The Frozen Cocktail That’s As Old As the Blender

Today we're making Missionary's Downfall, a pineapple minty refreshing rum drink from the 1930s, and a frozen blended drink that appears to be as old as the blender itself. And we'll make two versions of this today. One that's a little bit more simplified, yet still delicious, and another one that will be a little bit more advanced. The first reference to Don DeBeachcomber's Missionary's Downfall that I've come across are from August 11, 1938, and that is just one year after the Miracle Mixer was introduced at a restaurant trade show in Chicago by Fred Osias and Fred Waring. Within a year they changed the name to the Waring Blender. What's fun about researching things online and using newspapers and magazine databases is new things pop up all the time. We have not collectively as a society digitized everything, which is probably for the best. Now last year when I was first looking into this drink, I noticed that the oldest reference to the Missionary's Downfall that I could find was not actually to that drink, but something from the Honolulu Star Bulletin in February 1939 for a drink called the Malahini's Downfall. Malahini in Hawaiian is an outsider, so it would appear the drink to be basically the same, I'm guessing, but a change to the name more appropriate for Hawaii. But it was just recently when I found the reference to 1938 for the Missionary's Downfall, that's one year earlier, something I had not seen before, and I'm assuming here, even though I didn't actually verify this, that it was probably digitized just recently. The world of Don the Beachcomber drinks can be confusing if we take the word blended to literally mean blended in a blender or blendor. We know prior to 1938 Don the Beachcomber would not have had a Waring style blender, and something blended would have been through a drink mixer, but these two things are not the same. This is a drink mixer or flash blender. It's essentially like a big electric swizzle stick. It can be used in place of swizzling or shaking and can offer lighter, airier, and foamier cocktails than a shaker. While it can also chop up some ice, it doesn't blend in the way that a blender blends. They're two different things. These things are just not interchangeable. You can't just swap out one for the other. So when you or I or anyone else is looking through old historic books or books that are referencing those old historic books, and we see an instruction to blend, oftentimes that means to blend in this, which is the electric drink mixer, and the telltale sign for that is if something says to blend for five to ten seconds. They're talking about the drink mixer. Now, books that greatly add to this confusion are ones like this, Hawaii Tropical This book is actually not by Don the Beachcomber, but by his widow Phoebe Beach and her then-husband Arnold Bittner. It calls to blend in a blender many drinks that we know now to not be the frozen blender style drinks. The book also calls for adding ingredients to a blender and shaking it, and this is just not something we do. Unless, of course, you work for one famous tequila bar. Now, most likely this is just an error in translation. People saw the word blended, they associate it with the blender they know, the stand-up kind, and they just translate it that way. This book came out in 2001 before the Tiki revival, and if you were transcribing a recipe that just said blend, you would probably also just conclude that it meant blender and not a drink mixer, which no one was really using at the time. Beach Bumberry covers all of these differences in his books, but like all of life, you just kind of skip over everything and don't read it, then you might just see the word blend and automatically associate that with the frozen blender style from a stand-up blender when it really is telling you to do something else entirely. So, keep all of this in mind when you're out there on your own deciphering historical recipes. Do they mean flash blend or do they mean blend blend? Now, it is possible that the first version of The Missionary's Downfall predated Don the Beachcomber having a wearing style blender. I don't think so. It doesn't really seem likely, but these things are possibilities. I just don't know. I don't know when he first got his hands on one of these. You'll have to ask someone else that has better information on that than I do. But this is one of the more popular Don the Beachcomber drinks, and it's definitely the most popular frozen blended Don the Beachcomber drink, and what's cool about it is that it appears to be one of the very first popularized frozen cocktails to be made in a wearing blender from a Tiki bartender. The popularized recipe is one that was unearthed by Beach Bum Berry and the one that you could find in Beach Bum Remixed. He also mentions the earliest version of this drink to be from 1937, and it makes you just wonder when Don did get his hands on one of these blenders and how quickly he introduced it to his bar. Today, we're making two versions of the drink, and we'll start with a recipe from Daniella Dallapola that sticks close to the original using fresh mint and pieces of pineapple, and we'll follow that with a slightly more advanced version from Garrett Richard and serve the Missionary's Downfall that he makes at the Sunken Harbor Club in Brooklyn. But before we get to making those, just a point of reference here, if you're interested in this, some of this information comes from Beach Bum books, some of the things you saw on the screen come from me researching past newspaper articles, and the recipes and a lot of background to the Missionary's Downfall comes from the Cocktail College podcast. There's been two episodes on the Missionary's Downfall, that first one several years ago with Daniella Dallapola, and then a more recent one with Garrett Richard. There's a lot of techniques and principles in there that will help you make better frozen blended drinks at home, and you don't have to adapt all of them, but I think just having that information and then knowing if you make something and it doesn't turn out the way you want it to, you can sort of start to piece things together for maybe the next time you make a frozen drink, or at least just pull out a couple of those principles to make better frozen drinks, because frozen drinks can and should be delicious. They don't have to be the crap we're used to being served at big chain restaurants or theme parks. Now that blender or blendor that you use is significant, and while I have one from a long time ago, I don't know if this is from the 40s, 50s, or 60s, because they kind of made the same thing and they looked the same for decades. These are not good at making frozen drinks. Even if you have crushed ice or nugget ice at home, a Vitamix is going to be a thousand times better. So for the Garrett Richard version, I'm going to make two cocktails, doubling it up in the Vitamix, but for the first one we're going to make today, the Daniella Dallapola version, I'm actually going to be using a stick blender. That's what the recipe called for, and this is a better way to make a single serving cocktail than to use a big Vitamix that doesn't do well with small ones. So I'm going to start with half an ounce of lime juice, half an ounce of a peach liqueur, one and a half ounces of a white rum. I'm using this Hamilton Puesto blend. I rarely use this, but this is probably a good application here. Three medium pieces of pineapple and eight mint leaves. I'm going to blend everything without ice using the stick blender. Now I'm going to add in about a cup of ice, and the good thing about the stick blender is you can kind of keep your eye on the ice. You can start with a little bit and then work your way up if you need more. I'll garnish with some mint placed right in the center of the cocktail. So there you go, the missionary's downfall. All right, let's try it. Cheers. The first thing that you have to know if you, if you make this is that it is not supposed to be a dominant, bold, assertive cocktail that's overrun with sweetness or spirit or any, anything else. It's supposed to be light and clean and refreshing. It's supposed to be a palate cleanser. It is first and foremost minty with the other flavors in the background of the pineapple, the peach, and even the rum. And that's the intent of it. I know this audience, people are going to say, instead of one and a half ounces of rum, can I just use three ounces of rum fire? And no, you can't. That's, that's not, that's not the point of this. It is supposed to be incredibly light. And like I just said, a palate cleanser and it does that, that mint cuts through. And the number one most important thing to do is to make sure that that mint is really liquefied. You don't want chunks of mint floating around in your missionaries downfall, getting stuck in your teeth. It's not that that's not, that's the point of the blender. The point of the blender is to completely obliterate that mint after 90 years of this drink being in existence. It is something where I kind of like challenge anyone to find a frozen blended drink that is more refreshing than, than this one. I don't, I don't think that there is one. All right, next up, we're making the Garrett Richard sunken Harbor club version. And like I mentioned, this recipe was shared in the cocktail college podcast. I'll leave links to those episodes in this episode description for you to find out more about the missionary devil. Cause I do think that this is such an important drink because of that tie into the first blenders that's ever existed. Like the second Don could do this, he got his hands on it and he did. There are a few tips for making frozen cocktails that Garrett does in this recipe that you could take on. First thing is that we're going to amplify that peach flavor with not only just a pizza core, but a peach aperitif, which is delicious, peachy, refreshing, and a little bit of quinine. The next thing to do is to put our spirits and our liqueurs in the freezer. This will obviously lower the temperature of those ingredients. Meaning we won't need quite as much ice, which means our drink will not be as diluted as many frozen drinks are. I have already measured out the rum, the Rin Can Can, and the pizza core. And I've made enough for several cocktails that's been put in my freezer. And this is a lot easier if you don't have space to put, you know, three or four, you know, full-size bottles in your freezer, just pre-batch what you need and put it in a smaller container in your freezer. Now, another trick that Garrett uses is the same as the one from the pina colada video that I shared like last year, taking frozen pieces of pineapple and then letting them thaw and drain. This will remove some of the water content of the fruit. And you're basically concentrating that sweet pineapple flavor. We will also need to acid adjust pineapple juice, but in the recipe, you could also just swap out lime juice and use it instead of the acid-adjusted pineapple juice. So let's get started on this one. And I'll start with half an ounce of our acid-adjusted pineapple juice. Half an ounce of honey syrup. But since I'm making two cocktails, I'm doubling up each ingredient for this. Now for this, you'll need half an ounce of the pizza core, half an ounce of the Rin Can Can, and one ounce of rum. But since I already pre-batched this and put this in the 60 grams of the chopped pineapple per cocktail. 12 mint leaves. And then we're going to dry blend this so that's blending without the ice. And as this is blending and it's in a vortex, I'm going to add in a quarter teaspoon of xanthan gum per cocktail. And I'll add 170 grams of ice per drink. And in this case, I'm doing one and a half cups because I know that my measuring cup and the ice I use is 170 grams about for one and a half cups. I'll garnish with some mint and a slice of pineapple. So there you go. Another missionary's down boy. The biggest difference you're going to have in the presentation and the longevity of these two drinks compared to each other is the xanthan gum. Xanthan gum is going to keep that drink, this drink, sort of stabilized longer. So xanthan kind of makes like a gel around the ice. Too much of it and you get a gluey, gloppy sort of mess. So you want to make sure that you're using about a quarter of a teaspoon per cocktail. You could have put this in the first one. I'm just kind of excited to follow recipes to kind of show the differences between two different recipes that are pretty popular for this. But what can be deceiving about xanthan is it doesn't keep it colder longer. It just keeps it sort of structured longer. So you could have something that has some structure to it much later that is now room temperature. So let's try this one. Cheers. It is interesting and subtle how similar they are, yet different they are as well. The first version we made was more of like a cutting mint flavor coming through. And the blender you use, it matters so much because even a stick blender doesn't get the fine texture that a Vitamix can. So there's an element of that which can be more refreshing, like when you have larger pieces of ice where this one feels closer to, I wouldn't say slushy machine style, because it has a different texture here. But the ice crystals are so small and smooth. And the xanthan gum does that as well. It makes a smoother texture and consistency, a little bit thicker too. The peach flavor here is much more prevalent than the last one. And even that Rin Can Can, which has a little bit of quinine in it, that'd probably make a delicious gin and tonic. But that comes through just, it's very subtle, but just a couple of different peach flavors going on. I would not define either one of these as being sweet, but this is like a tad sweeter with the honey, which works in something so cold. Cold drinks, you need more sweetness to stand up to the cold temperature. So both are delicious. If you have these ingredients, you can make both of them. So I encourage you to make both and try them. But just endlessly refreshing, perfect summer cocktails. I just recently shared a video. Those are my four favorite cocktails I've made on YouTube. And if I was doing that again, this would be a close contender there. And if not, it would be on a frozen list. And it's just funny because I feel like this is really driven a lot by the temperature and the texture. The texture makes me want more and more of it. The flavor is still great and spot on, but just that refreshing palate cleansing texture, as well as the temperature, which we don't often associate with many cocktails. But when you're doing frozen, that's why it's important. That's why all these techniques that you will see in this drink, and if you listen to that podcast, you can pick up there. They end up being incredibly important to the finished cocktail that you make. So that's it for this one. Two versions of the Missionary's Downfall. If you enjoyed this video, please give it a like below. Consider subscribing to the channel if you want to support this channel more. I have a Patreon page. Otherwise, I'll see you on the next one.