El Presidente
El Presidente is a classic rum- based cocktail . The cocktail dates from the beginning of the 20th century and was very popular during the Prohibition era in the United States and in the years immediately thereafter. The cocktail consists of rum, a dry vermouth , curacao and grenadine . Depending on the recipe, curacao or grenadine or both can be used.
The drink comes from Cuba and is probably named after the then President Mario García Menocal . In his book Imbibe, David Wondrich considers the bartender Constantino Ribalaigua to be the inventor. Travelers from the USA in particular drank the cocktail in Cuba and then brought it to the United States.
The first mention of the drink can be traced back to 1919 when a recipe appeared in a Cuban newspaper. Even if the exact origin of the drink is unclear, it gained popularity through the German-American bartender Eddie Woelke, who evaded prohibition in the USA by working at the bar of the Jockey Club in Havana . Woelke mixed the cocktail and dedicated it to the then incumbent President Gerardo Machado . The drink was a Machado favorite and from there spread to the Cuban upper class. At that time, Curaçao was not yet a mandatory component.
The cocktail appeared with highly praiseworthy descriptions in the cocktail books of the post-Prohibition period, but lost a lot of interest in the following decades. He suffered from the fact that all of his ingredients changed their taste significantly at the end of the 20th century. Bacardi rum, which was used for the original El Presidente, became a mass product with a decidedly different taste than in Cuba after the company's move. The taste of the mass-produced curacao, which is often available in bars today, differs significantly from that in the original recipe. Grenadine has been replaced in most bars over the decades by significantly simpler, cheaper and artificially flavored products of the same name, which often no longer contain pomegranate juice at all.
Remarks
- ^ M. Carrie Allan: The Original El Presidente ; Washington Post Recipe Finder, June 3, 2015
- ^ A b c John Kiely: El Presidente: The Exquisite Cocktail That Neither Communists Nor Capitalists Could Kill , Houston Press, February 27, 2014
- ↑ a b Vince Keenan: Cocktail of the Week: The El Presidente , November 8, 2013