swizzle stick is a slender wooden rod with three to five spokes radiating horizontally from one end (picture a toy airplane propeller affixed to a pencil) used to “swizzle” a drink—as opposed to shaking, stirring, or blending electrically—by whisking the ingredients in a glass or pitcher filled with crushed ice. Proper swizzling technique involves rapidly rotating the stick between your palms while simultaneously raising and lowering it, until the whirring spokes froth the drink and frost the glass.
Swizzle sticks are often confused with stir sticks, the mass-produced plastic wands used not to make drinks but to decorate them. The traditional wooden swizzle stick has been an artisanal Caribbean product since at least the eighteenth century (when swizzling was first documented by visiting Europeans). Then as now, it begins life as a branch on the trunk of the Quararibea turbinata shrub, or swizzlestick tree, which grows wild throughout the West Indies. To make a swizzle stick, snap off a branch with the proper protruding “propeller blade” twigs, then strip off the bark and trim the twigs so that they’ll fit inside a tall glass.
The swizzle stick is primarily associated with a specific category of drink called, fittingly enough, the swizzle. A notable exception that falls both within and without the category is the Ti Punch, a swizzle by any other name that’s whisked with a baton-lélé or bois-lélé (what the French-speaking Caribbean islanders call their swizzle sticks).
See also swizzle and Ti’ Punch.
Aspinall, Algernon Edward. The Pocket Guide to the West Indies. London: Edward Stanford, 1907.
Grose, Francis. A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. London: S. Hooper, 1788.
By: Jeff Berry