Can I use canned pineapple juice?

You can, the way you can wear shoes without socks. It works, but you'll know. Canned juice skews flat and oversweet, and it won't whip into that foamy cap that makes the drink feel alive. If fresh is genuinely impossible, find a chilled refrigerated juice rather than the shelf-stable stuff, and dial the grenadine back a touch because canned juice is already carrying extra sugar.

Why does it taste like nail polish remover when I make it?

You poured too much maraschino. That liqueur is sneaky, all bitter almond and dried cherry, and a heavy hand turns the whole glass medicinal. Stick to a true barspoon, level not heaping, and let the rum and pineapple lead. Maraschino is seasoning here, not an ingredient you measure in ounces.

Which white rum should I reach for?

Something with a little character rather than a vodka in disguise. A clean Cuban-style or a lightly aged Spanish-style rum gives the drink backbone without stepping on the pineapple. Save the funky, high-ester Jamaican stuff for a Daiquiri where it can show off. Here you want rum that supports the fruit instead of arm-wrestling it.

The Mary Pickford: Silent-Era Havana in a Coupe

Somebody named a drink after America's Sweetheart and then made it pink, and you would be forgiven for assuming the worst. Don't. The Mary Pickford is white rum, pineapple, a whisper of grenadine, and a barspoon of maraschino, and when it is built by someone paying attention it tastes like a Havana afternoon you don't want to end. Pink, yes. Stupid, no.

2 ozWhite Rum

1.5 ozPineapple Juice

1 barspoonGrenadine

1 barspoonMaraschino Liqueur

Garnish: Maraschino cherry

Pineapple juice is the whole game here, and it behaves badly if you let it. Use juice that has seen the inside of a pineapple recently, not a can that has been sweating in a well for a week. Shake it hard with plenty of ice, harder than you think, because pineapple wants to froth and that froth is the point. You are after a pale, foamy cap that sits on the surface like sea spray. The grenadine should be real pomegranate, not the corn-syrup transfusion bottle, and it goes in by the barspoon because its only job is color and a low hum of fruit. The maraschino is the trap. A barspoon, no more. Too much and the whole glass turns into a bowl of cough drops and stewed cherries. Double-strain into a chilled coupe, drop a good cherry, and serve it cold enough to hurt your teeth.

This drink leads with rum and gets its lift from fruit and a sweetener, which is the spine of a Daiquiri whether or not a lime ever touched it. That is the structural quirk worth understanding. The Daiquiri template is spirit plus something tart plus something sweet, shaken into a cold tangle. The Mary Pickford simply swaps citrus duty out. Pineapple juice carries the acid and the body that lime usually provides, the grenadine and maraschino split the sweetening, and the white rum stays in the driver's seat the whole way. Strip the color and you are holding a rum daisy with pineapple standing in for the squeeze of a lime. The book files it with the Daiquiri clan for exactly that reason, and once you taste it next to a Bee's Knees or a Brown Derby, both of them spirit-forward sours wearing different fruit, the family resemblance stops being theoretical.

Havana in the 1920s was where Americans went to drink while their own country pretended it had quit. The bars at the Hotel Nacional and the Sevilla-Biltmore ran hot with tourists, gamblers, and movie people, and the bartenders there were among the best on the planet because they had to be. Mary Pickford was the biggest star in the world at the time, a silent-film actress and a shrewd businesswoman who helped found United Artists, and she sailed down to Cuba with Douglas Fairbanks and, by most tellings, Charlie Chaplin in tow. A bartender, usually credited as Fred Kaufman though Eddie Woelke gets named too, built her something off the menu. Pineapple was everywhere in Cuba, rum was the local birthright, and the result was a pink coupe named for a woman who, by several accounts, didn't much drink. That is the kind of detail that makes a cocktail story worth keeping. The drink outlived the studio system, the hotel's gangster era, and Pickford's own fame, which is more than most things from 1924 can claim. It fell out of fashion for decades, dismissed as a sweet pink relic, and it deserved better. Made right, it is bone-dry where it counts and generous where it should be.

Open the Mary Pickford recipe card on Speed Pour

FAQ

Can I use canned pineapple juice?: You can, the way you can wear shoes without socks. It works, but you'll know. Canned juice skews flat and oversweet, and it won't whip into that foamy cap that makes the drink feel alive. If fresh is genuinely impossible, find a chilled refrigerated juice rather than the shelf-stable stuff, and dial the grenadine back a touch because canned juice is already carrying extra sugar.
Why does it taste like nail polish remover when I make it?: You poured too much maraschino. That liqueur is sneaky, all bitter almond and dried cherry, and a heavy hand turns the whole glass medicinal. Stick to a true barspoon, level not heaping, and let the rum and pineapple lead. Maraschino is seasoning here, not an ingredient you measure in ounces.
Which white rum should I reach for?: Something with a little character rather than a vodka in disguise. A clean Cuban-style or a lightly aged Spanish-style rum gives the drink backbone without stepping on the pineapple. Save the funky, high-ester Jamaican stuff for a Daiquiri where it can show off. Here you want rum that supports the fruit instead of arm-wrestling it.