The Hemingway Cookbook (31 page)

The Myth of the Mojito

Curiously, El Floridita was not the only bar to capitalize on Hemingway’s star status. La Bodeguita del Medio, a “claustrophobic little hole-in-the-wall,”
¹⁹
has carved out its own piece of the Hemingway legend. Above the bar, a sign reads:

MY MOJITO IN LA BODEGUITA
MY DAIQUIRÍ IN EL FLORIDITA

The quote is signed “Ernest Hemingway” in his unmistakable script. Thanks to the insatiable appetites of tourists and journalists for Hemingway lore, the
mojito
has made its way into The Hemingway Bar. In fact, that sign was not created until well after the Castro revolution in 1959. The owners needed a way to increase business and attract tourists, and Hemingway seemed like the perfect spokesman. It did not matter that Hemingway probably never set foot in the place, which was nothing more than a
bodeguita
, or grocery store, in Hemingway’s drinking days. They did not even have a bar until the mid-1950s. All that aside, there was no place on the narrow street outside El Bodeguita for Ernest’s chauffeur to park, and the fact that there is no such thing as a sugarless
mojito
confirms that the Hemingway connection with the drink is completely fictional. Nonetheless, it is a marvelously refreshing drink, and truly Cuban. As close as Hemingway came to the
mojito
was a drink invented by Gregorio Fuentes—at once mate, cook, and bartender aboard the
Pilar
—to prevent or cure colds. It is very similar to a
mojito
, sweetened with honey instead of sugar:

1
SERVING

2 tablespoons honey

Juice of 2 lemons

Sprig of mint

2 ice cubes

Bacardí White rum

Place the honey, lemon juice, and mint sprig in a tall glass. Stir, pressing the mint against the side of the glass to release the oils. Add the ice and rum. Stir and serve.

Hemingway Daiquirí, Papa Doble, Wild Daiquirí, Daiquirí Special

The following recipe is based upon the Daiquirí recipe from El Floridita that Hemingway drinks with A. E. Hotchner in his book
Papa Hemingway
.

1
SERVING

2½ jiggers Bacardi or Havana Club rum (1 jigger = 1½ ounces)

Juice of 2 limes

Juice of ½ grapefruit

6 drops of maraschino (cherry brandy)

Fill a blender one-quarter full of ice, preferably shaved or cracked. Add the rum, lime juice, grape-fruit juice, and maraschino.

Blend on high until the mixture turns cloudy and light-colored, “like the sea where the wave falls away from the bow of a ship when she is doing thirty knots.”
²⁰

Serve immediately in large, conical goblets.

Deusico (Turkish Coffee)

In the late summer of 1922, Asia Minor was smoldering, ready to ignite yet again in the final, tragic chapter of the Greco-Turkish War. Hemingway to went Constantinople as a correspondent for the
Toronto Star
, to cover the Greek expulsion from Thrace. He witnessed their forced exodus from the city, an experience he would draw upon when he described the Italian retreat from Caporetto in
A Farewell to Arms
. He took in the entire spectacle, resting his imagination on certain things he found most intriguing. As he wrote about Constantinople, he described the food, eventually focusing on a drink that he must have deeply respected, if for nothing other than its brute, unrelenting potency:

Turks sit in front of the little coffee houses in the narrow blind-alley streets at all hours, puffing on their bubble-bubble pipes and drinking deusico, the tremendously poisonous, stomach rotting drink that has a greater kick than absinthe.
²¹

Duesico, or Turkish coffee, refers to a method of grinding and preparation rather than a type of bean. You may either grind the coffee yourself, which involves pulverizing dark beans (such as arabica or Viennese) to a very fine powder and adding a pinch of cardamom. Or, you may purchase the coffee already ground. Be certain to note that there is cardamom in the mix. The coffee is prepared in a small, long-handled pot called a
jezve
, which you may find in finer cookware stores or Turkish markets. It may also be made in a small saucepan.

1
SERVING

1 tablespoon Turkish coffee

2 teaspoons sugar

4 tablespoons water

Mix the coffee, sugar, and water together in a
jezve
. Place the
jezve
over low heat and bring it to a boil three times, removing it from the heat each time before the foam runs over. After the third boil, rap the
jezve
sharply on the side to settle the grounds (you may also add a small splash of water to obtain the same effect). Pour the coffee slowly into a demitasse.

Hemingway with Perico Chicote, Mary, and friends at Chicotes in Madrid, Spain.

Gimlet

The overt tension between Francis Macomber and his wife throughout the story about his “Short Happy Life” on safari in Africa begins at the very start of the story, over lunchtime cock-tails with their white hunter, Robert Wilson:

It was now lunch time and they were all sitting under the double green fly of the dining tent pretending that nothing had happened.

“Will you have lime juice or lemon squash?” Macomber asked.

“I’ll have a gimlet,” Robert Wilson told him.

“I’ll have a gimlet too. I need something,” Macomber’s wife said.

“I suppose it’s the thing to do,” Macomber agreed. “Tell him to make three gimlets.”

The mess boy had started them already, lifting the bottles out of the canvas cooling bags that sweated wet in the wind that blew through the trees that shaded the tents.
²²

While Raymond Chandler’s legendary detective Philip Marlowe insisted that the only way to make a gimlet was with equal parts vodka and Rose’s (lime juice), the gimlet of the Macombers’ day was still a gin drink.

1
SERVING

1 ounce gin

1 ounce Rose’s lime juice

Fill an old-fashioned glass halfway with ice. Add the gin and lime juice and stir.

Gin and Tonic

Chicote’s on the Gran Via in Madrid “was a very cheerful place, and because really cheerful people are usually the bravest, and the bravest get killed quickest, a big part of Chicote’s old customers are now dead.”
²³
Perico Chicote opened his bar in 1931. It was a favorite hangout of Hemingway’s during the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s. When he began writing “The Denunciation,” a story of old friends and new betrayals, in Paris in the spring of 1938, he brought the narrator Henry Emmunds to Chicote’s to escape the shelling on the Gran Via. Once inside, a waiter tells him of the presence of Luis Delgado, a fascist spy. Before he denounced Delgado to the counterespionage bureau, he recalled gambling with him in San Sebastián over gin and tonics, the same drink he is drinking at Chicote’s:

“What about a gin and tonic? That’s a marvelous drink you know.”

So we had a gin and tonic and I felt very badly to have broken him and I felt awfully good to have won the money, and a gin and
tonic never tasted better to me in all my life. There is no use to lie about these things or pretend you do not enjoy winning; but this boy Luis Delgado was a very pretty gambler.
²⁴

The true Hemingway gin and tonic uses Schweppes Indian tonic water, which they served at Chicote’s, and Gordon’s gin, Hemingway’s favorite. (He once wrote that Gordon’s gin could “fortify, mollify and cauterize practically all internal and external injuries.”
²⁵
) The measure of gin and the lemon are included in honor of Gregorio Fuentes, who served gin and tonics of these proportions aboard the
Pilar
.

The Ernest Hemingway Gin and Tonic

1
SERVING

2 fingers Gordon’s gin

Schweppes Indian tonic water

Lemon wedge

Pour the gin into a tall glass over ice. Fill the glass with tonic water. Add the lemon wedge and stir.

Glühwein

The German word glühwein translates literally as “glowing wine.” It is a hot, spiced wine drink that served Frederic and Catherine well during the cold nights in Switzerland in the middle of January:

There was an inn in the trees at the Bains de l’Alliaz where the woodcutters stopped to drink, and we sat inside and warmed by the stove and drank hot red wine with spices and lemon in it. They called it gliihwein and it was a good thing to warm you and to celebrate with. . . . It was a fine country and every time that we went out it was fun.
²⁶

¼ cup black tea (made by steeping 1 tea bag per ½ cup boiling water)

2-3 slices of lemon with peel (use orange for a less bitter version)

3 teaspoons sugar

1-2 dried juniper berries

2 cloves

1 cinnamon stick (optional)

1¾ cups red wine

Heat all ingredients in a saucepan over low heat until very warm. Strain through a sieve into warmed tumblers or drink with teeth clenched.

Grappa

In
A Farewell to Arms
, Frederic Henry has a peculiar relationship with grappa, a harsh Italian brandy distilled from grape husks, the residue that remains when the grapes have been pressed and relieved of their juice. He never seems to want it, and yet he drinks it throughout the novel, with often dramatic consequences. During a layover, en route from the field hospital to the Red Cross Hospital in Milan, Frederic pays a young boy to get him some cognac. All the boy can find is grappa. Henry shares the bottle with the man invalided next to him, and they both suffer from what Hemingway called “gastric remorse.”

Grappa could never be accused of being smooth. It hits like a roundhouse right and sears life phosphorus. In
Across the River and into the Trees
, Colonel Cantwell reminisces about his war days with a friend and former comrade:

“I drank grappa and could not even feel the taste.”

“We must have been tough then,” the Colonel said.
²⁷

Highball
(Highbalito con Agua Mineral)

In his book
Straight Up or on the Rocks
, William Grimes calls the highball “about the laziest cock-tail in existence.”
²⁸
Although originally a whiskey or gin drink, the highball now refers to any liquor on the rocks with soda. Compared with the high art of the Daiquirí, the highball is simple pedestrian fare:

The Floridita was open now and he bought the two papers that were out, Crisol and Alerta, and took them to the bar with him. He took his seat on a tall bar stool at the extreme left of the bar. His back was against the wall toward the street and his left was covered by the wall behind the bar. He ordered a double frozen daiquiri with no sugar from Pedrico, who smiled his smile which was almost like the rictus on a dead man who has died from a suddenly broken back, and yet was a true and legitimate smile. . . .

Pedrico set out a bottle of Victoria Vat, a glass with large chunks of ice in it, and a bottle of Canada Dry soda in front of Ignacio Natera Revello and he made a highball hurriedly and then turned toward Thomas Hudson, looking at him through his green-tinted, hornrimmed glasses and feigning to have just seen him.
²⁹

Highball

1
SERVING

2 ounces Victoria Vat, or whiskey

Canada Dry soda water (Honest Lil, the old prostitute from El Floridita, orders her
highbalito
with mineral water)

Pour the whiskey over ice in a highball glass. Fill the glass with soda and stir.