Pimm’s No. 1 liqueur isn’t all that good. That’s just my opinion, but I arrived at it many years ago (the 2000s) when someone turned up with a bottle of Plymouth Fruit Cup and it made dramatically more delicious drinks.
Since then, I’ve enjoyed a smattering of homemade fruit cups over the years, but haven’t seen much in the way of recipes.
This recent recipe on Punch caught my attention, as it has a DIY Pimm’s liqueur alternative from Sam Ross:
12 oz Fords gin
12 oz Carpano Antica Formula
2 oz Grand Marnier
1 1/2 oz Cherry Heering
Anyone have any other good fruit cup/summer cup preparations to recommend?
Speaking of, does “cup” have a cohesive historical significance? I think @Splificator mentioned this glancingly somewhere, but I haven’t been able to find it. It seems cup is often a large format drink, using lower ABV bases than punch, but not always? I love that Jerry Thomas lists several in the section headed “Fancy Drinks” with the disclaimer “Many of them are rather troublesome to prepare, and some of them, which we have tried, have not yielded the satisfaction expected or desired.” Was cup the “pop punk” of the nineteenth century? Was it the “food magazine drink” of its day?
My impression is that it is a general purpose old English word that used to be commonly deployed to identify not only a vessel but its typically alcoholic contents, even serving as a synonym for punch. I suspect @Splificator wrote about it somewhere, but I haven’t found it in the OCS or Punch, yet.