum History

Before there was rum there was sugar. Man has long evidenced a yearning for the sweet. This taste has been satisfied by sweeteners ranging from the maple syrup of the northeastern United States to the bee’s honey around the world. None, though, have attained the international primacy of cane sugar and its by-product, rum. Sugar from cane is so much a part of our lives now that we take it for granted. One has only to go into the nearest deli or Starbuck’s to note the abandon with which we use the little white and brown packets, and the prices in the supermarket attest to the fact that this commodity is no longer considered scarce. We consume a staggering 66 to 88 pounds of sugars and syrups per capita in the United States and are still considered slackers when compared to the upward of 100 pounds that are the norm in countries like Australia, Brazil, and Fiji, and the 120 pounds-plus currently ingested in Cuba. (Statisticians don’t tell whether these figures include rum drinking; if so, the figures become a bit more understandable.)

Sugar gets taken for granted, but it is very much a part of who we are in the Americas, and its presence explains why some of us are here at all. Rum is a major New World part of the story of sugar, a story that is strung across hemispheres and borders. The powdery white substance was once as rare and as controlled as others like cocaine and heroin are today and its evolution and history equal the most circuitous of drug routes. Its by-product—rum—lubricates every aspect of our history.

Sugarcane looks very much like any other grass in the savanna. Some variants of it still grow wild in the tropical fields of New Guinea. Tall and segmented like bamboo, with its reed-like stalk filled with sweet sap, Saccharum robustum is at the origin of the main cultivated sugarcane species we know today. Cane has been recognized for at least 2,200 years and is a curiously adaptable plant. A perennial with a deep root system, cane can flourish and grow upward of fifteen feet tall. It requires little water, but will do well when properly irrigated. It is tolerant of a wide range of soil conditions and can grow on both hillsides and flat land.

No one knows whether by man, weather, or spontaneous generation that cane migrated, but cane was growing in India and possibly China early in written history. It is in India, though, where the sugar-bearing reed gained importance. There its modern story began, and it became one of the first plants to inspire man to technology. Instead of chewing it to release its sweet juice, cane farmers learned they could concentrate the sweetness of the plant by crushing and boiling the cane. Sugarcane presses were used to grind the stalks just like oil presses. Early Indian texts suggest that the cane was transformed into many different types of sugar with special medicinal effects attributed to each. There was no rum in India, but there were a variety of medicinal beverages and a drink called samyava—a blend of wheat flour, milk, ghee, and sugar flavored with cardamom, pepper, and ginger. Rock sugar called khand (from whence our word candy comes) was first described in Western texts in 326 or 327 BCE by those in the retinue of Alexander the Great as, stones the color of frankincense, sweeter than figs or honey.

Alexander the Great’s armies may have seen sugar on the subcontinent, but sugarcane’s voyage to Europe and from there to the New World was a slow one and its subsequent transmutation into rum would take more than a millennium. Unlike chiles, which swept around the world in less than a century, cane took 700 years to make its way from Southern Asia to the shores of the Mediterranean and an additional 700 more to make its way across the Atlantic.

Texts on sugar and its journey can fill a library row or two; those on rum scarcely fill one shelf. It seems no one is sure of the origins of rum. The drink may have originated in Europe or even in the Middle East or on the Indian sub-continent itself. The trail is, quite simply, cold. Sugarcane was brought to the Caribbean by Columbus in 1493; his diaries remark on the abundance of the harvest, but it seems that there was no attempt made to cultivate it on a large scale and no real record as to whether or not the Admiral of the Seas and his men made any attempt to distill the cane into a beverage of any kind.

Kill Devil’s Conquest

Rum turns up for the first time in the glasses of the New World as reported by an English adventurer named Ligon. Richard Ligon was an informed voyager and the most valuable of travelers: an observer and a chronicler. His thoughts on the new land of Barbados were published in a volume entitled A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes. He describes the island, draws the earliest surviving map on which he notes 285 plantations and their owners, and details life of all the inhabitants from the plantocracy to the enslaved Africans.