2/18/2024 0 Comments Mary Pickford grateful dead fontI have not had an American maraschino cherry since. Then they were drained and dyed that famous bright red. But on my way to the assembly line I passed the vats that bleached cherries from their natural red to a haunting white. I stood and pitted peaches eight hours a day. My job the summer after high school-and physically the hardest one I have ever had-was working in a cannery. The color varied a bit in its later incarnation, which included the addition of maraschino liqueur. The pineapple juice must be fresh-squeezed.” The result was, and remains, a very light pink cocktail. Both cocktails are sweetish and should be well shaken. The Mary Pickford…is two-thirds pineapple-juice and one-third bacardi, with a dash of grenadine. It is the aristocrat of cocktails and is the one preferred by the better class of Cubans. From Dove/Express/Getty Images.Īccording to Woon, “The presidente is made with half bacardi and half French vermouth, with a dash of either curacoa or grenadine. Pickford at London Airport with her husband Charles “Buddy” Rogers. ‘I no do so badly here.’” When I read that description, my first thought was that Constantino could have found steady employment at MGM, playing the barkeep in films such as The Thin Man-decades before the movie Cocktail. Woon contends he told the barman he “could make a fortune in Paris. It’s worth a visit to Havana merely to watch Constantino operate.” This juggling feat having been performed several times, Constantino empties glasses of ice, puts them in a row on the bar, and with one motion fills them all each glass is filled exactly to the brim and not a drop is left over. The drink is shaken by throwing it from one shaker and catching it in another, the liquid forming a half circle in the air. Then, still apparently without a glance at the shaker, he does the same with the curacoa or grenadine. When the pineapple juice is ready Constantino pours it into a huge shaker, takes the bacardi bottle and, without looking, pours a quantity in the shaker. Meanwhile another boy fills six glasses with ice to frost them. A boy is put to work squashing and squeezing the pineapple. ![]() Woon went on to ask his readers to visualize a fantasy sojourn to the bar: “Six of you visit the Florida and order Mary Pickfords. In the 1920s, Woon sang the praises of its “head barman Constantino, a saturnine individual whose peculiar gift consists in his accurate, though seemingly casual, measurements of drinks.” A combination bar, store, and restaurant, the Floridita would become famous as a favorite haunt of Ernest Hemingway’s. He particularly enjoyed the way the Pickford was made at La Florida (the Americanized name of what Cubans and everyone else calls the Floridita). It was Woon’s widely read book that may have first called attention to it, and he reported its omnipresence throughout the island. But there is no doubt that Prohibition sparked the “Americanization” of the bar culture of Cuba, and that helps explain the cocktail coinage of the day, such as the Mary Pickford, which was soon as popular around the world as the actress herself. And most sources agree that it was either native New Yorker Eddie Woelke or the Englishman Fred Kaufman, head barman at the Sevilla Hotel, who first concocted the drink that came to be known as the Pickford. Prohibition, meanwhile, helped instigate a large-scale stateside emigration of bartenders-often to sunnier climes. PROHIBITION AND THE “PICKFORD” PROVENANCE However, Mary was miserable there for quite a few reasons, including the humid climate that wreaked havoc on her fabled curls. When Pickford was at Independent Moving Pictures in the early 1910s, along with her then husband Owen Moore, they did make several films in Cuba. ![]() What’s more, Chaplin was a frequent guest at the stars’ Beverly Hills home, Pickfair, but rarely, if ever, traveled with them. ![]() But a thorough review of Mary and Doug’s schedule reveals no trips to Cuba-and they never made a film there during their marriage. Griffith, in the creation of the revolutionary film distribution company United Artists. Sometimes in the telling, they are accompanied by Charlie Chaplin-their partner, in 1919, along with director D.W. The most oft-repeated story about the Mary Pickford cocktail is that it was “invented” in Cuba in the ’20s in honor of the silent-screen star, who was then visiting the island along with her actor-husband Douglas Fairbanks while they were making a movie there.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |