Imbibe! (23 page)

To round out this gathering of old-timers, here’s a trey of the native drinks of Jerry Thomas’s people; musty, slightly eccentric concoctions that savor of white clapboard houses, short summers, closed mouths, and dark woods. I’ve listed them in rough order of palatability.

 

NOTES ON INGREDIENTS :
In its heyday, this drink’s devotees preferred old Jamaica to the somewhat lighter Santa Cruz and anything to the rougher stuff from New England. In any case, you’ll want a pot-still rum such as Inner Circle, from Australia, if you can find it (get the 115-proof ); otherwise, any dark, Demerara-style rum will do (El Dorado is cheap and effective). There are those who prefer cider to water; it’s not necessary.

For a simple Hot Rum, omit the butter and the mixed spices, although Thomas suggests you still grate nutmeg on top. A perfectly acceptable drink, but frankly this is a case where more is definitely more.

 

NOTES ON EXECUTION :
Proceed as for a standard Hot Toddy, adding the spirits, butter, and spices in with the liquor before topping off with boiling water. If you want to make these the fun way—the way, as it were, I learned at my mother’s knee—simply put everything into a mug, including water (not heated), and plunge a red-hot poker into it. This is not recommended after the second round.

 

NOTES ON INGREDIENTS:
In 1775, of course, there was no bourbon. To make a Revolutionarily correct Stone Fence, you’ll need rum of the usual old-school kind and hard cider, the funkier the better—as in, ferment your own. Alas, the only rum I know savage enough to do this justice is the acrid and funky 115-proof Bundaberg, from Australia, which you can’t get in the United States (see how the laws conspire to make us good?). As late as 1869, the
Steward & Barkeeper’s Manual
observed that a tart and full-flavored (and alcoholic) crab apple cider was “frequently used in preference to ordinary cider,” but for the Professor’s version, your standard health-food store sweet cider will do. And this isn’t the place to trot out your fanciest bourbon.

 

NOTES ON INGREDIENTS:
Again, for full authenticity you’ll need a rum that you could stand a fork up in; real pirate-juice. The molasses should be Caribbean—like a nice Barbados blackstrap—and the water should be from an outdoor pump (okay, that’s not strictly necessary). For a hot Black Strap, use about 2 ounces of water, for cold—a drink I shudder to recall—1 ounce and plenty of cracked ice.

 

NOTES ON EXECUTION:
Whether hot or cold, stir the molasses and the water together before adding the spirits.

Anyone who has spent any time pondering the origins of the Cocktail—be it for the months or years it takes to write a book or the minutes or seconds it takes to internalize a Dry Martini—will agree that it’s a quintessentially American contraption. How could it be anything but? It’s quick, direct, and vigorous. It’s flashy and a little bit vulgar. It induces an unreflective overconfidence. It’s democratic, forcing the finest liquors to rub elbows with ingredients of far more humble stamp. It’s profligate with natural resources (think of all the electricity generated to make ice that gets used for ten seconds and discarded). In short, it rocks.

But if the Cocktail is American, it’s American in the same way as the hot dog (that is, the Frankfurter), the hamburger (the Hamburger steak), and the ice-cream cone (with its rolled
gaufrette
). As a nation, we have a knack for taking underperforming elements of other peoples’ cultures, streamlining them, supercharging them, and letting ’em rip—from nobody to superstar, with a trail of sparks and a hell of a noise along the way. That’s how the Cocktail did it, anyway.

You could say, I suppose, that the Cocktail has been around since antiquity; that it was already old when Scribonius Largus, one of the emperor Claudius’s physicians, suggested that a stomachache would be soothed by dissolving black myrtle berries and pills made up of dates, dill, saffron, nigella seeds, hazelwort, and juniper in sweet wine and chugging it down. Before you turn the page, muttering, “I know Cocktails, and that’s no Cocktail,” hear me out. Nowadays, “Cocktail” means anything from “whatever is served in a conical, stemmed glass” to “a mixed drink containing alcohol” (as in, “Cocktails are five dollars for our Economy customers,” where the term indicates a plastic cup full of ice and soda and a tiny bottle of booze on the side). But that lexical flexibility wasn’t always the case. In the nineteenth century, when the word first became joined to a drink, it denoted something far more specific: spirits or wine, sweetened with sugar, diluted (if necessary) with water, and spiced up with a few dashes of “bitters”—that is, a medicinal infusion of bitter roots, herbs, barks, and spices. Under that definition, Scribonius’s potion, with its bitter hazelwort, has a lot more right to the title than most of the things you’ll find on the average modern Cocktail menu (e.g., the “Chocolate Martini”).

But this book is about the American Cocktail, not the
Gallicauda Romana
, so we’ll leave the nostrums of antiquity to find their own historian and fast-forward some 1,600 years to Restoration-era London, where the more immediate roots of our national beverage lie. At first glance, those roots appear to be well buried. There’s no end of drinking going on, to be sure. Ale (unhopped and traditional) and beer (hopped and controversial) were consumed morning, noon, and night by all classes, supplemented whenever economic circumstance allowed by copious draughts of wine, the stronger the better. But distilled spirits, if consumed at all, were taken neat in drams, or—in fast company—mixed up in bowls of Punch. There was nary a Cocktail to be seen.

That said, consider the drink known as “Purl.” Now, Purl has come down to us as a Dickensian mixture of hot ale, gin, sugar, and eggs, with nutmeg on top. But in the seventeenth century, it was something rather different: a sharply bitter ale infused with wormwood and other botanicals and drunk in the morning to settle the stomach, if settling was needed. It was popular enough for Samuel Pepys to mention it in his diary (then again, there’s pretty much nothing alcoholic he doesn’t mention).

The humble Purl had a city cousin, “Purl-Royal.” This was pretty much the same drink, except instead of ale or beer it was based on “Sack”—a relatively sweet Sherry that was fortified with brandy. If you were to taste Purl-Royal today, you’d have no trouble at all classifying it: vermouth. (In fact, “vermouth” is derived from
vermut
, the German word for “wormwood,” which the modern beverage originally contained in some quantity.) As “Wormwood-wine,” Purl-Royal was another thing Pepys drank. He also drank gin; had he but thought to mix them, the Age of Reason might have been rather different (imagine Voltaire on Martinis!). Interestingly enough, Pepys drank vermouth and gin in the same year, 1663, with the same person, Sir William Batten; one might wish to speak with Sir William.

But Royal or not, Purl would be nothing but a byway in the history of drink if not for Richard Stoughton, who kept an apothecary’s shop at the Sign of the Unicorn in the London borough of Southwark. One of the novel features of the age was a lively trade in proprietary medicines; pre-mixed, one-size-fits-all concoctions that you could buy in stores, rather than having to go to a doctor and stand around while he customized something for you (these were essentially the first branded goods). In 1690, Stoughton decided to get in on the action. His entry, the “Elixir Magnum Stomachicum,” aka “Stoughton’s Great Cordial Elixir,” was an alcoholic infusion of twenty-two botanicals, the chief among them apparently being gentian. It turned out he was onto something: At a shilling apiece, the characteristic long-necked, globular little bottles of dark yellow liquid (or was it red?—accounts differ) sold briskly enough that, eight years later, he was able to put himself through medical school at Cambridge. In 1712, Stoughton applied for and received a Royal Patent for his creation—only the second to be granted to a medicine.

Like most patent medicines, Dr. Stoughton’s was originally marketed with a certain latitude regarding its applications—after all, why limit your business? Pretty much whatever you had, it was for it—particularly if your distemper had anything whatsoever to do with the stomach, which the elixir would “rectify” from all its “Indispositions,” or the blood, which it would cleanse from its “Impurities, [such] as Scurvies.” Over the years, however, users seem to have discovered that it was good for one set of symptoms in particular. In 1710, Stoughton’s advertising, which had previously hinted at this somewhat less-exalted indication, came right out and said it: the Elixir is “Drank by most Gentlemen . . . to recover and restore a weaken’d Stomach or lost Appetite . . . occasioned by hard Drinking or Sickness, &c.” and “[carry] off the effects of bad Wine, which too many die of.” In other words, a hangover cure—and, considering that this was the Age of Punch, no doubt a necessary one.

But whatever its therapeutic qualities, or lack thereof (one is entitled to a certain skepticism), Stoughton’s Elixir had something else going for it: It tasted good. Not straight, of course—the stuff was quite concentrated. But you could mix it in with your water or tea, yielding what Stoughton called “the Bitter draught.” Where’s the fun in that, though? Much better to pour a little into your hair-of-the-dog, thus yielding “the best Purl in Ale, and Purl Royal in Sack, [being] very pleasant and wholesome, [and] giving each of them a fragrant smell and taste, far exceeding Purl made of Wormwood.” What’s more, with the Elixir, you could make your Purl “in a Minute”—no more assembling bunches of herbs or weeks of steeping. Just tip a little into your drink, give it a stir, and you’re done.