Originally posted 02 May 2012

I was interviewed for a local paper about rum history, and when the piece came out I was puzzled by an allusion the writer made to Mary Poppins drinking rum. I wondered if there was perhaps a scene that I missed due to a trip to the snack bar at the theatre – perhaps a subplot where Mary gets tired of taking care of the kids, leaves them with Uncle Albert, and heads to the local pub for a double navy grog with a shot of old Jamaican heavy for a chaser. When she is thrown out of the place for being drunk and disorderly and singing lewd sea shanties, she lands in the arms of Mr. Binnacle, who is always at that location around closing time because it’s a good place to meet women who are being thrown out of bars for singing lewd sea shanties.

If Disney did film that scene, it ended up on the cutting room floor, but it is clear that Ms. Poppins did enjoy her tipple. In the scene after the rainstorm in which she informs the children of the virtues of taking a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down, she pours three colors of liquid from the same bottle. The two children take a sip and in turn report the flavor as lime cordial and strawberry. Mary takes her own sip and purrs, “Rrrrrrum punch” with much more enthusiasm than is usually shown for alcoholic beverages in movies made for children. You can see the clip here – go to the one minute mark.

I asked a friend who is a Disneyphile, and he thinks this may be the first instance in a Disney film of a woman drinking alcohol. It would also fit very well with the practice of an earlier era – in the early 1800’s rum punch was indeed recommended by doctors. So Mary was probably just following her mother’s family recipe for taking care of a sudden chill – a modest serving or rum punch for herself and the children.

Originally posted 30 April 2012

When you try to accurately recreate historic foods and beverages, some of the difficulties are obvious; a recipe that says to cook something until it “looks right” is not very helpful if you have never seen the finished product before. Measurements calibrated in handfuls are an obvious problem, so the modern cook is grateful when they come across a recipe list that specifies “four eggs,” “a cup of milk,” or “the juice of five lemons.” If you have studied the history of agriculture, you know that your problems are just starting. If the recipe calls for four eggs, you should probably use three – thanks to a hundred years of breeding chickens that lay big eggs, they are about a third larger than they used to be. They taste different, too, thanks to the chickens’ diet of vitamin-enhanced commercial feed. The milk we buy now has been homogenized, pasteurized, and has less butterfat – you may want to experiment with a mix of 3/4 milk and 1/4 cream. As for the five lemons, you might get something closer to the original if you use three lemons and a lime – lemons a hundred years ago were smaller and more tart. The liquor is different too – in the case of the Colonial American drinks that were originally made with inferior local spirits, it is now hard to find rum as bad as the best they could get. A book could be written on the differences in the raw ingredients of prior centuries and the ones we use now… I may even write it, despite being warned that the subject is too arcane to interest major publishing houses. I tested all the recipes printed in Rum: A Global History and have verified that they work, and if each is made by someone who follows directions and obtains good ingredients, they are at least close to what was eaten and quaffed in days gone by.

Originally posted 27 April 2012

Stroh of Austria has an endearingly odd way of making their commercials memorable. Their original mascot was a stylized bear, and as time has passed the bear has become less and less lifelike. Even when the bear is rendered in a drawing, it looks like a guy wearing a rented bear suit that doesn’t fit very well. This first ad is not too bad, with the mascot resembling a bear cub that has been stuffed by an unimaginative taxidermist.

This one looks like he at least enjoys drinking the product he is advertising::

And then we have this awesomely lifelike fellow:If you are camping and are suddenly face to face with a cuddly looking ursine with rum on his breath, that is probably him. (Images used by permission of Stroh & Co.)

Originally posted 24 April 2012

In the book I mention a bit about rum in the British and American navies. Though the elaborate ceremonies aboard British ships inspired the most famous images of grog consumption, rum rations were common in other navies as well. This picture from the 1890’s shows Czarist Russian sailors gathered around the rum pot. If anyone who views this image can read Russian and can make out the Cyrillic characters on the sailors’ hats, I’d be interested to now what ship this is.

Rum was also dispensed in the German navy as late as the Second World War. In his book “Without Hindsight,” German naval ensign Gerhard Both recorded a 1944 incident in which a sailor nicknamed Pongo earned the disapproval of his crewmates.

“The standard drink for any festivities on board for the rank and file was tea with rum, which was collected from the galley by means of very large teapots. On one such occasion, at an advanced stage of the party, it was Pongo’s turn to collect another pot full of tea with rum. Even today I can still visualize his return with a well-filled pot, but instead of setting it quietly on the table he started dancing around with it in the middle of the deck in crazy circles, and the tea/rum poured out of the spout and all over the deck. It took four or five men to stop this crazy carousel.”

The picture of the Russian sailors is courtesy of ThePiratesLair.com, which has an extraordinary collection of naval rum memorabilia. Among the pages here is a very well photographed article on naval rum cups, including information on how to detect counterfeits. If you never knew these existed, much less that people are counterfeiting them, there is much to see there.

Originally posted 23 April 2012

One thing that can confuse a rum scholar is the variety of names for the exact same thing. For example, here are three labels from 1945 that Ypioca of Brazil provided a bit too late to get in the book.

As you can see, two are labeled Aguardiente, the third “Delicious National Whiskey.” Both were produced in the same facility using the same ingredients, cane juice and water, and both would now be sold as cachaca. The differences in the names were 100% marketing, and depended on where in South America these bottles were to be shipped. (These are from the 1940’s, well before there was any attempt to market cachaca outside Brazil.) This problem is not limited to South American brands – as noted in a May 2006 article in a trade magazine called Drinks Buyer Magazine Asia, “In the Philippines, gin is made from molasses. In fact, India and the Philippines could be classed as major rum-drinking nations if some of the “gin” and “whiskey” there was properly classified.” Though international truth-in-labeling laws have extinguished most of the outright counterfeit products, there are still plenty of bottles that are labeled in ways that make it hard for an unwary patron of poorly lit bar to know what they are imbibing.

Originally posted 22 April 2012

Rum was often used as a basis for medicinal tonics, and a pair of pharmacists in Kingston, Jamaica had a particularly tasty recipe that they brewed up using local Long Pond rum.  The popular drink caught the eye of a major liquor company in 1944, but since Levy Brothers Pharmacy Spiced Rum wasn’t catchy enough, they named it after a Caribbean celebrity: Captain Morgan. Henry Morgan was a colorful character, a pirate and privateer who was briefly the Governor of Jamaica. He was notable for ingenious military strategies, personal courage, heavy imbibing, flagrant disregard of orders from London, and an incident in which his crew was so drunk on rum that they set his flagship on fire. Though the beverage named after Morgan wasn’t the first spiced rum ever made, it was the first to be mass marketed, and the image of the gaudily dressed Welsh privateer was a potent marketing tool.  His portrayal has changed over the years – this ad is from 1950.

I like this depiction of the Captain better than the modern version – he looks less like a cartoon character and more like someone I’d actually hoist a glass with. (Images courtesy of Diageo).

Originally posted 21 April 2012

What better way could there be for the family to spend an evening than pretend to be pirates? The British board game Buccaneer premiered in the 1930s, and allowed players to compete for diamonds, rubies, gold, pearls, and barrels of rum.

One wonders whether a game that encourages children to fight over barrels of alcohol would be accepted in current society. The game was sold until the 1980’s in Britain but never caught on elsewhere, and early sets in good condition fetch a substantial amount among collectors.

Originally posted 20 April 2012

One of the challenges in writing this book was a problem faced by culinary historians and historical recreationists everywhere – when you see a common measurement, is it really what you think it is? For instance, when you see the word “Gallon” in an old British or Colonial American manuscript, it might be one of three different measures. There was a dry gallon, used for wheat and other grains, and two wet gallons, the wine gallon (3.75 liters) and the ale gallon (4.62 liters). There were also standardized measures for larger containers – the wine barrel contained 31.5 gallons, the beer barrel 36 gallons. When the question arose of which gallon was used for rum, I contacted historian Steve Bashore, who is restoring George Washington’s distillery at Mount Vernon. Steve contacted the cooper at Colonial Williamsburg, who confirmed that since spirits were usually aged in old wine barrels, when a gallon of rum is mentioned in a recipe, it is probably a wine gallon.

Handily for Americans who are recreating old rum recipes, the modern American gallon is based on the wine gallon, while the British Imperial Gallon is based on the old beer gallon. (In case you are interested, the two countries standardized their respective gallons in 1824.) Americans and others who use US measurements, your standard measuring cups and jugs may be your guide. For the rest of you, there are conversion tables aplenty on the web…

Originally posted April 19, 2012

Many articles about the alcohol trade with Native Americans use the same image, of a sharply dressed Yankee brandishing a bottle of liquor to a tribal chief.

Oddly, none of the individuals or institutions I contacted could give a date or origin for this image, which appears to be an engraving of the type used in books and newspapers in the early 1800’s. The Yankee is often identified as a fur trader, but the reason for that is unclear – perhaps those are furs on the wagon in the background, but I have not found a version in high enough resolution to make it out. Does anybody out there have any idea where and when this might have first appeared?

Originally posted April 17, 2012

There is a lively debate about the earliest evidence for distilling. In his excellent book Uncorking The Past, Dr. Patrick McGovern makes a good case for the technology of distilling in China around two thousand years ago. There is another civilization that apparently had the same technology five hundred years earlier, though it is an open question as to how they used it. At the museum in Taxila, Pakistan, there is a complete alembic still that could have been used to extract alcohol, and it has been estimated to be 2500 years old.

The elements of the alembic still are obvious – a pot to boil the wort, chamber to capture the steam, with a tube to another chamber where the steam will condense to a concentrated liquid. It is all made from terracotta clay, and it looks very much like distilling equipment used in Indian and Pakistani villages today. Unfortunately, without testing the inside of the boiler to see what kind of residue was left behind, it is impossible to determine whether it was used to make alcohol or to extract oil from plant materials to make perfume or medicine. The same equipment could serve either purpose. The dating of this still is also open to question, since the display in the museum states the age of everything in this case without saying how the era was determined. I have sent numerous messages to the museum, but this display is apparently not one they are eager to discuss or investigate. It seems likely that an institution managed by a strict Muslim government is not interested in conducting an experiment that could confirm that alcohol was first distilled in what is now Pakistan. Certainly the people of the Indian Subcontinent during the Vedic period knew how to make a cane sugar based beer, but did they distill it into the world’s first rum? Lacking the proof that could only be obtained by chemical testing, it can only be said that the technology of distilling, the cultivation of sugar cane, and the knowledge of the art of making alcoholic beverages existed at the same place and time. Whether the people of the Indian subcontinent put those skills together, and whether they used the result as a recreational beverage, medicine, or for some other purpose, is a question that can not be answered with certainty at the present time.