Drinking Advice from Sarah Josepha Hale, 1839

Sarah Josepha Hale (1788-1879)

After her husband died in 1822, Sarah Hale took on writing work to support her five children. Chances are, you are familiar with her work; the song Mary Had a Little Lamb was based on her 1820 poem. She edited Ladies' Magazine from 1828-1837 and later became editor of the influential Godey's Lady's Book. Among her other works, she published in 1839 The Good Housekeeper. Her advice to housewives of the time strikes sensible notes: beer and warm tea are, indeed, wholesome drinks. Well. Hot tea, anyway; warm tea has no life in it. One can almost see her lips pursed in disapproval, however, when it comes to "fermented liquors." By the time she hits stride with her not-one-drop approach to distilled spirits, we realize that we've tumbled down a rabbit hole into a Puritanical realm of proto-Prohibition.

From The Good Housekeeper, here is Mrs. Hale and her take on appropriate beverages for American households:

WHAT SHALL WE DRINK?

Why water — that is a safe drink for all constitutions and all ages — provided persons only use it when they are naturally thirsty. But do not drink heartily of cold water when heated or greatly fatigued. A cup of warm tea will better allay the thirst and give a feeling of comfort to the stomach which water will not.

Toast and water, common beer, soda-water, and other liquids of a similar kind, if they agree with the stomach, may be used freely without danger. 

Fermented liquors such as porter, ale, and wine, if used at all as a drink, should be very sparingly taken. Distilled spirituous liquors should never be considered drinkable—they may be necessary, sometimes, as a medicine but never, never consider them a necessary item in house-keeping. So important does it appear to me to dispense entirely with distilled spirits, as an article of domestic use, that I have not allowed a drop to enter into any of the recipes contained in this book. 

As the primary effect of fermented liquors, cider, wine, &c is to stimulate the nervous system, and quicken the circulation, these should be utterly prohibited to children and persons of a quick temperament. In truth, unless prescribed by the physician, it would be best to abstain entirely from their use.

Hale, Sarah Josepha Buell. 1839. The Good Housekeeper: Or, The Way to Live Well and to be Well While We Live: Containing Directions for Choosing and Preparing Food, in Regard to Health, Economy and Taste. Boston: Weeks, Jordan and Company.

Goes well with:

• William "The Only William" Schmidt pontificates on Why Men Drink in his 1891 bartending manual The Flowing Bowl. 
• W.O Rigby gets into the spirit of Prohibition by thumbing his nose at Volstead with his 1920 fake-out Prohibition Schooners.

He Gurgled When He Walked

Charlie over at Modern Mechanix sells stuff on eBay. Cool stuff. Seems like old magazines, mostly. Don't know him, never met him. But I'll be keeping a closer eye on his blog after he posted pdfs of a 1930 article titled Tricks of the Rum Runners by Pat Roche, a one-time Treasury agent.

Here's Roche on Prohibition-era adulteration techniques:

The cutting plant buys large quantities of genuine liquor from the runners, opens the bottles, and adds an equal part of alcohol and an equal part of water, making three cases out of one. Flavoring and coloring matter also are added to bring the taste and appearance up to the original. Bottles, either purchased new from glass plants which make them to order and duplicate any foreign product in shape, size and appearance, or bought from old bottle dealers who have built up a market for empties, are used. The finished product can not be told from the original.

If it's just flavoring and "coloring matter" drinkers were lucky. But what flavor? What matter? The scan here is from a Prohibition-era moonshiner's secret hand-written notebook in my library and gives a clue to how one might cook up a batch of "whiskey essence"—butyric ether, rectified fusel oil, extracts of musk root, orris (root) and vanilla and others in a Cologne spirits base. Yum.

Check out Charlie's post for the full text of Roche's article and four pages of full-page pdfs. The caption on the picture at the header reads:

A unique method of liquor transportation via hot water bottles. The culprit was captured by a detective curious as to why the negro gurgled when he walked.

Given the profits margins of faked whiskey in 1930's Chicago, I wouldn't be surprised if every man, woman, and child gurgled just a little as they walked. Of course, if you're stuck using hot water bottles to transport liquor, the trick is to secure both ends.

Goes well with:

• Boilerplate: History of a Victorian Robot ("Mechanical Marvel of the Nineteenth Century")
  

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Scoffin' the Law

I want to be a scofflaw
And with the scofflaws stand;
A brand upon my forehead
A handcuff on my hand.
I want to be a scofflaw,
For since I went to school,
I hate to mind an order,
I hate to keep a rule.

~ anonymous poet C.W.
in Franklin P. Adams’ column
New York World, Jan 16, 1924

Delcevare King was a staunch prohibitionist and big mahoff with the Anti-Saloon League during Prohibition. His story is old hat to linguists and cocktail mavens, but the rest of us could use an introduction for his contribution to the drinking arts. In October 1923, he wrote a letter to the Harvard Alumni Bulletin (he was class of 1895) protesting the Harvard Glee Club’s singing of Johnny Harvard, the “most drinking of drinking songs…that comes pretty near to scoffing at the prohibition law.”

Even prohibitionists sometimes can have a point. Given some of the song’s lyrics, a reasonable person might conclude that alcohol—illegal for beverage purposes at the time—might figure subtly into undergraduate life at the university:



Drink,
drink,
drink,
drink,
drink,
drink,
drink,
drink,
drink,
drink,
drink,
drink,
drink,
drink,
drink,
drink,
drink,
drink,
drink,
drink,
drink.
Yes, drink.




King took umbrage and launched a national contest to come up with a new word describing those who flaunted their disregard of laws banning beverage alcohol. A $200 award was to be dispensed for the word “which best expresses the idea of lawless drinker, menace, scoffer, bad citizen, or whatnot, with the biting power of ‘scab’ or slacker.’”

There were something like 25,000 entries. Also-rans, according to the Boston Herald, include; vatt, still, scut, sluf, curd, canker, scrub, scuttier, dreg, drag, dipsic, boozlaac, alcolog, barnacle, slime-slopper, ell-shiner, still-whacker, sluch-licker, sink, smooth, lawless-ite, bottle-yegger, crimer, alcoloom, hooch-sniper, cellar-sifter, rum-rough, high-boozer, and law-loose-liquor-lover.

Whew. Lawless-ite ranks up there with deadites from the Evil Dead movies for words that hurt my ears, but I quite like bottle-yegger and even scuttier has a ring to it. Next time I'm giving someone the high hat, I might have to use that. I wonder—is there still a stash of submission letters somewhere? Some Boston-area archives?

Of the 25,000 entries, two contestants came up with the same term: scofflaw. The prize was split between Henry Irving Dale and Kate L. Butler. Within days, Harry’s Bar in Paris was offering a “Scoff-Law Cocktail.” The cocktail faded for a while, but the word stuck. A shame about the fading drink, though: it really does deserve a spot in your repertoire.


The Scofflaw Cocktail

1.5 oz rye
1 oz dry vermouth
3/4 oz lemon juice (freshly squeezed, please)
3/4 oz grenadine*

Shake with ice in a shaker for a slow count to ten, then strain into a cocktail glass and, if you like, add a lemon twist.

Yes, drink.

* Lagniappe: Make Your Own Grenadine

The cocktail crowd over at eGullet has an ongoing discussion of how best to make one's own grenadine from fresh pomegranate juice rather than relying on the scarlet corn syrup we knew growing up. If you want that bright Shirley-Temple-Cocktail red, then a brand such as Rose's would turn the trick. But it's worth experimenting with sugar and pomegranate juice to come up with your own house version. Here's what I do:

1 cup POM pomegranate juice
1 cup white table sugar
3-4 dashes of orange flower water

Put all the juice and sugar into the container in which you will store it—a plastic squeeze jar, a repurposed vermouth bottle, or even the POM bottle itself after using half the contents—and shake the hell out of it. Once the sugar goes into solution, add the orange flower water, give it a few swirls, and store in the refrigerator.

Note that this version, while red(ish), is much more dark and even slightly muddy-looking. The taste it great, but it's emphatically not the stuff of Kiddie Cocktails.


Goes well with

• The Harvard Song Book
  
• Predicting New Words: The Secrets of Their Success by Allan Metcalf
• Metcalf has been the long-standing executive secretary of the American Dialect Society
• David Wondrich's Imbibe!, a modern classic in mixology and the stratigraphy of cocktails
• Miller's Crossing, a script by Joel and Ethan Coen
  

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Prohibition Schooners

A Boston doctor issued a pamphlet
explaining how an innocent jug of molasses
could be turned into a vile jug of rumwith nothing more than a copper coil.
In a few days there was not a length of copper to be had
in the entire city.
Kellner, Esther (1971) Moonshine: Its History and Folklore.
Weathervane Books, New York.

That a certain segment of American society took Prohibition with grain of salt is apparent even still. Otherwise law-abiding citizens regularly circumvented statutes forbidding beverage alcohol by purchasing bootleg liquor from Canada, ersatz gin, and so-called Scotch (which may never have been anywhere near Scotland). Evading the law became a national pastime. Those wealthy enough to afford it traveled abroad to get their drink on. Many turned to home-brewing their own beer and wine. Some turned to small stills for their own use while others began moonshining on a massive scale.

The Scofflaw Cocktail, a rye and vermouth concoction, dates from this era. It followed hard on the heels of a national contest sponsored by wealthy prohibitionist Delcevare King (Harvard, class of 1895) to come up with a name for those who drank against the law. The scofflaws promptly named a cocktail after themselves.

But even candy makers and soda jerks got in on the hijinks. In Rigby’s Reliable Candy Teacher (13th edition, 1920), confectioner W. O. Rigby offers this thumb to the nose of the Anti-Saloon League:

Prohibition “Schooners”

In a glass stein or beer glass, prepare the dessert form of gelatine and run this in the stein or glass up to about 1 inch from the brim. This gelatine run into the glass should be a light amber color and flavored to suit. After running it in the glass or glasses, allow it to congeal. Whip up a certain amount of acidulated gelatine which has been dissolved over a steam bath. Just before it sets place it in the steins or glasses, and allow it to froth over the top. The result is an accurate imitation of the way a stein of beer “would look.” This is a novelty that takes exceedingly well as a burlesque on prohibition.

A word on schooners: In Kansas City, as late as the early 1990's, one could order a schooner of beer (especially the local and delicious Boulevard beers) from taps in old-school joints. The schooners there were massive goblets holding almost half a liter. If things got dicey, they could also be used to subdue troublemakers. Not that I ever saw this, of course. But I did see a few schooners bounce off wooden floors where other glasses would have shattered.

CocktailDB shows a more delicate (though still substantial) mug than what we called schooners. What I had in mind when I read this was more like this. See, also, Mindy Flacks showing how it's done at Louise's Downtown in Lawrence, Kansas. Attagirl, Mindy.

Goes well with

• Repeal Day

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