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Whiskey Daisy
Place in large glass a half tablespoon sugar, three dashes lemon juice or lime juice, a wineglass maraschino, two dashes raspberry syrup, stir up well, strain, add fruits in season and serve.
A short, garbled entry: the drink is named for whiskey, but the ingredient list never mentions any. Read it against other daisy recipes of the same era before you build it.
- The missing spiritA daisy is a spirit soured with citrus and sweetened, so a Whiskey Daisy should take about 2 oz of rye or bourbon as its base. In period bar books the maraschino is a small accent — a teaspoon or two — and it appears here to have swapped places with the whiskey.
- WineglassA bar wineglass of this period is 2 fluid ounces, four tablespoons. Taken literally, 2 oz of maraschino liqueur with sugar and raspberry syrup on top is almost undrinkably sweet.
- DashesA dash from a bar bottle is roughly an eighth of a teaspoon; three dashes of lemon juice is a token amount. Daisies of the same date usually call for the juice of half a lemon, around half an ounce, which is what makes the drink a sour rather than a cordial.
- SugarHalf a tablespoon of sugar dissolves poorly in cold liquid by stirring alone. Dissolve it in the citrus juice first, or substitute an equal volume of simple syrup.
- Ice, though it is not stated"Stir up well, strain" implies ice in the glass or shaker — the mixing vessel chills and dilutes, and the strain leaves the ice behind. Without it you are serving unchilled liqueur.
- The soda finishMany period daisy recipes finish with a splash of soda or seltzer. This entry omits it; adding an ounce or two brings the sweetness back into balance.
- Fruits in seasonThis means the garnish, not an ingredient: a slice of orange, a few berries, a cherry. Cut fruit was standard decoration on summer drinks and carries no flavour role.
- YieldOne drink.
The daisy belongs to a family of late nineteenth-century American bar drinks — sours, fizzes, fixes, cools — distinguished mostly by how they were sweetened and whether soda was added; the daisy is generally described as a sour lengthened with soda and sweetened with a liqueur or fruit syrup rather than plain sugar. A range of sweeteners and liqueur modifiers appears in period recipes. The family is worth knowing because the tequila version of the same formula is the margarita, whose name is the Spanish word for daisy — a connection often noted, though the line of descent is traditional rather than documented.