My favorite thing to drink this summer has been a super refreshing cucumber-mint limeade. I first made it one hot evening when my 12-year-old son and I were getting ready to watch a Euro 2020 soccer match. We squeezed lots of limes, mixed the juice with a bit of sugar syrup and blitzed it together with a whole peeled cucumber until it was a beautiful pale green color. Then we poured it into our prettiest glasses over ice, topped up with soda water and garnished with mint. It hit every spot you want in a summer drink. My son drank his straight up, but I added a shot of tequila to mine to make it into a cocktail.
What, actually, is a cocktail? It’s one of those words you can use hundreds of times in your life without ever asking where it comes from. In 19th-century America, cocktail was far from the only word for mixed alcoholic drinks. Like a sling (a drink made from brandy, rum or other spirits mixed with sugar, water and flavoring) or a toddy (much the same thing but with hot water and sometimes honey instead of sugar), cocktail originally meant a specific kind of mixed drink rather than mixed drinks in general. If history had taken a different course, we might all now speak of drinking drams, cobblers, coolers, smashes, juleps or—my personal favorite—slingflips.
