Hirsch - Forgotten drinks of colonial New England: from flips & rattle-skulls to switchel & spruce beer

Published by American Palate

A Division of The History Press

Charleston, SC 29403

www.historypress.net

Copyright 2014 by Corin Hirsch

All rights reserved

First published 2014

e-book edition 2014

ISBN 978.1.62584.727.0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hirsch, Corin.

Forgotten drinks of colonial New England : from flips and rattle-skulls to switchel and spruce beer / Corin Hirsch.

pages cm

Summary: Discover the intoxicating history of the drinks that were a part of life in Colonial New England but have since been lost to time--Provided by publisher.

Summary: A survey of lost drinks from New Englands colonial era, as well as recipes to bring them back to life--Provided by publisher.

print edition ISBN 978-1-62619-249-2 (paperback)

1. Beverages--New England--History. 2. Drinking behavior--New England--History. I. Title.

TX815.H54 2014

641.20974--dc23

2013050303

Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the author or The History Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

CONTENTS

Introduction

THOROUGHLY FOXED AND FUDDLED

Did they really drink that much?

Im in a Vermont caf with a friend, and a woman at the nearest table has overheard our talk about the epic drinking of colonial New Englandersmugs of cider at breakfast, 11:00 a.m. drams of rum, Mimbos and Rattle-Skulls and flips knocked back one after the other in an alarming stream.

Well, yeah, they drank quite a bit, I tell her, taking a sip of the lone pint Ill drink with that nights dinner. Our Yankee forebears would probably blink in disbelief at the relative timidity of that evenings victuals, but between us and them lay a centuries-long sea of temperance and Prohibition that drastically altered drinking habits. The nightlife districts of Boston, Portland and Providence may still host plenty of benders, but even Don Draper had nothing on early New Englanders, who could probably down four tankards of beer for every martini and follow it up with three mugs of flip and a bilberry dram to boot.

During that meal, I was nearing the end of a frenetic, blurry four months researching Stone-Fences, rum trading routes and Madeira punches. Even though I write about beverages as a food writer at Vermont newspaper Seven Days, I hadnt considered taking a plunge into colonial drinks until a note from an editor from The History Press unlocked some ideas. I proposed an uberlocal history book that fit its niche: a book on the colonial-era beverages of New England. A chapter about rum, another about cider and some fleshing out of colonial tavern life.

What I hadnt realized was that European settlers practically swam in a sea of booze from breakfast til bedtime. Whether they were working, weeding, writing, selling goods, getting married or even dying, they drank so heartily that their lawmakers (who sometimes worked under the influence) constantly passed laws to regulate tavern practices, drink prices and what people drankincluding how much, when and where: No drinking after nine oclock. No drinking on Sunday. No drinking in the same room as your husband or your apprentice. Those laws rarely altered colonial residents bent for the drink, however. Beer, cider, brandy and spirits flowed like waterinstead of water, in most casesand the day didnt begin until after a shot of bitters or stiffner of hard cider. A deal wasnt a deal unless sealed with a dram of rum, and the Declaration of Independence was written by a Founding Father sipping on Madeira, the choice tipple of the upper crust.

Why didnt I learn that in school? asked the woman, who had a mug of tea in her hand. My theory: who wants to tell a room full of children that their great-great-great-times-ten-grandfather didnt pick up a hoe unless he was totted up with cyder or that he may have had a liver the size of a grapefruit? That those early pious Puritans sipped beer and wine as part of their day-to-day? That the gentlemen of early New England were gravely concerned about liberty and fairness but also perpetually focused on the where and when of their next whetterand those drinks, in turn, helped fuel and foment revolution.

Not all early Americans were comfortable with the prevailing ethos. I wrote some of this book in the library of Dartmouth College, whose 1769 charter notes that no taverner of retailer should be licensed within three miles of the College. By 1778, college president Eleazor Wheelock was sending alarmed letters to New Hampshires governor about a particular disorderly tavern across the street from the college that was soon joined by several more. Inside one, fellow students were discovered dancing on a table at 11:00 a.m., wine bottles in hand. The president was not pleased. Neither were scores of men before and after him, from parsons Increase and Cotton Mather to Dr. Benjamin Rush, whose late eighteenth-century writings on the corrosiveness of drink eventually helped birth the temperance movement.

This book is not intended to be scholarlyinstead, its a romp through colonial drinks, their origins and how theyre made and blended. Some of these were the earliest artisanal American beverages. Honey became mead and metheglin. Pumpkins, spruce branches and herbs became ale and beer. Apples became cider and brandy, as did pears. Raspberries, blueberries and blackberries became wine. Vinegar flavored switchel. Drinks such as imported Madeira and sherry lubricated men who plotted the whys and wherefores of independence. Pilgrims, farmers, builders and adventurers sometimes bonded over punch bowls or pitchers of flip, drinks that softened the edges of a hardscrabble life of harsh Puritan mores and the frigid wildness of their New World.

Due to a dearth of historical material, the text occasionally crosses the temporal and spatial boundaries. Some of the drinks listed in such as Mimbos, Ratafia, sangaree and slingswere more popular in the mid-Atlantic and the South than in New England. Some, such as whiskey, took their place at the bar after the colonies had become a new nation and so werent really colonial per se.

In the last few years, cocktail menus from Maine to Rhode Island have been sprouting punches, cobblers and switchel, drinks that reach through time to put us sensually in touch with the day-to-day life of our ancestors. The idea that we can taste another era through re-creating its food and drink is thrilling.

Part 1

WHY THEY DRANK

Billings is at hoe. The Kitchen Folk say he is steady. A terrible drunken distracted Week he has made of the last. A Beast associating with the worst Beasts in the Neighborhood. Drunk with John Copeland, Seth Bass &c. Hurried as if possessed, like Robert the Coachman, or Turner the Stocking Weaver. Running to all the Shops and private Houses swilling Brandy, Wine and Cyder in quantities enough to destroy him. If the Ancients drank Wine as our People drink rum and Cyder it is no wonder We read of so many possessed with Devils.

John Adams, July 18, 1796

Brutal. Barbarous. Deadly. Those are the terms that some modern historians have used to describe the America of the early 1600s, and they clang against the sanitized picture painted for us in grade schoolthat Pilgrims shared joyous feasts with natives and forged tiny utopian villages along the coast, sowing the first seeds of freedom and liberty.