Peg O’ My Heart

Last evening I made something new for the Mrs. and myself called a “Peg O’ My Heart”. It went over real well with the wife, and I liked it pretty well too.

The recipe:

2 oz. dark rum

1 oz. lime juice

1/2 oz. grenadine

Shake the ingredients in a shaker half-filled with ice. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. No garnish.

The drink is very fruit forward and more than a little sweet. This is in keeping with the time period of the drink. It pre-dates Prohibition when sweet drinks were far more common. In that it has more in common with 19th century cocktails than it does with the drinks of much of the 20th century. I personally didn’t find the sweetness cloying, but if you wanted to cut back on the sweetness making it with less grenadine (say two teaspoons) should work just fine.

I’ve seen on the net where some “Peg O’ My Heart” recipes call for 1 1/2 oz. of light rum instead of the larger amount of the dark.  This is a mistake, and may date from the time when Bacardi company was suing folks for making “Bacardi Cocktails” without using Bacardi rum. It very well could be some places got around that problem by tweaking the “Peg O’ My Heart” to bring it more in line with the “Bacardi Cocktail” (which consists of 1 1/2 oz. light Bacardi rum, 1 oz. lime juice, and 1 teaspoon grenadine.) The original “Peg O’ My Heart,” as far as I’m concerned, is simply the better drink.