Drink (22 page)

The modern wine bottle was an English invention, its creator Sir Kenelm Digby, scholar, traveler, sometime pirate, and pioneer archaeologist. Digby discovered a method of making cheap, strong bottles out of glass, hitherto a costly and fragile material whose manufacture was the province of artisans. His bottles were square, and translucent green or brown, rather than globular and clear, but they were wonderfully durable. When sealed with corks, another innovation, they provided a system for storing wine and allowing it to mature in an oxygen-free environment. For the first time since the fall of Rome, Europe had the technology to age wine.

In the same years that English lords were laying down ranks of square bottles full of Bordeaux in their cellars, they were also buying casks of wine from the Champagne district of France. This fluid, which at the time was a still, sweet drink, gold-tinted red, as if someone had opened an artery and dripped a little blood into a glass of white wine, had been all the rage at the French court when King Charles II had lived there in exile. His fellow monarch, Louis XIV, had been crowned in Rheims cathedral at the heart of the Champagne region and had drunk its wines ever since. Immediately post-Restoration this “frantically fashionable” French elixir was touted in England by the émigré Marquis de Saint-Évremond, where it, too, became all the rage. However, the champagne the English came to know and love was very different from the wine the French court drank every day. It arrived in England each autumn and was consigned to cellars to sleep over winter. When spring came and temperatures rose, its yeasts woke up and it underwent a secondary fermentation, which made it fizzy and dry. It is described as “brisk champagne” in its debut in the English language in 1664, and whereas Saint-Évremond considered bubbles in champagne to be sacrilege, in England they were de rigueur. Fizz made its stage debut in the comedy
Love and a Bottle
by George Farquhar, where its effervescence is commented on when poured out: “See how it puns and quibbles in the glass.”

However, by the time that champagne was sparkling in London theaters, a portion of English society had turned against the fashion for things French. They were, after all, made by Catholic hands, and Parliament and the English people were staunchly anti anything that smacked of popery. When King Charles tried to push a bill through Parliament granting freedom of worship to Catholics, it was rejected, and in 1679, imports of French wine were banned altogether. This served to make them more expensive rather than unavailable, and their consumption or rejection became polarized on party political lines.

The politicization of drinking tastes is apparent in later Restoration comedies, which used them as an aid to characterization. Tory writers created little England ale-loving Whig Puritans, who hated foreign drinks. Their archetype was Dashit, a typically hypocritical Whiggish wine merchant in Aphra Behn’s play
The Revenge
(1673). Their prejudices were expressed in the same work by Trickwell, who, disguised as a Puritan preacher, upbraids Dashit for selling French wine: “You have made us drunk with
the juice of the whore of Babylon:
For whereas good Ale, Perry, Cider, and Metheglin, were the Ancient British and Trojan drinks, you have brought in popery, mere popery— French and Spanish wines, to the subversion, staggering, and overthrowing of many a good Protestant Christian.”

Outside of plays and the high society that they represented, ale or beer was still the drink of most English people, whether Whig or Tory, and unlike French wines, which were taxed or exempted in tune with the mood in Parliament, both brews were subject to continuous levies. The excise introduced to England to fund its civil conflicts generated too much money to be repealed: A petition from the Brewers Company in 1660 pleading for “freedom from the illegal and intolerable burden of excise, burdensome to the poor to whom ale and beer, next to bread, are the chief stay” had been rejected, and thereafter tax on liquid bread was a fact of life in England.

The Restoration was a period of innovation in drinks. Novel beverages appeared in London, some of which were recorded by Samuel Pepys in his diary. These included such exotica as orange juice. Pepys had his first taste of this curiosity at the house of his cousin, Thomas Strudwick, in 1669, and he clearly was suspicious of its potablity: “Here, which I never did before, I drank a glass, of a pint I believe, at one draught, of the juice of oranges of whose peel they make confits . . . and it is a very fine drink; but it being new, I was doubtful whether it might not do me hurt.” While orange juice was rare, another novelty,
coffee,
very quickly became commonplace. Coffee was the first nonalcoholic beverage to be drunk regularly in England. People began to substitute a cup or two of this hot infusion for their morning pint of ale. It seemed to have all the invigorating properties of alcohol without inducing delinquency in the drinker.

Coffee originated in Ethiopia and for centuries had been a popular beverage in Islamic lands, which had held a monopoly on its production. The Dutch, however, had managed to obtain some coffee bushes in 1616, which they shipped to Amsterdam and thence to Sri Lanka, where they established a plantation of their own. From Sri Lanka they carried the plant to Java, where it flourished, and by the middle of the seventeenth century, they were growing enough to begin its export to Europe. The first coffee shop in England was opened in Oxford in 1651. London had one a year later, Venice followed in 1683, and Paris in 1686. The prophet of coffee in Paris was an Italian, Francesco Procopio dei Cotelli, whose Procope, which is still open, was the prototype of all French
cafés
.

The first coffee shop in England, that of Pasqua Rosee in Oxford, marked its debut with flyers, which explained the nature of the drink it sold and how it should be consumed. Coffee was “a simple innocent thing, compounded into a Drink, by being dried in an Oven, and ground to Powder, and boiled up with spring water, and about half a pint of it to be drunk . . . and to be take as hot as possibly can be endured.” The flyer also listed some of the medical benefits to be reaped from drinking coffee: It protected against headaches and was “excellent to prevent and cure the
Dropsy, Gout,
and
Scurvy
.” Moreover, it was “a most excellent Remedy against the Spleen,
Hypocondriack Winds,
or the like.” Finally, the flyers contained a warning as to psychoactive properties. While coffee would “prevent
Drowsiness,
and make one fit for business” it could also “hinder sleep for 3 or 4 hours.”

London had its first coffee shop a year after Oxford, and more than a hundred a decade later. Despite such rapid proliferation they were controversial institutions, as was the beverage they sold. The principal objection to their product was its failure to intoxicate. According to the first English critic of coffee, it was a loathsome fluid, “thick as puddle water . . . ugly in color and taste,” which had the nasty side effect of “qualifying wine,” i.e., countering its effects. Moreover, in the opinion of the same critic, coffee made its users garrulous, treacherous, and impotent. Whereas, in the ages before Christians had drunk the stuff, “a Prince of
Spain
[was] forc’d to make an Edict, that the Men should not repeat the act of Coition above nine times a night, for before the Edict, belike Men did exceed that proportion; That in this Age, Men drink so many Spirits and Essences, so much Strong-water, so many several sorts of Wine, such abundance of Tobacco, and (now at last) pernicious Coffee, that they are grown as impotent as Age, as dry and as unfruitful, as the Deserts of
Africk
.”

Despite the grave threat posed by coffee to the sex lives of English men and women, new coffeehouses kept appearing. From 1663 onward, the sale of coffee was regulated for the first time, alongside that of other new beverages, viz., tea, chocolate, and sherbet, and coffeehouses were licensed in a similar manner to alehouses. By modern standards the Java that they served was filthy stuff. Its active ingredient had spent months at sea before reaching England, and on arrival it was charred rather than roasted, ground into coarse lumps, and brewed up with river water in the proportions of one ounce per quart. Indeed, it is unlikely that the burgeoning popularity of coffee shops derived entirely from infusions, for they also sold a full range of alcoholic drinks. Their attraction rather seems to have been their egalitarian code. Just as pubs in the Middle Ages had served as sanctuaries from feudalism for the commoners, so coffee shops performed a similar role for England’s mercantile and professional classes. They were places where people of any background might meet on equal terms to do business, or to discuss matters of common concern, without having to adhere to the stultifying rituals relating to precedent then current in England. Their informal code was spelled out in a pamphlet of the age, dedicated to the “Excellent virtues of that sober and wholesome drink called Coffee”:

Coffeehouses tended to specialize in different sorts of clientele. While some drew clergymen, others attracted scientists, artists, or lawyers. Each was like a little court, where trade, literature, metaphysics, philosophy, or politics ruled, and gossip flourished. They became known as “penny universities,” as coffee cost a penny a cup
¹⁸
and newspapers and debate came free of charge. Groups of businessmen with similar interests gathered at specific coffeehouses to transact their affairs. Indeed, some such in the City of London quickly became the foci of both the domestic capital markets and international trade. From 1697 onward, most of the business of the London Stocks Exchange was carried out in a pair of coffeehouses—Jonathan’s and Garraway’s. London’s shipowners, meanwhile, met at Lloyd’s Coffee House, whose proprietor published a daily paper listing news of interest to the shipping world, held auctions of prize goods, and which evolved to become the headquarters of a global insurance market.

The net effect of the “salutiferous berry” on British drinking habits was considerable. For the first time in history, there was a safe, cheap, and respectable alternative to alcohol. It had its greatest impact in the morning: Instead of quaffing ale before going to work, people drank coffee by the dish, preferring to gibber rather than to stumble. The sobriety coffee fostered was welcomed, “for whereas formerly apprentices and clerks with others used to take their morning’s draught in ale, beer, or wine, which by the dizziness they cause in the brain make many unfit for business, they use now to play the goodfellows [with] this wakeful and civil drink.”

12 RUM

Sugar and slave trading were among the principal topics of conversation at Edward Lloyd’s Coffee House in London. Europeans had been found to have an insatiable appetite for the former substance, whose manufacture relied upon cheap labor supplied by the latter traffic. Sugar for the English market was produced in various Caribbean islands, which the English had begun to colonize at about the same time as New England. At first these had served as raiding stations from which to harry the shipping of other European nations, but once it was discovered that their soils were suited to sugarcane, they were cultivated with an intensity hitherto reserved for vineyards.

The manufacture of refined sugar for the home market created a by-product—molasses. Initially this was considered to be worthless and was fed to hogs, or dumped on the land as fertilizer. However, it was soon found that with the addition of water, molasses fermented readily. While the resulting brew had a few aficionados, further experimentation revealed that it was an ideal raw material for distillation, and
rum
was born. The first mention of the potation is contained in a description of Barbados, dating to 1651: “The chief fuddling they make in the island is
Rumbullion,
alias
Kill-Devil,
and this is made of sugar canes distilled, a hot, hellish, and terrible liquor.”

The island of Barbados, the source of this diabolic fluid, had been an uninhabited, densely wooded Eden when an English ship had chanced upon it 1607. A base was established at Holetown in the 1620s, and it was settled in earnest in the 1640s, first to grow tobacco, then, to the exclusion of all else, sugarcane. By the time that rum had made its debut in the lexicon, Barbados had been deforested and plantations of the new wonder crop covered much of its surface. Its alcoholic by-product was used to perk up the indentured servants from Britain who comprised its initial workforce: “For when their spirits are exhausted, by their hard labor, and sweating in the Sun, ten hours every day, they find their stomacks debilitated and much weakened in their vigor every way, a dram or two of this Spirit, is a great comfort and refreshing to them.”

However, free rum notwithstanding, competition for English indentured workers from Virginian tobacco growers caused a labor shortage, which was relieved by the importation of African slaves. Whereas in 1640 there had been more English slaves in Africa than vice versa, by 1660 the position was reversed, as English ships purchased tens then hundreds of thousands of Africans and carried them to the New World to work on plantations. Those who were landed in Barbados were provided a rum ration at work: “This drink is of great use to cure and ’fresh the poor negroes, whom we ought to have a special care of, by the labor of whose hands, our profit is brought in.”

The governing class of Barbados also took to ’freshing themselves with rum. When Christopher Codrington arrived in the island in 1703 to commence his appointment as its governor, he complained that the local dignitaries thought “the best way to make . . . strangers welcome is to murther them with drinking.” He also noted that their constitutions had been hardened by constant boozing to the extent that “the tenth part of that strong liquor which will scarce warme the blood of our West Indians who have bodies like Egyptian mummys, must certainly dispatch a newcomer to the other world.” When the Barbadians began to export their embalming fluid alongside their cargoes of sugar, it quickly acquired a reputation as a superior drink on the other side of the Atlantic. In 1708, the historian John Oldmixon recorded the appearance of rum in England, where it had “lately supplied the Place of Brandy in Punch” and was “much better than the Malt spirits and sad Liquors sold by our distillers.” Indeed, Oldmixon rated rum on a par with French Cognac in terms of quality, and more highly as a medicinal drink. It was “certainly more wholesome, at least, in the sugar islands; where it has been observed, that such as drink of . . . [brandy] freely, do not live long, whereas the Rum-Drinkers hold it to a good old age.”