My fellow drink writer Liza Weisstuch wrote a story about seltzer and the specific affinity that the jewish people of NYC have for it.
The story includes some quotes from me, as I covered the medicinal history of spas and the soda fountain in my book Doctors and Distillers.
The story is very fun and super interesting – read the whole thing here.
After reading my book Doctors and Distillers, Harold McGee (On Food and Cooking) pointed out to me that proof of distillation in ancient India (supposedly from the fifth century BCE) is not as well established as previously thought. Many histories on distillation cite work from 1979 that claims that elephant head stills were found along with other equipment that shows that there was alcoholic distillation in Northern India this early.
McGee recommended that I look at the book An Unholy Brew: Alcohol in Indian History and Religions by James McHugh. I added it as a suggestion that the SF Public Library should pick up, and thankfully they did. When it arrived recently, I took it out.
The book is dense and academic, and I decided that I wouldn't have time to read all of it. So instead I just searched for the sections on distillation. There were only a couple.
McHugh writes, "… the evidence for early stills in South Asia is more questionable than is often assumed…. John Marshall's 'still' excavated at Taxila was not found as a connected assemblage; Marshall assembled it himself from quite disparate finds, no doubt on the model of contemporaneous stills, in order to explain the function of just one of the vessels. Allchin [the 1979 reference that's referred to in places such as the Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails] built on Marshall's hypothesis regarding the function of these vessels, and his textual evidence is not convincing. Allchin likewise did not find a still assemblage but rather a large number of one type of vessel, with very few other parts."
"The earliest explicit description of alcoholic distillation that I am aware of is from a medical text… dating from around 1200 CE…. It is absolutely clear that distillation is described here and that the liquid distilled is a fermented, sugar-based drink…. An important point to note here is that, when Sanskrit texts mention alcoholic distillation, they are quite clear about it, using specific vocabulary."
Note that at the end of the 1100s is when we first find real evidence of alcoholic distillation in southern Italy as well. McHugh notes that the distilled spirit is distilled medicine, not beverage alcohol. This is in line with distillation in Europe at this time.
Later text references to alcoholic distillation pop up at the end of the 1200s in Indian texts, and now refer to recreational drinking. Note: nonalcoholic distillation in the West dates to probably 300CE; Arabs were distilling rosewater after I believe the year 700, but as I wrote in Doctors and Distillers, it doesn't seem that even if/when they distilled wine, they concentrated the alcohol with heads/tails cuts, so it was closer to filtration.
In a later chapter, McHugh mentions a book "The Elucidation of Distillates (Arkaprakasa), dating from the seventeenth century CE or later, is a treatise on distilled medicines." That might be a fun book for me to find if it has been translated into English sometime.
Anyway, I thought this was interesting.
I am very happy to announce that Doctors and Distillers: The Remarkable Medicinal History of Beer, Wine, Spirits, and Cocktails is a Top 4 Finalist for the Tales 2023 Spirited Awards in the category of Best New Book on Drinks Culture, History, or Spirits!
All the Top 4 nominees are great, as were many in the Top 10 that didn't get through to finals. It's a tough year to win a drink book award, as there were so many good ones newly out. I'm psyched to have made it this far.
Check out the rest of the list here and please pick up Doctors and Distillers if you haven't yet! I'm really proud of it.
This is a quick post on some books I've read on women distilling in olden times.
Distillation of spirits came out of medical alchemy (which is to say medical proto-science), and early alchemy books included lots of recipes for distilled medicines with stuff like gold and silver included in them. Some of these alchemy books were written by and for women, such as the best known Secrets of Isabella Cortese.
A very scholarly look from an alchemy/scientific practice perspective is found in Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy. It mentions distilled medicines that often resemble pure alchemical preparations.
Those women alchemists were noblewomen, who could afford the stills and other equipment and often a staff to operate them. But as we move into the 1600s and look at other noblewomen in Germany, we find the distilled medicines looking more like medicine (nonsensical as much of it was) rather than alchemy.
Noblewomen (as well as monks and nuns) in the Later Middle Ages/Early Modern Period made beneficial medicines to give as charity to surrounding villagers. Keep in mind that the nobles and monks were landowners, so keeping their tenants alive longer increased their own wealth. The book to read about this time period is Panaceia's Daughters: Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Germany.
As we move into the 1700s we find women authoring household books aka recipe books. These books always had a practical aspect to them for running a household (as opposed to books solely on distillation, all written by men, which were solely distilled herbal medicine recipes). The women's books would include information like food preservation techniques along with distilled medicines.
These books have fun names, like:
• The Country Housewife and Lady's Director in the Management of a House, and the Delights and Profits of a Farm Containing Instructions for managing the Brew-House, and Malt-Liquors in the Cellar; the making of Wines of all sorts (1728)
• The Ladies Directory in Choice Experiments and Curiosities of Preserving (1662)
• The Accomlisht Ladys Delight (1684)
• The Queene-Like Closet (1681)
• The Compleat Housewife (1727)
There are some books about these recipe books, but looking more closely at distillation we find Every Home a Distillery: Alcohol, Gender, and Technology in the Colonial Chesapeake. This book is a bit more accessible than the previous two. The author shows that in young America in the Chesapeake area people were more isolated and their technology and social structures closer to those of the previous century. So in the 1600s and 1700s we find more women distilling in the home (or rather, estate) and look at what they used distilled alcohol for and how they made or bought it.
I touch on some of this in Doctors and Distillers, and if you want to go down this rabbit hole I'd recommend reading it first to put a lot of this stuff in context.
If you read my book Doctors and Distillers you know that cure-all theriacs often contained viper flesh. Now one person has recreated a recipe for a branded theriac called L’Orvietan, with everything but the snake.
Bernardini had to travel across Europe on the trail of L’Orvietan. He scoured historic archives and antique bookstores. He acquired rare medical books and documents, and met with scholars, herbalists and pharmacists. Finally, in a Venice library, he found the missing link in his search: a 1623 recipe, written by Ferrante’s son Gregorio, which lists the ingredients, and, importantly, their measures, for the original L’Orvietan. Bernardini says he left just one ingredient out of his modern mix: burnt viper’s flesh.
Yet the mixture of herbs that Ferrante developed and others copied wasn’t necessarily all that original. L’Orvietan and its imitators had their roots in a more antique antidote called theriac. Theriac was a preferred preventive and cure of Roman emperors who were justly afraid of being poisoned, either from something slipped into their food or drink or by a venomous snake slipped into their bed at night. In fact, Theriaca Andromochas, developed by Nero’s physician, also contained viper flesh — similar in concept to antivenoms made of snake venom — and became the gold standard of antidotes.
Check out the story in Discover.
I was delighted to learn that The Perfect Tonic, the name in the UK for Doctors and Distillers, has made it to the short list for the André Simon Food and Drink Book Awards.
The four finalists are:
A Sense of Place by Dave Broom
Drinking with the Valkyries by Andrew Jefford
Imperial Wine by Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre
The Perfect Tonic by Camper English
Some good company there!
The organization put out a statement:
This year's Drinks assessor Matt Walls discusses the shortlist: "Our final drinks shortlist contains four contrasting styles of book, all of which are equally absorbing. Dave Broom's A Sense of Place transports you to Scotland so vividly you can almost smell the whisky, as he looks at its links to people, place, culture and community. In The Perfect Tonic, Camper English covers the fascinating and peculiar medicinal history of beer, wines, spirits and cocktails with irrepressible flair and wit. In her eye-opening, meticulously-researched Imperial Wine Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre examines how deeply the roots of the international wine trade are embedded in Empire and settler colonialism. And finally, in Drinking with the Valkyries, Andrew Jefford lets us share his wonder of wine through his peerlessly precise use of the English language."
I provided some context for a story about carbonated water for Wine Enthusiast.
“Naturally carbonated mineral spring water was thought to be extra healthy compared with regular mineral water, and far healthier than surface water from rivers and streams,” English notes. “European and American mineral springs rich in iron or other mineral salts were recommended to settle the stomach or treat conditions including anemia.”
Previously the Wall Street Journal had posted an excerpt from my book Doctors and Distillers, so I wasn't expecting this review from wine writer Eric Asimov to come in.
A very nice review by Kevin R Kosar in The American Spectator!
Walk into the average American grocery store and you will see the spices in one aisle, herbal cures in another, and beer and wine somewhere else. Over-the-counter medicines have their own section, and drugs are locked up behind the pharmacist’s counter. And distilled spirits, well, you likely will not find them on the shelves — they typically are exiled to dedicated liquor stores. Separate products for separate purposes, all packaged, marketed, and sold separately.
This state of affairs developed only in the past century, as one learns from Camper English’s diverting Doctors and Distillers: The Remarkable Medicinal History of Beer, Wine, Spirits, and Cocktails (Penguin, 2022). Hitherto, these foodstuffs were united in the form of boozy health tonics and curatives, which the sick or simply thirsty acquired from apothecaries, monks, barbers, or other medicine men.
…
Camper English’s Doctors and Distillers is a delightful way to journey back in time and see the many and often crazy ways that drink and medicine merged. Having finished reading this expansive book, nonetheless my yearning for those remarkable days of yesteryear remain. So off to a bar I shall go, where I can relive them by paying a mixologist to serve me an elixir of Fernet-Branca and cola, or perhaps a slug of herb-loaded Jägermeister.
I read about a reference to distillation in the Pirotechnia, so I decided to look up the book. To conclude at last these methods of distilling and extracting waters are varied according to the wishes that come to the minds of the workers. But in my opinion the true way is to adapt the fires well, with which you can do whatever pleases you when you wish, without the necessity of so much coöperating equipment. For this reason it would perhaps be necessary that I tell you here of the shapes and kinds of the furnaces, but I have decided to tell you of them farther on and here, in order not to break the discourse on distillation, I will tell you in detail the methods that are used for making aqua vitae.Many call this water of life in order to exalt it it, but they also say that for him who does not know how to make it, it should be called water of death. This is that substance and that agent which the alchemists bring to such subtlety that they call it the Quintessence and they credit it with so many virtues and powers [128] that the heavens could scarcely perform more. It is indeed true that he who considers it well will see great and laudable effects. In addition to some experiences, I remember having seen a treatise on this in which an experimenter had noted more than two hundred experimental effects. But if it is true, as the alchemists say, that this power alone makes metals grow and revives half-dead bodies, all the other things that they say of it must also be believed. It is certainly evident that it is one of the things that are very preservative against putrefaction and is beneficial to many cold and moist sicknesses. The quality of this is subtle, fiery, and penetrating and these subtle, fiery, and penetrating and these subtle investigators believe that it extracts the virtues from everything that is put into it and converts them into its own subtle and penetrating nature. In short, they say so many things about it that it would be too long a subject if I should now wish to related it to you.
