Mojito

The Mojito is Cuba's great warm-weather cocktail, and its ancestry runs back further than the name does. The commonly cited forebear is El Draque, a rough mixture of aguardiente, lime, sugar and mint, which legend ties to the crew of Francis Drake in the late sixteenth century as a shipboard remedy for scurvy and stomach ailments. The link is charming but the documentary evidence is thin, and serious writers on Cuban drinking treat it as a good story rather than a proven lineage.

What can be traced is the drink's emergence in Cuban bars in the early twentieth century, once light column-still rum had replaced harsher aguardiente. Havana in the 1920s and 1930s was a boom town for American visitors escaping Prohibition, and the Mojito travelled home in their memories along with the Daiquiri. La Bodeguita del Medio became the address most associated with it. The framed note on that bar's wall attributing a Mojito preference to Ernest Hemingway is famous, but its authenticity is widely questioned and it is generally regarded as an inspired piece of marketing rather than evidence.

The drink's real global explosion came much later, in the 1990s and 2000s, when it became the signature order of a generation of bars, appeared in film, and turned up on menus in places that had never seen a cane field. That popularity came at a cost: the Mojito is labour-intensive to make well and is frequently made badly, which is why so many bartenders quietly dread it.

Its balance is more delicate than its reputation suggests. Rum, lime and sugar form a Daiquiri; the mint and the soda are what make it a Mojito, and both are easy to overdo. Bruised or over-muddled mint turns grassy and bitter, and too much soda flattens the whole thing. Variations abound and mostly work: berry Mojitos, the South Side served straight up without soda, and the Nojito made with soda and lime alone.