by Wayne Curtis
Copyright © 2006, 2007, 2018 by Wayne Curtis
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Broadway Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
crownpublishing.com
BROADWAY BOOKS and its logo, B D W Y, are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Originally published in hardcover, in slightly different form, in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 2006, and subsequently in paperback in slightly different form by Broadway Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 2007.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Curtis, Wayne,
And a bottle of rum: a history of the New World in ten cocktails/Wayne Curtis.—1st ed.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. North America—History. 2. Caribbean Area—History. 3. Rum—North America—History. 4. Rum—Caribbean Area—History. I. Title.
E46.C87 206
394.1'3—dc22 2006004992
ISBN 9780525575023
Ebook ISBN 9780525575030
Cover design: Evan Gaffney
Cover images: (map) Chronicle/Alamy Stock Photo; (tiki mug) Brent Hofacker/Alamy Stock Photo; (palm tree) Mary Evans Picture Library; (anchor) Mary Evans/Retrograph Collection; (Hemingway) akg-images
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[ Contents ]
Introduction
Chapter 1. KILL-DEVIL
Chapter 2. GROG
Chapter 3. FLIP
Chapter 4. MEDFORD RUM
Chapter 5. PLANTER’S PUNCH
Chapter 6. DEMON RUM
Chapter 7. DAIQUIRI
Chapter 8. RUM AND COCA-COLA
Chapter 9. MAI TAI
Chapter 10. MOJITO
A Thumbnail Guide to Rum
When It’s Cocktail Time
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
For my mother and father
Introduction
[ MOLASSES ]
How beverage alcohol is produced, distributed, consumed, and regulated…offers a key to the nature of a society and how it changes over time.
—JACK S. BLOCKER JR., JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY, 2003
Rum makes a fine hot drink, a fine cold drink, and is not so bad from the neck of a bottle.
—FORTUNE MAGAZINE, 1933
I’m standing in front of the City Tavern Restaurant in Philadelphia’s Old City. It’s an austerely classical building, with tall stone steps rising from the sidewalk to a recessed door. At the top of the steps stands a young man with his hands behind his back. He has a sallow complexion and wears a short blue jacket with meringuelike ruffles about the neck. He has the air of a sentry, of someone with whom I must negotiate in order to get past the door.
People in period dress always unsettle me. I dread the moment they make eye contact, then snap into historic character and start speaking with a surplus of enunciatory gusto about an esteemed gentleman you’ve perhaps heard of by the name of Thomas Jefferson or some such thing. I understand some people enjoy this palaver. I am not one of them.
The tavern is a faithful reconstruction of the old tavern on the same spot, built from the ground up by the National Park Service in 1976. When the original tavern opened in 1773, it was arguably the finest in all the colonies and quickly became a social hub for the city and, in turn, for a young nation. Colonial representatives to the Continental Congress lodged and ate here during their deliberations, and through the tavern’s doors passed such illustrious Americans as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Paul Revere, and John Adams, the last of whom called this “the most genteel tavern in America.”
They arrived here seeking to craft a new nation. I have come seeking an old drink.
Rum is the history of America in a glass. It was invented by New World colonists for New World colonists. In the early colonies, it was a vital part of the economic and cultural life of the cities and villages alike, and it soon became an actor in the political life. Hoping to briefly visit that lost world, I ascend the steps of the tavern.
At the doorway Mr. Ruffles happily spares me ye olde time banter. He escorts me through the Subscription Room, where a melancholy woman in a mobcap plays something funereal on the harpsichord. Just beyond is the tavern, which is dusky and furnished with several nicely worn tables and benches. I am shown a seat in a corner, and handed a menu of rustic colonial fare, which includes West Indies pepperpot soup, prime rib with a Yorkshire pancake, and turkey potpie.
The food sounds appealing if a little severe, but I’m only interested in ordering a rum shrub, a popular colonial-era drink. The unusual name comes from the Arabic word for drink, shrab. Colonists would chop up fruit or berries (or a strong spice like ginger), boil the pieces in vinegar, then let it steep for a day. The concoction then would be boiled again with sugar, resulting in a dense, intensely flavorful syrup that could preserve the pleasing bite of the fruit into winter and beyond.
A little shrub added to a glass of water would make it come alive with taste and glimmer with a light pastel hue, and the concoction could be further enlivened with rum or brandy, and often was. I am told by my ponytailed waiter, Chris, who was not at risk of lapsing into any unprovoked hilarity, that shrubs accounted for 60 percent of the wine and spirit sales at the City Tavern. Chris further informs me that shrub was once a popular drink because it provided vitamin C throughout the year. Never mind that vitamin C wasn’t actually identified until the 1920s. I nod my head gravely and order up a shrub.
The barkeep is housed in a sort of wooden cage in a corner, like a war criminal waiting to testify at a tribunal. He sets to work on my drink, but I can’t see much. Other waiters lean on the counter in front of him and chat about “deuces” and “four-tops,” which strikes my ear as pleasingly colonial. My shrub readied at last, Chris brings it over and sets it down. Pale pink and effervescent, the drink looks refreshing, and at the first sip I’m pleased to discover that it’s tart and sprightly, like a dilute fruit punch, and has the thirst-cutting precision of a gin and tonic.
This is no doubt an enjoyable introduction to rum’s early history. Yet I despair slightly, for I am getting no closer to finding colonial rum. The rum in this shrub is Captain Morgan, a spiced rum that was first sold in 1984, which, despite the colonial name, tastes nothing like its ancestor. From a marketing point of view, this is probably not a bad thing. The old-fashioned rum Jefferson and Adams ordered would have been cloying, greasy, nasty-smelling stuff. Colonial rum, made with a crude pot still and seat-of-the-pants technology, would have been laden with impurities, and could have been whiffed a block away. This rum shrub had been gentrified, making the past more potable.
Nor was there much choice in rum drinks. Shrub was it. An actual eighteenth-century tavern would have had a small riot of rum concoctions, along with a taverner conversant with them. Rum was by far the most popular spirit of the era, and often the only spirit sold. Guests could have ordered up a mimbo, a sling, a bombo, a syllabub, a punch, a calibogus, a flip, a bellowstop, a sampson, or a stonewall. Colonial tavern keepers were every bit as imaginative as today’s $18-a-cocktail bartender and would have added molasses and dried pumpkin and coarse sugar and water and a bit of citrus and whatever else was at hand to give the
drink some depth—and, more to the point, to mask the rum’s taste. Few ingredients were off limits in pursuit of this goal.
To drink a rum shrub made with Captain Morgan was to linger in comfort at a safe distance from the past. Learning about rum at the City Tavern, it turns out, was like learning about the habits of wild bears at Walt Disney World’s Country Bear Jamboree.
My journey would take longer than I thought.
* * *
—
A short while later I walk two blocks north for a wholly different rum experience. Cuba Libre is a trendy two-story restaurant and rum bar that opened in late 2000. This Friday evening it’s packed with professionals in suits, and I wedge myself sidewise to get through the downstairs crowd to the overflow bar on the mezzanine. The interior was created by a company called Dynamic Imagineering, which themed the place to convince customers that they were dining in a courtyard of Old Havana. It’s all tile work and stucco, wrought-iron balconies, and heavy wooden doors. Diners sit under palm trees that flutter gently under rattan ceiling fans; the songs of Ibrahim Ferrer float above the din. A huge photomural on one wall depicts a vintage American car with bulbous fenders.
Cuba Libre is one of a handful of destination rum bars that have blossomed around the nation. They’re cropping up in the wake of martini bars and single-malt Scotch bars, small meccas of rum where the spirit is treated with unaccustomed deference. Much of the output of the West Indies and the Spanish Main is arrayed high and wide behind the bar, like heads on a trophy hunter’s wall: rums from Haiti, Barbados, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guyana, Jamaica, Mexico, Guatemala, and Colombia. Drinkers here select from sixty-two different varieties, priced up to $44 per shot. The drink menu is a spiralbound mini textbook that includes a brief course on the history of rum and a list of the rum drinks on offer, which include the Cuba libre, the daiquiri, the dark and stormy, the caipirinha (a sort of rough Brazilian daiquiri), and two variations on the mojito: regular and watermelon.
The mojito emerged from nowhere and by the late 1990s it was suddenly everywhere. In 2004, the town of Richland, New Jersey, the home of a large mint farm, renamed itself Mojito for a few weeks as part of a publicity stunt funded by Bacardi. Bacardi chose Mojito as a town name, according to a marketing executive, because the drink out-Googled “appletini” by a margin of fifteen to one.
The mojito’s popularity isn’t solely due to marketing stunts. It happens to be a superb drink with a fine pedigree. It’s uncommonly refreshing—it’s basically a tall daiquiri with the addition of mint and club soda or a rum Collins with mint. (It’s also been called a Cuban mint julep.) It’s not all that difficult to make. It combines strata of sweet and tart, lightly complicated with mint. It is summer in a glass.
“All of our specialty cocktails are authentic,” boasts the Cuba Libre menu. The staff seems to take the same sort of pains crafting an authentic mojito as the design firm had in making an ersatz Cuba. The restaurant scouts produce markets for just the right kind of herba buena (spearmint is better than peppermint), and purchased an old sugarcane press to make its own guarapo—fresh sugarcane juice—to sweeten the drink. Two employees work nearly full-time to just support the local demand for mojitos—they clean and stem the mint, squeeze fresh limes, and crush the sugarcane daily. (Guarapo goes sour quickly and can’t be stockpiled for future use.)
That workers are toiling so hard for authenticity amid a wholly artificial environment, meant to evoke another time and another place, causes my heart to skip a beat in admiration of the utter complexity of American life.
Here is how history is invented and then reinvented, a mill in which simple products of the earth are forged into lasting symbols.
* * *
—
Rum’s genius has always been its keen ability to make something from nothing. It begins with molasses, a by-product of sugar making that had virtually no value at the outset of the sugar industry. Rum has persistently been among the cheapest of liquors and thus often associated with the gutter. But through the alchemy of cocktail culture, it has turned into gold in recent years. Rum is reinvented every generation or two by different clans, ranging from poor immigrants who flocked from England to the West Indies, to Victorians enamored of pirates, to prohibitionists and abolitionists, right down to our modern marketing gurus, who tailor it day by day to capture the fickle attentions of consumers attracted to bright glimmerings of every passing fad.
I won’t make the argument here, which has been made for so many everyday items in recent books, that rum was the item “that changed the world.” It certainly put its hand on the tiller of America’s past now and again, but the value in examining it minutely lies elsewhere. A rum bottle serves better as a prism through which to see how America changed and developed from the arrival of the first European settlers to the present day. Rum didn’t necessarily change history, but history certainly changed rum, and if you but look you can see all of us reflected in each variation.
Refracted through a bottle of rum, the world looks different: for instance, how the islands were once the central gateway to the colonial world, and the great mass of land that’s now the United States was by and large the uninteresting backyard. Through that bottle you can see how pirates and the colonial slave trade and the domination of the Europeans over the native Americans actually happened, and how these episodes later became part of a national mythology.
To track rum to its source—back through the mojito craze, the Trader Vic interregnum, the Prohibition era, the grim slave epoch, the age of the pirates, and the first European settlement of North America—is to run to ground the story of America.
Rum, it turns out, is the most protean of American spirits. Like any liquid, it can change its form to fit its vessel. But unlike most liquids, it can also change its whole character. Rum disproves the tired bromide put forth by F. Scott Fitzgerald that there are no second acts in American life. In fact, American life is made up of nothing but second acts, and rum sets a fine example.
Bourbon fanciers, who often claim for their tipple the title of “America’s spirit,” drink one of the most regulated spirits known. To be labeled bourbon, it has to be made with a certain percentage of corn and aged in a certain kind of barrel. But excessive regulation is not the spirit of America. Unrestricted experimentation is. Rum embodies America’s laissez-faire attitude. There have never been uniform, global guidelines for making it. There’s no international oversight board, and its taste and production varies widely, depending on where it’s made, leaving the market to sort out favorites. If sugarcane or its by-products are involved in the distillation process, you can call it rum. Rum is the melting pot of spirits—the one liquor available in clear, amber, or black variations.
Over the course of four centuries, rum has transformed itself from swill to swanky, and moved from the gutter to the great room. It began as the drink of the common man, the booze to guzzle when you turned up only lint and a few coins in your pockets. Through the wiles and persistence of its makers, rum has followed an upward trajectory and is now the drink of all classes. It’s the great American story: the ne’er-do-well who overcame the unfortunate circumstances of its birth to be accepted in the more rarified world of the gentry.
Rum is a survivor. Its story is classically American in that it’s a tale of a rise, a fall, and a comeback. Rum emerged out of the confusion of a freshly settled land, and its production became one of the dominant industries of the new economy. And then it all but disappeared, as if the knowledge of its manufacture had lapsed, not returning with any force for more than a century. And when it did, rum dusted itself off and, as it is wont to do, went looking for a party.
Rum has always had a distinctly American swagger. It is untutored and proud of it, raffish, often unkempt, and a little bit out of control. The history of rum tends toward the ignoble, many times pleasingly so. “Rum’s early history is one long rap
sheet,” wrote Hugh G. Foster in 1962. This is especially true when compared to snooty old gin and its dull marriage to the martini, or upstart vodka, for which quality is regularly confused with marketing. And whiskey is still fighting its tired, ancient battles—Scotch versus Irish, Canadian versus bourbon—like feudal lords grappling for control of empty moors. Rum is always willing to try something new and sort out the consequences later. As the bon vivant James Beard put it in 1956, “Of all the spirits in your home, rum is the most romantic.”
Rum, in short, has been one of those rare objects in which America has invested its own image. Like moonglow, the life of America is reflected back in each incarnation of rum.
* * *
—
In this book, I’ve chosen to tell the story of rum through ten drinks. Each era of North American progress has had its own rum drink, ranging from the harsh kill-devil of the earliest colonial days to the pleasantly sophisticated mojito of today. In each chapter, I’ll look at the political, economic, and cultural environment that allowed each drink to arise. More generally, this book strives to answer three broad questions about rum: How did it grow to become the most important spirit in the New World in the eighteenth century? How did it come to be eclipsed by other drinks in the nineteenth century? And how did it manage to find its way back?
For this book, I immersed myself in rum for more than three years—not quite literally, but not far from it. I’ve consumed it in quantities that were of grave concern to friends and family, traveled great distances to sample it, mixed it with things that were probably not meant to be mixed and, in general, tested the forbearance of a patient wife. I recall awakening on more than one morning to a dull and distant sort of pain, then finding in my pockets unintelligible notes in what appeared to be my own handwriting—“Tolstoy/war and peace, window scene rum” was one.
