It is far from the aim of these innocent communications to corrupt my gentle readers but the fact of you taking the trouble to read the idle ramblings of an idle fellow shows you to be a person of sufficient good sense and responsibility to be trusted with the following information.
You will have gathered that I spend much of my time in Brazil and I feel it is only right to share with you news of one of Brazil's greatest contributions to global civilisation: the caipirinha, a drink made from the local white rum known here as cachaça (accept no substitutes such as the heretical caipirosca, made with vodka).
One of the advantages of this drink is that you can use the cheapest cachaça available. There are purists who drink cachaça unmixed with any foreign substances but I have to confess that the upmarket (and expensive) cachaças leave me unmoved and since we are going to adulterate the drink anyway, there is no problem in using the cheapest variety. Cachaça is now quite widely exported so you can make the caipirinha without having to come to Brazil.
Obviously, different people make the drink in different ways, but this is the one I have found to be most satisfying.
First, prepare your glass(es). Place the glass in your freezer for an hour or so and take it out when you are ready to serve the drink.
Next, cut a lime into pieces and place them in a mortar. Add two or even three dessert spoons of sugar (if you’re trying to lose weight and think you can get away with sweetener, forget it and find a good book). Add half the amount of cachaça you wish to drink and crush the lime pieces, sugar and alcohol with the pestle. Take the previously prepared glass from the freezer and put four or five ice cubes in now. Add the mixture from the pestle, not all of which will flow out. That’s why you now add the rest of the cachaça to the remaining sugar in the mortar to wash it out and add it to what is already in the glass.
In restaurants, the caipirinha is served with a straw so that you can suck the ice-cooled portion from the bottom. If the ice is put in last, it sits on top of the crushed limes and cools the upper level of the liquid but when you drink it the ice then rests against your lip and freezes it. It is, of course, possible to strain the mixture and not have any limes in the glass at all but what we are talking of here is a hand-crafted product, the slight imperfections of which are part of its charm. Fragments of lime and undissolved sugar come up through the straw, giving the whole thing a combination of perfection and rough texture.
If you do want to drink without a straw, try the following technique. Many years ago an American friend suggested a modification to serving this drink. Take one of the lime sections and run it around the rim of a glass to dampen it with juice. Up-end the glass and dip the rim into a saucer of castor sugar, so coating the rim with sugar, and then put it in the freezer. In this case you will have to put the ice in last otherwise you will drink the uncooled part of the caipirinha first, and of course you have to put up with the frozen lip - but you pay your money and take your choice....
I have never been a great drinker of alcohol because of suffering from early-onset hangovers and one of the advantages of the caipirinha, at least in my case, is the lack of a hangover either at the time of drinking or the next morning. So there we are: drink responsibly and non-violently, let someone else do the driving, and share your caipirinhas with friends to bring about a small increase in the sum of human happiness.
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