Popularity
This drink was once viewed as exotic, with its dark syrup, made (at that time) from cola nuts and coca.
Soon, as Charles H. Baker, Jr. points out in his Gentlemen's Companion of 1934, the Cuba Libre "caught on everywhere throughout the South ... filtered through the North and West," aided by the ample supply of its ingredients. In The American Language, 1921, H.L. Mencken writes of an early variation of the drink: "The troglodytes of western South Carolina coined 'jump stiddy' for a mixture of Coca-Cola and denatured alcohol (usually drawn from automobile radiators); connoisseurs reputedly preferred the taste of what had been aged in Model-T Fords."
The drink gained further popularity in the United States after The Andrews Sisters recorded a song (in 1945) named after the drink's ingredients, "Rum and Coca-Cola". Cola and rum were both cheap at the time and this also contributed to the widespread popularity of the concoction.
Read more about this topic: Cuba Libre
Famous quotes containing the word popularity:
“Here also was made the novelty ‘Chestnut Bell’ which enjoyed unusual popularity during the gay nineties when every dandy jauntily wore one of the tiny bells on the lapel of his coat, and rang it whenever a story-teller offered a ‘chestnut.’”
—Administration for the State of Con, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1845)
“A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of “spirit” over matter.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)