I don’t consume a lot of alcohol of any
kind. My alcohol consumption was immodest for a spate in my 20s, after which I
became a near teetotaler for more than a decade, but both behavior patterns proved
to be (extended) phases. For the past score of years it has been fairly modest,
at least by the standards of the CDC. The CDC guidance for an adult male of
average size is no more than 14 drinks per week
and no more than 4 in any one day. (A standard “drink” in the US is defined as
14 grams of alcohol, which is the amount in 1.5 ounces [44.4 mL] of 80-proof [40%]
spirits.) I haven’t met, much less exceeded, either CDC limit in the current
century, and rarely came close. But when I do pour myself a little ethanol, it
is usually a high proof bourbon or rye. Neat: no ice, no mixers. I don’t care
much for sweet or mellow alcoholic beverages: the burn is part of the
point, much as the heat of a chili pepper is the point. This wasn’t always the
case. In my college years (legal drinking age was 18 then as it still is in
most of the world today) I didn’t like the harshness of unmixed spirits, so I either
opted for wine or would disguise spirits in cocktails aimed at those with a
sweet tooth: white Russians (long before The
Big Lebowski), grasshoppers, screwdrivers, Southern Comfort & Coke, and
the like. (Aside: sweeter than bourbon, Southern Comfort is pretty awful by
itself IMHO, but it is quite good as a mixer in lieu of bourbon.) Eventually
for simplicity’s sake I came to favor rum and Coke (aka Cuba libre) as my go-to
cocktail, rum being a spirit actually made from sugar and from sugar byproducts
such as molasses.
This hasn’t been my
tipple of choice since Star Wars: Episode
VI - Return of the Jedi was in theaters for the first time, but nostalgia for
that era likely influenced my decision last week to pick up a copy of And a Bottle of Rum: a History of the New
World in Ten Cocktails by Wayne Curtis. I like thematic histories. On my
shelves I have dedicated histories of salt, pork, cod, plagues, textiles,
shipping, and even rust, among many others. The elements of history – even
seemingly minor ones – are so intertwined that each can have profound impacts
in unexpected ways. Salt, for instance, may seem to have little to do with the
American Civil War, yet it was a strategic material necessary (in those
pre-refrigeration days) to preserve food to feed the troops, and its shortage
in the South was a real hardship; coastal Southern salt production facilities
were among the first targets of the Union Navy. This reveals the strength and
the weakness of histories that place one element – even a big one be it class, race,
ideology, or what-have-you – front and center. It really is illuminating to
view history from each of those perspectives, but we mislead ourselves if we
think that only one lens is correct or that it gives us a full view. A few
hundred years ago it would have seemed normal to regard religion as the central
mover of history. By the late 20th century, however, the historical
world view of statesmen and academics on both sides of the Cold War had become
so thoroughly secularized that the Islamic Revolution in Iran (which had
nothing to do with class, liberalism, Marxism, capitalism, or democracy)
completely blindsided them. Rum is not remotely as important as anything
mentioned so far, not least because lots of substitutes for it always were and
are available. Yet neither is it negligible.
Sugar is not an
indigenous New World crop. It is native to Papua New Guinea from which it
spread slowly westward in ancient times. Alexander the Great in 325 BCE
encountered it in India, and the plant was carried further west in Hellenistic
times. It was not abundant in the West, however, until introduced to the Caribbean
islands, which proved to have the perfect climate and soil for it. It was the
crop that put the islands on a paying basis for French and English colonists in
the 17th century. It wasn’t a bonanza comparable to the gold and
silver treasures flowing from the Spanish territories, but (unlike the French
and English colonies on the mainland, which were a serious drain on homeland
resources) it was something. It was something with dire consequences: slave
labor on the sugar plantations. Sugar production creates a lot of waste in
stalks and molasses. We don’t know who first decided to ferment and distill
alcohol commercially from the waste, but the where is probably Barbados. The
oldest mention in print of the stuff (called Rumbullion by the author) is by a
visitor to the island in 1652. The earliest surviving example of the short form
“rum” is also from Barbados in a 1658 deed that mentions “cisterns for liquor
for rum.”
Rum caught on quickly
in England and the English colonies. It didn’t suit the French and Spanish, who
continued to prefer wine and brandy at home and in their colonies, but they
were happy to export their excess molasses to the East Coast of North America
where it was distilled into rum in copious quantities. Rum helped spark the
American Revolution. In 1763 England began to enforce the previously flouted
Molasses Act and followed it with the Sugar Act of 1764, which placed tariffs
on sugar and molasses thereby threatening American rum distilleries. The uproar
was so great that the tariff on molasses was reduced in 1766 to a paltry 1
penny per gallon, but by then the Americans were stirred up about other things
as well. When rebellion broke out, the molasses trade was disrupted anyway, of
course, so the colonists became whiskey distillers. Whiskey still dominates the
output of American distillers, though in 2021 Americans drink much more
imported vodka than their own whiskey. Despite that Yo Ho Ho
song, which we owe to Robert Louis Stevenson and Treasure Island, rum wasn’t big among Caribbean buccaneers until
the later years of the classic age of piracy. It wasn’t available in the early
years. Blackbeard, however, was an inveterate rummy (he mixed it with gunpowder
of all things), so at least there is one notable conformer to stereotype. Grog
(3-to-1 mix of water and rum plus a splash of lime) wasn’t a pirate thing at
all but a Royal Navy thing. Admiral Edward Vernon (nicknamed Old Grogram)
decreed the watered and limed rum ration, which was specified in the naval code
in 1756. Rum for its first two
centuries was a rough, raw, and ragged drink. Facundo Bacardi y Maso changed
that when Bacardi’s distillery opened in Santiago Cuba in 1862. The rough edges
were smoothed out with aging and a filtration process that is still technically
secret (but probably uses sand and charcoal, much like Jack Daniels whiskey). The
result is a rum that is pleasant without a mixer. Other distillers soon
followed. Santiago is also the
birthplace of the Cuba libre (rum and Coke). The time and place are pretty
certain though the details vary with the teller. Since its introduction in
1886, Coca-Cola had been tried as a mixer for various spirits. In the most
common version of the story, during the Spanish-American War in 1898 American
troops in bars mixed rum and Coca-Cola and toasted their rebel allies, “Por Cuba libre!” In the US it did not
become a common cocktail before World War 2. During the war, however, it was the
drink of choice of sailors on Trinidad where there was a major US naval base
and no shortage of Caribbean rum. An island entertainer with the charming name
Lord Invader took note and modified a calypso tune originally written by
Trinidadian Lionel Belasco in 1906 with new lyrics and a new title. The locals
and the sailors liked it. Comedian Morey Amsterdam (readers of a certain age
will recognize him from The Dick Van Dyke
Show) heard the song when on a USO tour, got professional help back in the
States to polish the score, and introduced it to various singers. The Andrews
Sisters recorded Rum and Coca-Cola in
1944. It was the flip side of the single One
Meat Ball, which they expected to be a hit; instead Rum and Coca-Cola made a splash and One Meat Ball just a ripple. One couldn’t ask for better
advertising. Whether called a rum and Coke or a Cuba libre, it’s been a very
common bar order ever since. Side note: after the war the aging Lionel Belasco
sued and won for copyright infringement. Rum sales in the US
have about 10% of the market for hard spirits. The percentage varies a little
from year to year as rum based drinks (Mai Tai, Piña Colada, Daiquiri, Mojito,
etc., each of which has its own connection to social history) go in and out of fashion,
but only the very expensive high end rums show any long term trend upward in
sales. I’m too cheap for those. I don’t see myself ever ordering any of the
more complicated rum cocktails either. Just for old times’ sake though, perhaps
one night I’ll once again toast “Por Cuba
libre!”
No comments:
Post a Comment