a chemical stress

Hemingway liked Cuban rum in general and frozen daiquiris—which provoked him into a small rhapsody—in particular. “This frozen daiquiri,” he wrote in Islands in the Stream, “so well beaten as it is, looks like the sea where the wave falls away from the bow of a ship when she is doing thirty knots.”

The daiquiri as we know it is a sort of alcoholic sherbet, often extruded from vast, Dairy Queen—like dispensers. It is associated with sundresses and strawberries, linked more to ice-cream headaches than hangovers. One wonders: How did the manliest of bare-fisted fighting men fall in with such a beverage?

Seeking the answer to a simple question can give a pilgrim great stamina. So it was with my quest.