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Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Let's end today's show with a nightcap. Did you know that at the turn of the 20th century, Cuba was the standard bearer for cocktails in the Caribbean with bars flourishing alongside the rum business? Some of the island's signature drinks included El Presidente and, of course, the mojito. That's according to a new book that spotlights and features 84 recipes for those cocktails and more. It is called Tropical Standard: Cocktail Techniques and Reinvented Recipes. The authors write, "The tropical drink conjures up its own optimal scene in which it occupies center stage, but the tropical drink is not just a prop in a tropical setting. It's a celebration of the bounty and flavors of the tropical produce and a contemplation of the history of tropical populations."

Joining us today are co-authors of the book. Ben Schaffer, he is the editor and publisher of the online magazine The Rum Reader. Ben, welcome.

Ben Schaffer: Thank you very much.

Alison Stewart: Also joining us today is co-author Garrett Richard. He is chief cocktail officer at Sunken Harbor Club in Brooklyn. Hi, Garrett.

Garrett Richard: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Alison Stewart: Ben, in the book, you write about how tropical cocktails were marketed to Americans after Prohibition. Tell us about a Texas native named Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt.

Ben Schaffer: Yes, Ernie Gantt, later known as Donn Beach, because he called his bar Don the Beachcomber, which was not after himself. It was the other way around. He named himself after the bar. He might have named the bar not after himself, because he may have had a bar named after himself that was an illegal speakeasy-

Alison Stewart: I see.

Ben Schaffer: -and he wanted to distance himself from that. We're not really sure on that. That is not a detail in our book because we don't know if it's true. A little extra for the listeners.

[laughter]

I think the idea is he did amazing things. I think today if you walk into any bar in America and you have an amazing cocktail, the reason that's possible is because of the craft cocktail revival, which began with Dale DeGroff at the Rainbow Room here in New York in the 1980s and was continued in a significant way by Angel's Share in the East Village, which opened in '93. Everything that we have today comes from that. They really went back to that 19th century, the late 19th century style of cocktails, bringing back styles and flavors that had been maybe a little bit forgotten because, of course, we tried to forget it with Prohibition.

I think some people have an erroneous belief that Prohibition was a great time for cocktails. It was certainly a great time for drinking, but I think the cocktails were pretty terrible because you weren't able to get all the things you needed to get. That situation continued really until pretty recently. The cocktail revival that we have now is not the first cocktail revival in America, because, as you say, Mr. Gantt, aka Donn Beach, in the 1930s, right after Prohibition, he opened a bar in Hollywood, Don the Beachcomber, and then there was Trader Vic, one of his first imitators, who did the same in the Bay Area.

Again, they tried to bring back some of those flavors, some of those base spirits that had been forgotten, but they brought in a heavy influence of that rich tradition of Caribbean drinks, Jamaican, Cuban, et cetera. There's been a revival of interest in those kind of tropical drinks in the last couple of decades, but I think it's been in parallel with the larger cocktail revival.

One of the purposes of Tropical Standard is to bring those threads back together as they should have always been. They're part of the same lineage, but also to bring in the wild card, which is the cutting-edge culinary techniques that people like Dave Arnold, the longtime director of technology at the French Culinary Institute and a legendary figure in his own right, and a good pal of ours, I'll brag to say. [laughs]

He created all these great ways again, to push the envelope. Can we get new flavors? Can we get new textures? What do we have now that they didn't have 100 years ago that we can push the envelope? This book, I think, through Garrett's genius, is the first to bring together the threads of that 19th century cocktail style that was really the heyday of cocktails, the tropical drinking style that is derived from Caribbean traditions. Now these new techniques, these new technologies where we can say, "What can we do that's a little bit more?"

Alison Stewart: Garrett, what did you see around the opportunities around tropical drinks?

Garrett Richard: I think everyone has had a mediocre or a bad tropical drink, something that's either overly sweet or just something watery and fruity that you get at a resort somewhere or at a theme park. Really, what we saw the genre as as a vehicle to teach people techniques, because these techniques help make those drink better. Largely, when these drinks were at the height of their popularity in the '50s and '60s, they were so complex and so hard to make, that they were actually made behind closed doors. Now, what you're seeing is that using technology and modern techniques that a lot of bars are taking those closed door things and putting them out in front of the public in a much faster and more efficient way.

A lot of this book reveals how to do that. Just to jump off of what Ben was saying, I think a lot of recipes that we feature in the book, they really reverberate throughout time. A great example is we talk about a cocktail called the Silver Lake slush, which is our version of a drink from the Tiki-Ti called the Lemon Head, which is their version of the lemon drop, which lemon drop was very popular in the 1970s.

They are a tropical bar that was opened in the mid '60s, but we really create a thread that shows that this drink references 19th century techniques like the cobbler and the smash, and then how that was revived in the early craft cocktail revival by people like Audrey Saunders and Julie Reiner and Dale DeGroff.

Then we bring it into the modern with, okay, how do you make a "sour mix but with fresh ingredients and lime peel using things like a vacuum machine?" I think that is what is really exciting about some of these recipes is that we get to pull all the threads together throughout the whole history of the movement and then see where it's going to go from there.

Alison Stewart: Ben, what are some important moments in history to keep in mind when we think about the explosion of the tropical cocktail?

Ben Schaffer: Well, I think for me, the most important moment in cocktail history is always the next drink you're going to have. That's a very good point. In the beginning of the book, the thing that I'm most proud of because we put a lot of work into this book. It's based on Garrett's genius. The bit that was more based on my own craziness is the little intro where we call it tropical drinks, the first eight million years. The idea was we went right back to the beginning, which I decided was going to be, we believe citrus evolved around then. You really can't do anything without citrus. Of course, let's not forget, almost all the good stuff is tropical, all the flavors we love obviously.

Garrett Richard: Coffee.

Ben Schaffer: Yes coffee, sugar, chocolate, all the spices, bell peppers as well as black pepper, whatever you want to name, not just obviously things like mangoes and pineapples. Basically everything is tropical. Rice is tropical. All the best stuff comes from there, and there's biological, botanical, and astronomical reasons for that, which I deal with over a couple of paragraphs. In about eight pages, we do the first eight million years. The highlights would be obviously millions of years of evolution. That's important. Then we have really the punch traditions that come out of India.

Again, I think Dave Wondrich and others have made a very clear case that that's something that's native to India. It's not something that the Brits were doing in India. It's something they learned about there. Then the Caribbean is a fascinating place because I think it's the only region of the world where people from every other region of the world came together. Not always, of course, of their own choice, but it has cultural threads from all over the place. They brought in the most of the produce that we think of as being Caribbean was Southeast Asian and origin, sugarcane and citrus, et cetera, and they also brought those punch traditions.

I think punch gets us things like the planter's punch from Jamaica and it gets us the daiquiri from Cuba. Again, when hundreds of years later, Americans started going there and learning about these things, Americans like Gantt and Mr. Trader Vic, they were inspired by those drinks. We couldn't be here without all those steps, and I think it's important to know that there are all those steps. It's not just something that happened. [crosstalk]

Alison Stewart: It didn't happen in a vacuum.

Ben Schaffer: Exactly.

Alison Stewart: That's the kind of thing I think is so interesting about it. When you start thinking about the geopolitical part of it.

Garrett Richard: In my own practices, we tried not pretend that these techniques came in a vacuum, too. I made sure to reference every place that I worked. There's a little bit of them in all of these recipes. There's a sarsaparilla syrup from my time at Slowly Shirley and the Happiest Hour, which was in the West Village. There's some inspiration from when I worked for Julie Reiner, who opened the Monkey Bar, and she now owns Clover Club and Milady's in the City. I think it's important to show the thought process with a lot of these cocktails because I think sometimes recipes are presented in a way where it's, "Okay, here's the ingredients, here's maybe a short paragraph."

It doesn't necessarily show you the thinking behind it and all the blood, sweat and tears that go into it, because a lot of these recipes, there's a ton of failure. There's a ton of bombing when you're creating these things. Over the years, some of these recipes have gone through multiple iterations where the book and the beta testing of the book was opening, the Sunken Harbor Club in Brooklyn, it's like, these are now their final form of some of these but the El Diablo, for example, which is a great tequila cocktail, I've been making that since I started bartending. I've had many different versions of it, and hopefully, this is one that will tell the story properly, and that people can then really look at this cocktail and say, "Oh, this is a classic that we should know more about, and that we should be making at home or at your local bar."

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about a classic you should know more about you. You've alluded to it, Ben, the Mai Tai.

Ben Schaffer: Yes. Well, I think it's one of the most famous drinks. People the name-

Alison Stewart: Yes, and they think they know where it's from, but it's got an interesting backstory.

Ben Schaffer: Yes. Well, this is going to be a little controversial to some of the fans of tropical drinks, and we don't really say this in the book either, but I don't think we really absolutely know when it was invented and where, but Trader Vic, who did invent it, claims he invented it in 1944 in Oakland. There is no actual written evidence of it until much later, which is slightly unusual because there is a lot of written evidence about what he was doing at that time. There's menus, there's articles, and it never mentions-

Garrett Richard: There's witnesses, apparently.

Ben Schaffer: Yes, there's witnesses.

Alison Stewart: They were drinking some.

[laughter]

Ben Schaffer: Exactly. I think, as you know, that's part of the problem of doing a history of cocktails is that people were drinking throughout but anyway, it's an amazing drink and it's really a maximalist Daiquiri. He takes a Daiquiri, reformat, and he adds more on to it. He was very influenced by his time in Havana, not home of, but the place where the Daiquiri became most famous.

Garrett Richard: Oddly, invented in San Francisco, but a lot of the technique for specifically the Mai Tai and tropical standard actually takes inspiration from another San Francisco institution, which is Tommy's Mexican restaurant, which they invented the Tommy's Margarita, and a lot of the structure for how I balanced the layers of acidity and sweet and even ice come from Tommy's and, it's fun to--

Every time I've mentioned this to fans of the genre, they're like, "Oh, your Mai Tai was inspired by a margarita." I was like, "Yes."

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Why not?

Garrett Richard: Because these lessons, they move across drinks quite well.

Ben Schaffer: That's right. When people moved across the Pacific, when Americans started to become tourists in Hawaii, they were familiar with these drinks that they were getting in California, that they thought of as being Hawaiian, or Polynesian because that was the way it was marketed as you said to those people, and one of the people that that was tending bar in those days in the early '50s, in Hawaii, was a guy named Harry Ye, who was a Chinese American who lived there, and people were asking him for Hawaiian drinks, and he's like, "Well, there aren't any Hawaiian drinks." He had to go and make them.

Garrett Richard: He had to create them.

Ben Schaffer: He invented the Blue Hawaii, I think, most famously, but many, many other drinks. Garrett has an amazing version of the Hawaii, which we call the Blue Leilani because we're trying to always show the heritage but show that it's not just another take on it. It's a little bit different, but Harry Yee, who just passed away to over 100 years old last year, was a real character.

Garrett Richard: Popularized the orchid on top of cocktails.

Ben Schaffer: That's right. He claims to have invented putting paper umbrellas on cocktails.

Garrett Richard: If Instagram was around, he would have killed it.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] The name is of the book is Tropical Standard: Cocktail Techniques and Reinvented Recipes. My guests are Garrett Richard and Ben Schaffer. I'm really curious about flash blending. This has just caught my attention. Here we go. Explain with it.

Garrett Richard: The way I would contextualize it--

Ben Schaffer: We need a sound effect.

Alison Stewart: Yes. Flash blending [laughs].

Ben Schaffer: You know how you go to a fancy cocktail bar today and maybe you see something like liquid nitrogen, you're like, "Oh, they have the new tech." The new tech in the '30s and even before that, in the '20s in soda fountains, was a drink mixer, which, if you've ever been in a Johnny Rockets, you've seen what they used to make milkshakes. It's a little spindle that goes at like 3000 rpm and blends very fast.

When when these neotropical cocktails were created they wanted to use that modern technology and basically what it is is an electrified swizzle stick, which swizzle sticks had been used throughout the whole age of punch. What's great about the technique is that it aerates the cocktail, it dials in the amount of water, and if you think about a lot of the ingredients that are really common for our book, pineapple, coconut cream, honey, that aeration makes such a difference in the way your nose perceives the cocktail, in the way you're actually sipping it and the texture. It makes it much lighter.

It's an important technique to the genre, but also the first chapter we make sure to show you that, hey, this can be used in other cocktails, you can use it in egg white drinks, you can use it in after-dinner drinks, which we have a recipe called the Banshee, which is the banana version of a grasshopper. I think in New York, there are other cities where flash blending is much more prominent. It was important for us to say, hey, this is a technique that's been vastly overlooked, at least in our home market, and it needs to be reconsidered.

Alison Stewart: People think of tropical drinks as being sweet, do they have to be sweet?

Garrett Richard: No, not at all?

Alison Stewart: You looked at me with that disgust like, "No, it doesn't."

Ben Schaffer: All drinks should be balanced. They should taste the way you want them to taste. One of the things that bartenders tell me is that people constantly come to them and say, "I want to drink but don't make it sweet," and then they do that, and the person doesn't like it, because it's not sweet. People actually, like sweet drinks, they just don't know they like them, but I think the proper drink actually isn't sweet, the proper drink should have acidity, Garrett likes to include a little bit of salinity in drinks, because salt as his drink what it does to your food, it makes everything else come forward. There has to be a balance.

Garrett Richard: Also, sometimes it's that when you're making a recipe, it's from just a random source. You don't know some of the factors. We try to clear up what the coding of a cocktail is, that every syrup has a certain level of sweetness, that we explain why lemon and lime are as acidic as they are, and why they work and drinks while something like fresh orange juice and grapefruit on their own won't work, and we even teach you how to transform those juices into useful acidity bombs, but the point is that I think sometimes drinks can come off too sweet or unbalanced because someone doesn't know what those factors are going in.

Even ice and the proper water content can make a drink either unbalanced or perfectly crisp, and it really sometimes goes down to those, the devil's in the details in some of these cocktails.

Ben Schaffer: It's about measurement.

Alison Stewart: Magic.

Ben Schaffer: Yes, and magic. I think the most important stuff we talked about in the book in terms of techniques are two techniques that are exactly what you're both talking about right now, which we call sugar adjusting and acid adjusting, and it's really just about if you make a syrup, or if you have a juice that you know what the level of sweetness and level of acid in that is, so that when you put it in the drink, you know what it's going to do. If you juice something that has sugar in it, or if you make a syrup from from fresh juice, you don't know exactly how sweet that is. It depends on the particular fruit that you happen to use that day. It might be different when use another day.

There's ways to measure that and adjust accordingly, and then when you plug it in, it's always going to play the same role.

Garrett Richard: Because generally, everyone can make lemonade to their taste, sugar and lemon and water, but if you said, oh, do the same with grapefruit or pineapple, much harder because you don't know how to get around those problems of water and not enough acidity, and we--

Alison Stewart: You will after the book.

Garrett Richard: Yes, exactly.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is Tropical Standard: Cocktail Techniques and Reinvented Recipes. It is by Garrett Richard and Ben Schaffer, and it's also very cool looking on your bookshelf. Thanks for coming in.

Ben Schaffer: Thank you.

Garrett Richard: Thank you so much.

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