In my occasional forays into researching Tiki drink history and its early ingredients, I’ve spent a lot of time tracking down when passionfruit became one of the genre’s canonical ingredients. It may surprise you that passionfruit syrup doesn’t appear to be a primordial ingredient readily available to Don the Beachcomber and Trader Vic when they swung high gear after prohibition. There’s also a related line of inquiry about what role passionola (and later, fassionola) played in Tiki’s early days. So, let’s take a spin through the newspapers and books of the day to see what we can learn.
References to “passion fruit syrup” and “passionfruit syrup” were rare in the 1930s and 1940s. When mentioned, it’s usually within an academic context, e.g., Bulletin 77 of the Hawaii Agricultural Experiment Station (1939) or in cookbooks. The Hilo Woman’s Book Club (1943) notes two different types of passion fruit (“water-lemon” and “lilikoi”) and includes a recipe for passion fruit syrup:
Mentions of passionfruit syrup in cocktail books are few and far between in the 1930s and 1940s. Don and Vic weren’t sharing their recipes with abandon the way we do today. Trader Vic’s recently uncovered Maori Punch recipe (1949) calls for “passion fruit juice imported from Australia.” Given the recipe’s other ingredients, we can reasonably assume the “juice” was sweetened, perhaps to the point of being a syrup. It was not called passionfruit syrup, though. Perhaps it went under a different name commercially?
Passionola
If we step back to 1946, when Trader Vic first published his Trader Vic’s Food and Drinks, you won’t find the word passionfruit or even passion mentioned anywhere. What we find, however, is an early reference to passionola – yes, with a ‘p,’ not an ‘f’ – in the recipe for the Tonga bowl drink:
Trader Vic had competition early on in incorporating passionola into recipes. A 1943 newspaper article titled Passionola Hits Town notes:
Fred Wilke at Kitty Davis’ has obtained exclusive Florida rights to Passionola, trade name of the liquid extract, and has introduced it at the theater-restaurant in the form of The Passionola Bomber and The Passionola Cooler.
These are tall, frosty, fruit trimmed drinks of marvelous potency, throat and eye appeal! Customers are ordering them by the hundreds every night.
The Bomber is rose-colored and contains:
- 2 jiggers of rum
- 2 jiggers of Passion Fruit
- 1 jigger of pineapple
- 1 jigger of lime
The “Cooler” is green-tinted and is made with gin instead of rum.
This certainly sounds like a Tiki drink recipe to me! Incidentally, the Kitty Davis’ mentioned in the first sentence is Kitty Davis’ Airliner, a Miami nightclub set in an airplane.
Although not a tropical drink, another early reference to passionola in mixed drinks is a Southern Comfort advertisement from 1942 noting it was “worth trying” a jigger of SoCo, a half-jigger of passionola, ice cubes, and topped with champagne.
While we may not definitively know when passionola was first sold as a commercial product, we do know the name was trademarked in the US in 1943:
A 1944 passionola ad notes it’s a Passion Fruit Product and “The Taste Thrill of the Century!” Furthermore, three variations were available:
- GOLD — natural, tropical passion fruit flavor
- RED — reminiscent of rich, red cherries
- GREEN — with the tasty tartness of lime.
How might we use the various versions? A liquor store ad made suggestions:
- gold passionola with rum
- Red passionola with tequila
- Green passionola with gin or vodka. (I find it interesting that the green “lime” fassionola wasn’t paired with tequila.)
Perhaps this early “gold passionola” was simply passionfruit syrup as we know it today? And was it the same passionola that Vic’s Tonga recipe used? We may never know.
RIP Passionola
We don’t we hear about passionola today? What happened?
Would you believe a congressional investigation?
Buried within a 1963 US government report entitled Frauds and Quackery Affecting the Older Citizen, Hearings Before the Special Committee on Aging, United States Senate, is this masterpiece of bureaucratic writing:
SEX PILLS
Other drugs are sold to make up for loss of vigor and sexual weakness … We recently became aware of an organization which masquerades under a religio-scientiflc name urging readers to submit by mail sums or $10 or $20 for “Stagg Bullets” and “Genuine Passionola,” the former for men and the latter tor women. The advertisement refers to older men and women who are now able to do what they believed they could not otherwise accomplish because of their advanced years …. The words and advertisements for “Stagg” and “Passion” do not describe the products as blood builders and tonics but as marvels that can make a man regardless of age romantic, young, potent and virile as the gods.
Although the word “sex” is not used “one does not need a magnifying glass to see it.”… “Genuine Passionola” contained sugar, juices of pineapple, papaya, peach, apricot, apple, grape, and passion fruit.
So, yeah… that’s an interesting read! The ingredient listing at the end is a nice bonus. I suggest you start your next batch of Analog Fassionola using this newfound knowledge!
Fassionola
Unsurprisingly, references to passionola in books and newspapers plummeted after 1963. While this isn’t too surprising, we have to wonder about the timing of a trademark for fassionola granted by the US Patent Office in 1964, i.e., the very next year! The trademark does note, however, “First use as early as 1945”. The mystery continues…
There’s much more to the story I don’t have time for here, and I’m anxiously awaiting the publication of Fassionola – The Torrid Story of Cocktails’ Most Mysterious Ingredient by Gregorio Pantoja and Martin S. Lindsay. I’m sure they’ll fill in many more gaps in the story and I can’t wait for my copy to arrive.
