Made In America - Bill Bryson [131]
II
And on to drinking. One of the more enduring misconceptions concerning the Puritans in America is that they abjured alcohol. In fact, they liked a good drink or even a not-so-good one. One of the more popular tipples of early America, especially at weddings and other big social occasions, was sack posset, a concoction made by combining any handy intoxicant, usually ale or wine, with thick dots of curdled milk, which may explain why no one drinks it any longer. The sack in the name has nothing to do with a cloth container, incidentally. It is a corruption of the Latin siccus, meaning dry.
If colonial Americans were not adventurous eaters, they were happy to take their drinks from almost anywhere. The international pedigree of drinking terminology is evidenced by, among many others, julep, from the Arabic julab; sangría (often called san garee in eighteenth-century America), from the Spanish word for blood; toddy from Hindi tārē or tārē, a kind of palm tree sap; and beer, from the Germanic bēor (and ultimately from the Latin bibere, ’to drink’).
The early colonists showed a particular fondness for blending odd ingredients – eggs with milk and beer, for instance – and employed a variety of names to describe the result: mum, perry, switchel, metheglin, egg pop, balderdash (from which comes our word for nonsense), cherry bounce, any number of flips, and cock ale. This last named – a somewhat less than beguiling mixture of chicken soup and beer – is sometimes cited as the source for cocktail. Though cocktail is indubitably an Americanism – its first known appearance was in a newspaper in Hudson, New York, in 1806 – its similarity to cock ale is probably coincidental. Cock ale was never a popular drink – even in that adventurous age few thought of chicken soup as a distinguished addition to the punch bowl – and there is no known link between the two words. So where then does cocktail come from? According to Flexner, the term ‘almost certainly’ evolved ftom the French coquetier, or egg-cup, after a New Orleans apothecary who dispensed concoctions in egg-cups. Other, more literal-minded observers suggest that it has some connection with the tail of a rooster, though quite why the tail of a rooster would suggest a potent beverage is anyone’s guess. A more ambitious and almost certainly fanciful theory is that the cocktail was invented for the daughter of King Oxolotl VIII of Mexico. Her name was Xochitl, which the Spanish translated as Coctel.23 The word also bears a striking, but apparently coincidental, resemblance to a word from the Krio language of Sierra Leone, kaktel, meaning a scorpion, a creature with a notorious sting in its tail. One possibility that seems not to have been considered by any authority, so far as I can tell, is that it might refer to a stiff drink’s capacity to make one’s tail cock up. Applied to horses, the word took on that sense in England at almost exactly the time that it first appeared in a drinking context in America. At all events for most of its early life cocktail didn’t have the whiff of sophisticated refinement now associated with it. In the 1820s, a Kentucky breakfast was defined as ‘three cocktails and a chew of terbacker’.24
Through most of the eighteenth century the principal strong drink in America was rum, a shortening of rumbullion, a word whose origins are entirely obscure. Towards the end of the century a new drink came along that rapidly displaced it – bourbon. Bourbon was a by-product of the Whisky Rebellion of 1791, when the federal government imposed a bitterly opposed tax on domestic rye whisky. In an effort to evade taxation, some two thousand distillers fled to Kentucky – which was not yet a state and thus, they hoped, not subject to the tax – and set up their stills there. When the rye crop failed, they turned as an expedient to corn and found to their gratification that it produced a drink of uncommon smoothness. They called it after the county in which they had settled, though in fact it was not bourbon as we now know it. It was only later, after the 1820s, that