Daiquiri.

The Daiquiri is one of the world’s great cocktails. Relatively simple, it comprises just three key elements: white rum, sugar and lime juice. This combination has existed as a drink in the Caribbean for hundreds of years. The British Navy used a watered down version as “grog” to keep scurvy at bay. The real leap – and the foundation of the Daiquiri as a more recreational drink, however – was the development of refrigeration in the 1800s. This meant it was possible to make ice – and ice is essential for the preparation of the modern cocktail.

Today’s Daiquiri is thought by many to have been invented around 1898, in a mining village near Playa Daiquirí, on the southeastern tip of Cuba. The popular origin theory credits the Daiquiri’s creation to an American mining engineer named Jennings Cox, along with a U.S. Navy medical officer who brought Cox’s recipe from Cuba to Washington, D.C. Needless to say, on arrival in the US, it was a huge hit.

The Daiquiri was a pioneer in the sour category of drinks. In David A. Embury’s highly influential 1948 book, The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, it’s listed as one of the six essential cocktails to know, alongside the Martini, the Manhattan, the Old Fashioned, the Jack Rose and the Sidecar. (Not sure those would be the top six today, cocktail fashion changes.)

Ingredients:

Ice (good handful)
2 ounces light rum (1.5 measure from large side of jigger)
1 ounce freshly squeezed by hand lime juice (0.75 measure from large side of jigger)
3/4 ounce sugar syrup (0.75 measure from Pony or small side of the jigger)
Garnish: lime twist/dried lime slice

Recipe:

Add the rum, lime juice and sugar syrup to a shaker with ice, and shake until well-chilled (30-40 seconds)
Double strain through fine mesh strainer into a chilled coupe.
Garnish with a lime twist/dried lime slice

However you choose to adjust the measures to your taste, the Daiquiri is still one of the world’s great cocktails, in part because it has just three simple ingredients.