Easy Tiki

 
 

Easy Tiki

A Modern Revival with 60 Recipes

by Chloe Frechette

photographs by Lizzie Munro

Ten Speed Press

2020

 

 

Easy Tiki is a cookbook that does more than it promises, but also maybe doesn't do the thing it promises to do quite as well as I'd like. 

 

Author Chloe Frechette offers a menu of simplified tiki cocktails, each with 6 ingredients or less. But she also introduces them with a succinct history of the original tiki phenomenon and the modern tiki revival, and she suggests other elements of stage-dressing, from glasses and garnishes to music and ambience, to help complete the tiki mood. Each cocktail has the promised short ingredient list ... but collectively there must still be a hundred or more bottles of recommended ingredients.

 

Tiki started in southern California during the 1930s, when Don the Beachcomber opened a bar to celebrate the end of Prohibition with elaborate, complex drinks shrouded in mystique and lots and lots of Caribbean and Polynesian decorations. Don was beloved, but secretive and protective of his recipes. In northern California, Trader Vic imitated Don's style while adding his own twist, and of the two of them, probably did the most to spread, popularize, and commercialize tiki. After WWII, soldiers returning from the Pacific theater brought home a fascination with Asian and Polynesian culture, and tiki benefitted from this broader interest.

 

The original tiki trend mostly died out by 1970. In the early 2000s, revivalists like Beachbum Berry began learning the history of tiki, interviewing the surviving original participants, and reconstructing the original secret recipes. Alongside the general craft cocktail boom, tiki is also experiencing a modern resurgence.

 

Tiki drinks are mostly based on rum and fresh fruit juices. They blend strong, sweet, sour, and spice. Traditionally, they're complex and multilayered - rather than using one rum, one juice, one liqueur, each element of the cocktail will be multiplied, while retaining the original ratios. These combinations make it hard to identify the individual ingredients by taste, and give tiki drinks part of their mystery. This is traditionally heightened and played up with opaque glasses, large garnishes, windowless bars, and an emphasis on exoticism in the decor.

 

I liked Frechette's concise overview of tiki style. She provides enough references to musicians, artists, and books by other tiki historians that it would be easy for an interested newcomer to decide on their next step after reading this.

 

The thing I wish Frechette had done better would have been to organize her recipes a bit more so that the interested home bartender could get just a small core stable of ingredients, with additions that are usable in more than just one drink. Part of what makes tiki 'hard' or intimidating or just expensive isn't only that one drink has 8-12 ingredients, it's that that drink is recommended side-by side with another that needs 6-10 more if you want to make them both. Frechette addresses the first problem, but not the second.

 

I know I'm being a little unfair here. First, Frechette didn't write her own recipes. As an editor of Punch magazine, she sourced them, drawing on advice from bartenders around the country who are recognized by their peers for their excellence. Trusting the experts puts some factors beyond her control. Second, yes, she's right, a 6-ingredient cocktail is easier to make than a 10-bottle drink. And third, it's never really fair to the author to judge them based on the book you wish they'd written instead.

 

But a lot of times the simplification was to reduce from a blend of 3 rums to just 1, or to hold the falernum or orgeat. But those are exactly the sort of common ingredients that would be in every home tiki bar. Leaving one of those out in favor of a homemade syrup that's only used in a single recipe doesn't necessarily make anything easier. Nor does recommending only one rum, when maybe all 60 recipes in the book have a different 'only one' recommendation - whereas I suspect smart blends of a few reusable staples could serve as well. If you the reader select only a few drinks to try though, then you'll be able to get by with just enough bottles to serve your picks.