On Drinking: The Paloma
Everything Lit Up
One of life’s great pleasures is doing things with the seasons, but there’s also a joy in doing things deliberately out of sequence. I don’t have the constitution for Christmas in July, but I admire those who do. I am also reminded of an old friend of mine. She used to order Bloody Marys late in the day (sometimes even at night), which is the bar order equivalent of wearing your sunglasses inside. For true thrills, try doing both at the same time. Detractors would say moves like this are the height of assholery. I think they just signal your willing association with the club of ambience-makers. Let other people measure out their lives with coffee spoons, we’re here to dare.
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Season Opener
It’s rained quite a bit in California for the first half of this week. Atmospheric rivers and pineapple expresses and all the other jargon for historic, unprecedented amounts of rainfall. A colleague recently asked me if I could think of anything to take an out of town guest to do on a rainy day in Los Angeles and tea at The Peninsula was the only thing I could think of. For my part, I went ahead and made a batch of Palomas to brighten an otherwise cold, wet weekend.
I declared the Paloma in one of my first posts (which, and I don’t mean to humblebrag here, was received by a single digit number of people) as one of the best to drink on the hottest days. Serving it up in the midst of endless rain was a welcome deviation (if you just let the weather pick for you, this would have been a hot toddy situation). The drink takes on a new dimension when you remove it from its natural environment of sipping it poolside under palm trees. I’ll have to try it in the snow to see how elastic this drink can really be.
The Paloma is built in the glass and has 4 ingredients. Here’s mine:
Ice (1/3 of the glass);
Tequila blanco (this should be a good tequila, one that is probably too good to be mixing), filled up to the ice line;
Grapefruit soda, in equal or slightly lesser proportions than the tequila. This time, I had Squirt from Mexico on hand, which is probably best for the purists. I think the color, texture and flavor of this drink benefit from including some actual grapefruit juice (sometimes instead of the soda altogether, in which case you add some sparkling water to provide the bubbles); and
Half a lime, in two quarters (one quarter is squeezed into the drink, one whole quarter is dropped in as garnish).
Salud.
Of Vandals, Batangas and Bards
The history of The Paloma is murky (as is the case with a lot of great cocktails. Camper English (great name), journalist, ice beverage expert and proprietor of the website alcademics (another great name) has done the exhaustive research (as of 2017) to demonstrate some of the alleged origins for the drink circulating online are the result of pure internet vandalism. Other people say this guy created it, and he denies it (which, one would think, puts that rumor to rest).1 Finally, English’s account suggests the Paloma may be a more recent creation and is more of a descriptivist cocktail than prescriptivist. In other words, it seems lots of people were drinking something like this in Mexico by the 60s, and the drink name and recipe showed up decades later to codify/describe the behavior. As English’s research (and his erudite comments section) reveals, we probably named this drink the late 90s or early 2000s. He is still searching for an earlier mention in print.
As for the the name of the drink itself, there’s conjecture it’s named after the folk song La Paloma (in English, “the dove”), written around 1860. If you need some good prose for a Valentine’s Day (or, let’s say more specifically, an anniversary) card, Spanish Basque composer Sebastián Yradier has your back:
Te vi sonreír y todo se iluminó
Besándote, oí campanas que repicaban
I saw you smile and everything lit up
Kissing you, I heard bells ringing
Alongside Yesterday by the Beatles, La Paloma is the most recorded/covered song in history. So in the Paloma we have a popular drink, named after a very popular song. Maybe it can light up some otherwise wintry conditions for you as well.
Internet Bycatch
Once again making good on my promise to decontextualize the bottomless depths of the internet’s information complex.
Palm Springs Modernism Week is nearly upon us, and Shag has designed and built an entire house derived from his artwork [via Los Angeles Times]
We finally deciphered our first charred Vesuvius scroll. The contents aren’t so bad as to be antiquity’s equivalent of “drink ovaltine,” but it’s close. From the researchers: “we can’t escape the feeling that the first text we’ve uncovered is a 2,000-year-old blog post about how to enjoy life.” [via Smithsonian]
Some people enjoying life. The Last Day of Pompeii, Karl Bryullov, 1833. Tombolo has announced applications are open for its 2024 artist residency program. Tombolo is the rare Instagram Ad Brand that I don’t mind (alongside Dandy Del Mar).
A very good piece from Cactus Store on Substack! Feels like it was written by a kindred spirit. Come for the vintage nature films, stay for the eco-disaster Cassandry2:
One day, when alien anthropologists are sifting through the rubble of our once booming civilization, crunching their space boots over worthless Warhols while burning stacks of cash and rare Pokemon cards for heat, they’ll stumble upon these films depicting what Earth’s naked-ape-gone-mad too eagerly burnt to the ground—when these films will become the Dead Sea scrolls of our dead world.
After my Sundance delirium where I narrowly avoided buying a giant hat, I was able to get in to see Cody Wellema’s operation at Wellema Hat Co.3 Some exciting things in the works, and I was lucky enough to be the “first order of the season” for one their Milan straw hats. Now that’s how you do things out of sequence.
Don Javier did create a drink called La Batanga, which is stirred with a knife (something I’ll have to try, as I make it a habit, in then style of my father-in-law, to stir all my cocktails with a knife).
My own work-in-progress term for what I’m sometimes doing on Sublime Prosaic.
If you’re in need of the natural history of hats, part I in my series The Alchemy of the Milliners can be found here.