Caipirinha!

My pal Little Anthony (who's putting me up at the moment.... and quite possibly for the rest of our short, liver-diseased lives) is a much-travelled man, and he generally likes to bring back consumables as souvenirs of his globetrotting, rather than filling his small house with cluttersome tchotchkes. In the past I have found such exotica as moose jerky and bear-paw paté lurking in his cupboards, but on this visit I discover that his most recent import is a more user-friendly and less ethically troubling bottle of cachaça.

In recent years I have become quite a fan of the caipirinha, the 'national drink' of the country of my mother's birth, Brazil. Cachaça, its main ingredient, is one of the most unpretentious, unfussy members of the rum family (fermented from raw sugarcane juice rather than a processed derivative like molasses); at its cheapest, it's sugarcane moonshine. And the caipirinha is a classically simple 'rum' cocktail: just add fresh lime (whole lime wedges, muddled in the bottom of a large tumbler) and a bit of extra sugar (you can use simple syrup, but coarse sugar is actually better here, helping to break down the fruit pieces) to a generous slug of cachaça, top up with lots of crushed ice, stir, and...... let Sunday afternoon slide away from you.

In Oxford, the trouble is finding the limes...