Rebellious Spirits E-Book

Ruth Ball

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 330

Beschreibung

A delicious taste of the secret, exciting and often dangerous history of illicit spiritsBritain has always been a nation of enthusiastic drinkers. Any attempt to regulate, limit or ban our favourite tipple has been met with imaginative and daring acts of defiance: selling gin through pipes in a London back alley; smuggling brandy across Cornish clifftops; or dodging bombs and shrapnel running whisky in the Blitz.The history of spirits in Britain has more illicit in it than licit - and that history has shaped these isles. Packed with wild stories, as well as authentic recipes from the past, Rebellious Spirits reveals the colourful characters and tall tales behind Britain's long and lively love affair with booze.

Leseprobe

‘Full of great stories about the sordid and often lethal business of illegal alcohol’ – Henry Jeffreys, The Guardian Best Drink Books of 2015

‘Evok[es], with its tales of gin being piped in alleyways, a mood of nostalgic Blitz-era gentility’ – Stephen Bayley, Spectator

‘An engaging, witty and informative read for anyone interested in the colourful and exciting history of booze’ – Ginfestival.com

‘Many laugh out loud moments . . . I absolutely loved the recipes. . . . It’s such an interesting book that I am sure I will pick it up again for many years to come. It has certainly made drinking whisky and gin much more interesting . . . just the right amount of history and humour’ – The Book Magnet

‘For boozy, literary-minded dreamers . . . a lively and engaging read’ – Countrywives.co.uk

‘I’m forever fascinated by the underground, and the sub-cultural drinking habits of bad old Blighty are a rip-roaring read’ – King Adz, author of The Urban Cookbook and Street Knowledge

‘I loved everything about this book; the enthusiasm it brings to its subject, the try this at home approach, its humour, and the stories it brings to life. It really has a lot to recommend it’ – desperatereader.blogspot.uk

‘A damn fun read . . . I love the mix of historical facts with recipes and personal stories from the characters involved. And the characters we meet on the way are fascinating – as are the ingenious lengths they go to in order to conceal their illicit booze making from the authorities’ – Madame J-Mo

‘Alchemist and drinks genius Ruth Ball has written a thrilling history of people and events surrounding the intoxicating world of spirits’ – Lemonaste blog

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1: Monks and Monasteries

Chapter 2: They’ll Never Take Our Whisky

Chapter 3: The Gin Craze

Chapter 4: Pure Irish Spirit

Chapter 5: Worse Things Happen at Sea

Chapter 6: We’ll Drink Again

Chapter 7: A Scottish Fairy Tale

Chapter 8: Exploding Garages and Bootleg Brands

Recommended Further Reading

Acknowledgements

Index

INTRODUCTION

Britain is a nation of enthusiastic drinkers. You don’t have to look far to see that. In 2016 around 30 million Brits had a drink and, of those, almost 5 million drank on at least five days of the week. Small villages start national campaigns to save their only pub, the heart of the community, and in larger towns driving directions are often given using the pubs as landmarks. A friend’s house will be ‘left at The Rising Sun, straight on past The Crown but if you reach The Haymakers you’ve gone too far’.

We love our booze, and woe betide anyone who tries to interfere with it. Any attempt to regulate, ban or limit supply has only resulted in rebellious behaviour. We have a long and proud history, filled with wonderfully colourful stories, of people determined to fly in the face of authority, and continue making, selling, buying and, of course, consuming our favourite spirits, whether it’s someone selling gin through pipes and over windowsills in a London back alley; hiding stashes in a secret chamber in the walls of a peat burner’s hut on an Irish bog; a lone figure standing guard on a Cornish clifftop waiting for a smuggler’s signal; or dodging bombs and shrapnel running whisky in the Blitz.

The history of spirits in Britain has more illicit in it than licit. The most famous whisky brands have huge, mysterious holes in their official histories, times when writing down what they were doing would have been too dangerous, so that much is a mystery even to their owners. The British government even tried to outlaw drinking gin at the cost of thousands of pounds and the loss of what little popularity it had. The strictest control measures have always failed. The rebellious spirit of spirit drinkers refuses to be quelled.

Beer and wine are all very well for a work night out or your cousin’s wedding, but it has always been spirits that accompany naughtiness and rule-breaking. No gunslinger ever burst into a saloon and demanded half a pint of craft lager; no gangster ever set up an illegal wine press in their bathtub. Spirits are the true drink of the underworld. Such a powerful drink in such a small package: the feel of that first sip like liquid fire warming right down to your toes, the knowledge that a pint of it would mean certain oblivion. We know that it’s wrong, but that is what is so tantalisingly right.

In writing this history I have delved into archives, scoured newspapers and listened carefully to the rich oral history passed from bartender to bartender in order to find some of the best stories and amazing characters behind the black-market trade in spirits. Sometimes the sources were a little questionable – the words of thieves and smugglers – but these are the stories as they were recorded by the people who lived them, complete with their own embellishments and wild claims. To give you a taste of the history and bring it alive, the stories are accompanied by authentic recipes for drinks of the era – along with adaptations by me, the Alchemist, to make them safe and legal. Follow them carefully for a genuine taste of history.

Finally, before you immerse yourself in this very British history of spirits and discover a new world, pour yourself one of those classic American Prohibition-era cocktails. I recommend the Sidecar, a popular cocktail in the more glamorous New York speakeasies of the 1920s. Supplied by gangsters and sipped by the rich and the famous, it was strong, simple and heavily flavoured with citrus to disguise the poor quality of bootleg bathtub brandy. Drink furtively while fully prepared to flee at the first sign of a raid by the fuzz.

SIDECAR

2 parts brandy (a cheap brandy for authenticity or a VSOP cognac for pleasure) 1 part orange brandy (or Cointreau) 1 part lemon juice

Shake over ice and strain into a chilled Martini glass. Now sit yourself in a leather wing chair, light up a good cigar and sip slowly as you read this book.

CHAPTER ONE

MONKS AND MONASTERIES

For a long time there were no illicit spirits in Britain. Spirits cannot break the law when there are no laws to break, and laws about spirits cannot exist until spirits exist themselves. So before the story of illicit spirits in Britain can be told, I have to tell the story of how spirits came to be, and of the journey they took to reach one small windswept isle on the edge of Europe – an isle inhabited by people who were badly in need of a dram or two to keep out the cold.

The true origins of spirits have often been debated. Some claim they were being distilled in Egypt as the pyramids were built, others that arrack has been produced in Sri Lanka for three millennia. There’s little proof for any of these theories; most are based on a line or two in a single book that could be interpreted this way or that. The discovery could even have been made more than once, miles and centuries apart. The version I’ve chosen to tell is my favourite and just as likely to be true as any other.

Like many great inventions, it all began in Greece over 2,000 years ago. Unfortunately, once discovered, the invention was forgotten again for more than half of those years. Or rather, not exactly forgotten, but kept a closely guarded secret by a mystic sect who based their entire religion on getting very drunk. You could call that behaviour selfish or you could just call it normal behaviour for the constantly intoxicated. Whatever the reasons, this religious secret-keeping meant that it wasn’t until the thirteenth century that anyone else in the world really got to have a proper drink. To make matters worse, those in the sect who knew the secret didn’t even use the spirit for drinking.

The first spirits in the world, instead of being consumed in the usual manner, were used for a very special ceremony. An initiate would be brought before a gathering of the sect and neat spirit would be poured over their head and shoulders. Then, to test whether they were truly under the god’s protection, they would be set alight.

With luck, the initiate would be kept safe from serious burns by a special property that most, but not quite all, spirits have. Spirits are high in alcohol compared to fermented drinks like wine – they have enough alcohol to catch alight and to burn for a while, but they are still usually mostly water. When something is soaked in spirit and set alight then the alcohol will burn off, leaving behind enough water to stop even something flammable, such as paper or human hair, from catching on fire. However, if the spirit is too strong (around 60 per cent abv or above) then there is not enough water left for protection, and the soaked thing – or person – will scorch and burn. With no reliable way for the cult to test the strength of the spirits they were producing, this had the potential to be a dangerous initiation.

The whole ritual just goes to show what kinds of risky ideas result from the overconsumption of wine. Most Ancient Greeks drank theirs watered and believed that anyone who drank undiluted wine would go mad. So it’s probably best not to take the risk and to stick to a nice, safe dry Martini.

The deity who inspired this befuddled and dangerous devotion was Dionysus, god of wine, the vine and all moist fruits. His sects were found throughout Greece and were many and varied in nature. As you might imagine, the worship of the god of drink and mayhem was not an organised affair but performed here and there, this way and that way, by any who felt his calling. But there is one sect in particular that is recorded as having performed the spirit-burning ceremony and they came from Delphi.

Delphi was a shrine that was devoted primarily to the sun god Apollo, but it was also teeming with other religions, cults and sects crammed many to a street. There was nothing particularly unusual about the worshippers all setting up side by side. In a society that accepted the existence of many gods, the average citizen would visit all of them, trying to stay on their good side. By modern standards, the Delphi cult of Dionysus was unusually secretive, obsessive and, well, completely barking mad; in Ancient Delphi it was just one among many.

People like to think that the Ancient Greeks were all like Socrates, great philosophers; but for every sensible and serious great thinker or inventor in Ancient Greece, there were at least ten people dedicating their lives to the worship of a deity who could only be appeased by a precise calendar of complex ritual. The two weren’t even separate – it is just that we tend to remember the works that we think of as important, and forget about the rest.

Everyone knows Pythagoras for his theorem, a brilliant mathematical equation for working out the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle. Not many know that he was also the founder of a religious cult. This cult believed in reincarnation, vegetarianism, truthfulness and that the soul was fed by music. All very reasonable beliefs and surely a credit to any religion – except that they also believed that you should only have sex in the winter and that you should never eat beans because they are made of the same material as human beings. Legend even has it that Pythagoras died as he was fleeing from his burning house, chased by his enemies: because he refused to risk damaging the beans by running through a bean field to escape, he was killed. Even the mathematical discoveries for which we now remember him were the result of exploring the mystic properties of triangles. Pythagoras believed that the important spiritual properties of triangles could be better understood only by developing their mathematics. Practical uses were a happy side effect.

So while the beliefs of the Dionysians who first discovered spirits were strange by our standards, they were fairly usual by those of the time. Discovering how to extract the alcohol from wine and using it for worship was a logical product of their beliefs – it brought them closer to their god by concentrating his greatest gift. The fact that spirits were also a delicious drink was just another happy practical side effect. Setting fire to themselves rather than drinking it was less obviously logical but it must have made some kind of sense to them.

While most of the local population who wished to worship would only come to the major ceremonies of the cult of Dionysus once or twice a year, the followers who devoted themselves completely to the god and lived permanently in the sect were the only ones who would have taken part in the ceremony of the spirit. The initiates named themselves the Maenads, after the most important members of the god’s retinue. The mystical Maenads took the form of beautiful women, but if angered by the failure of the temple to present the correct offerings, they could grow talons and go on a rampage. All the passions of mortals would be whipped up into a frenzy of sex, intoxication, madness and bloodlust. To prevent that terrible possibility, the mortal Maenads stuck carefully to their two-yearly cycle of offerings and rituals.

Since Delphi was primarily dedicated to the sun god Apollo, it was especially appropriate for the Dionysians to have a presence there. The myth told that for four months every winter Apollo would ride off in his fiery chariot to visit a mystical race in the north, leaving his brother Dionysus in charge. In the first year that Apollo left, Dionysus was awoken by his handmaidens as Dionysus Liknites – Dionysus of birth. He breathed life into the grape vines so that they would begin to sprout and show new growth just as his short reign was coming to a close. It ended with his violent death just before the return of Apollo, when a love affair gone very wrong resulted in him being torn limb from limb by Titans. His followers reputedly celebrated this by tearing a live goat apart with their bare hands. Dionysus then descended into the underworld before being reborn the following year. The goat was not so lucky.

With the death of the god, the humans were left to gather the grapes and set them in vats to begin their fermentation. At the start of the next winter, just as fermentation was ending, Dionysus was reborn as Dionysus Chthonius – Dionysus of the underworld. This was when he breathed the sacred fire, alcohol, into the liquid, making it warming and intoxicating. The time had arrived for a great festival to celebrate the new wine that Dionysus had granted them. Wine was drunk year round, even though it would quickly deteriorate as the Greeks did not have particularly good preservation techniques. Since it could not be aged as modern wine usually is, it could be harsh and acidic. They drank it watered to prevent madness, and it was also often spiced and honeyed.

The practice of drinking sweetened, spiced wine was still common until well into the seventeenth century when improvements in winemaking techniques finally began to produce wines that were palatable without sweetening. This method is from a collection of Roman recipes, and although there are many earlier references to this type of wine, it is the earliest complete written recipe.

SPICED WINE: THE ORIGINAL (TRANSLATED FROM LATIN)

The composition of excellent spiced wine. Into a copper bowl put 6 sextarii of honey and 2 sextarii of wine; heat on a slow fire, constantly stirring the mixture with a whip. At the boiling point add a dash of cold wine, retire from stove and skim. Repeat this twice or three times, let it rest till the next day, and skim again. Then add 4 oz of crushed pepper, 3 scruples of mastich, a drachm each of leaves and saffron, 5 drachms of roasted date stones crushed and previously soaking in wine to soften them. When this is properly done add 18 sextarii of light wine. To clarify it perfectly, add charcoal twice as often as necessary, which will draw together.

Apicius (c.4th century)

THE ALCHEMIST’S VERSION

800g honey

3 litres cheap red wine

1 tbsp ground allspice

¼ tsp ground star anise

½ tsp saffron

1 bay leaf

1 tbsp crushed toasted almonds

For authenticity, use the cheapest red wine you can find. I do mean really cheap red wine. The kind you see in corner shops, three for a tenner. That kind of cheap.

In a large pan, mix all of the honey with 200ml of the wine and bring to the boil. Once it comes to the boil, turn down to a very low simmer and add all the remaining ingredients, except for the additional wine. Cover and continue to simmer gently for an hour; or you can simply take it off the heat immediately and leave it to sit for a day at room temperature.

Once cool, this produces a concentrated spiced wine that can be bottled and kept in the fridge for up to a year. Before drinking, mix the concentrated spiced wine with three times as much equally cheap red wine and an equal quantity of water (to prevent madness), then strain through a fine sieve or muslin.

The time when the wine was first ready to drink was a time of great celebration. Dionysus was returned and at his most powerful, bringing the gift of the wine that could be used to commune with him. His followers danced on Mount Parnassus, drank deeply and whipped themselves up into a drunken frenzy, taking on the aspect of the furious Maenads. Everyone could and would join in with this celebration of the new wine, a festival of drinking that has its echoes in the later and more famous Bacchanalia of Rome.

After the public festivities were done, the Maenads descended alone into Dionysus’ tomb for the secret part of the ceremony. There they used a basic form of still to bring forth the pure spirit of the god (the alcohol) from the wine, and they poured it on the heads of the new initiates for their trial by fire.

I really cannot recommend trying this ceremony for yourself. While the temperature is relatively safe for short periods, it is still hot, and if you fail to cover absolutely every inch of your head with spirit you’ll find the dry patches of hair catching fire. The experience of getting vodka in your eyes is also really not to be recommended. However, if you do want to experience a little of the drama with less of the risk then you could give this Victorian parlour game a try. It is relatively safe but still to be played at your own risk and preferably played sober, or at least with sober supervision.

This description of the game is taken from Robert Chambers’ Book of Days, an enormous collection of facts and trivia published in 1864, and I think it needs no translation:

One favourite Christmas sport, very generally played on Christmas Eve, has been handed down to us from time immemorial under the name of ‘Snapdragon’. To our English readers this amusement is perfectly familiar, but it is almost unknown in Scotland, and it seems therefore desirable here to give a description of the pastime.

A quantity of raisins are deposited in a large dish or bowl (the broader and shallower this is, the better), and brandy or some other spirit is poured over the fruit and ignited. The bystanders now endeavour, by turns, to grasp a raisin, by plunging their hands through the flames; and as this is somewhat of an arduous feat, requiring both courage and rapidity of action, a considerable amount of laughter and merriment is evoked at the expense of the unsuccessful competitors. . . .

Whilst the sport of Snapdragon is going on, it is usual to extinguish all the lights in the room, so that the lurid glare from the flaming spirits may exercise to the full its weird-like effect.

The cult of Dionysus was anarchic. They accepted and liberated women, slaves and outlaws. That kept them at the fringes of society, feared by those in authority. Still, they managed to continue practising even after Greece was conquered by Rome and throughout most of Roman rule. They were finally extinguished only when the Roman Empire converted to Christianity and began eliminating all of the old mystery religions. Followers of Dionysus fled into Persia and Arabia with a great exodus of non-Christians of all kinds, taking their well-kept secret with them.

Distillation was one of the cult’s most precious secrets and would never deliberately have been passed to outsiders. But the various mystery cults that were in exile together often merged, split and merged again with one another, and secrets did pass in this way to many different cults and religions. Somewhere along the way, the mystic secret of distillation arrived in the hands of a cult of Christian heretics called the Gnostics, who carried it though the Balkans into western Europe as one of their own religious secrets. Sadly, they were still not drinking the spirits they made – instead, just like the Greeks before them, they were using spirits to set fire to their heads.

The Gnostics as a sect were opposed to the wealth and power of the established Catholic Church, living and working instead with the poorest in the community. They also took one passage from the gospel of St John literally when they were performing baptisms: ‘Except a man be born of water and of the spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.’ So, using the secret of distillation learned from the Dionysians, the Gnostics would perform the normal baptism with holy water – but then they would perform a second baptism with fire by soaking themselves in distilled spirit and setting themselves alight.

Finally, the practice of distillation passed from the Gnostics to a similar Christian sect, the Cathars, who spread the practice throughout Germany, Italy and France. The Cathars were much more widespread and less secretive than the previous tiny sects who had practised distillation. They did not restrict the secret to full-time members of the religious order but allowed it to be known to all of the faithful, including many who held other professions. Most importantly, there were many doctors who were Cathars and who, on learning of this ‘holy spirit’, began experimenting with it for medicinal use. When the Cathars were finally crushed by the Inquisition in the late thirteenth century, the secret had already been preserved in medical writings – along with a key to the religious secrets it supposedly held, written in code.

The instructions for distilling were set down in medical texts in plain language, accompanied by claims about the medicinal properties of spirits. They may not have been intended for use as real cures for real diseases but instead as a code for the mystical and religious properties of the spirit. The faithful were supposed to recognise this and be able to find the secret where it was safely hidden and preserved from the persecutions of the Catholic Church. The claims that spirits could ‘ease an ancient pain in the head’ were code for taking away the pain of original sin; that they could ‘hold back old age and restore youth’ meant the granting of eternal life for the spirit, and the ability to ‘take away darkeness, spots or cataract from the eyes’ was the granting of the true sight of the faithful.

The secret of distillation lay hidden in these medical texts, which were kept in abbeys. The texts were faithfully copied and preserved by monks who dedicated themselves to the care of that written knowledge even though they often made no use of it themselves. Most orders were opposed to practising medicine, believing that only God should be able to heal, and so the medical books were of no use to them. Even if they had been practicing medicine, it would have been dangerous to be seen practising anything associated with the heretic Cathars while they were still remembered.

But by the beginning of the fourteenth century, that belief had begun to change. Many monasteries had changed their views of the practice of medicine, beginning to see it as part of their charitable work, and were trying to produce their own medicines to use. The Cathars had been largely forgotten. And there were the instructions for distilling spirits, just sitting forgotten and unused in most of the common medical texts. It surely could not be long before someone followed the recipe and spirits were finally made, known and drunk.

It was a Franciscan friar by the name of John of Rupescissa who, in the 1330s, finally rediscovered the lost art of distillation. What’s more, as well as prescribing it for external use as the written recipes recommended, he advised that Christian princes should take barrels of it into battle and give it to their soldiers as it could ‘make a man that is a coward hardy and strong if he drank but half a cupful’. After almost 2,000 years as nothing but a source of mystical fire, spirits were finally starting to be drunk for their intoxicating properties.

By the mid-fourteenth century medicinal spirits, under the name ‘aqua vitae’ (water of life), had spread throughout mainland Europe. As a medicine, aqua vitae came in three types: ‘simple’ – a raw, unflavoured spirit from a single distillation; ‘composite’ – flavoured with one or two herbs by redistillation or infusion; and ‘perfect’ – a complex recipe involving nine to thirteen redistillations over various herbs. The burning properties of simple spirits were also being rediscovered and they were used as a dramatic stage prop for the Christian ‘mystery plays’ popular in France, producing the flames for the burning bush that spoke to Moses.

Tracking down a copy of the aqua vitae perfectissima recipe was not an easy task, as most have been lost or are written in archaic German. Even after an English version was traced, the names of the spices had to be carefully decoded. Then the right methods and proportions to allow an approximation to be made without using a still had to be found. Altogether, this was the most difficult recipe to produce in this book, but it was also one of the most rewarding. Given the number and rarity of the spices involved, in the time it was written this recipe must have been so expensive that the cost itself reassured customers that it was a certain cure. In the Alchemist’s version, some of the more obscure spices have been left in, but a more common spice that can sensibly be substituted is given in brackets. Rue and sermountain have been omitted as they are nearly impossible to find or to substitute for; but if you happen to have some in your garden, throw in a chopped tablespoon of those, too. Otherwise, with the wealth of flavours already included, you won’t miss them.

AQUA VITAE PERFECTISSIMA: THE ORIGINAL

Fille thi viol ful of lyes of strong wiyn, & putte therto these poudris: poudir of canel, of clowes, of gyngyuer, of notemugges, of galyngale, of quibibis, of greyn de parys, of longe peper, of blake peper: alle these in powdir. Careawey, cirmunteyn, comyn, fenel, smallage, persile, sauge, myntis, ruwe, calamynte, origanum: and a half unce or moore or lasse, as thee likith. Pownd hem a litil, for it will be the betir, & put hem to these poudris, Thanne sette thi glas on the fier, sett on the houel, & kepe it wel that the hete come not o it; & sette thervndir a viol, & kepe the watir.

Curye on Inglysch (c.14th century)

THE ALCHEMIST’S VERSION

350ml brandy

½ tsp ground cinnamon

5 whole cloves

½ tsp ground ginger

½ tsp freshly grated nutmeg

3 slices fresh galangal (or additional ½ tsp ground ginger)

½ tsp cubeb pepper (or allspice)

1 tsp whole grains of paradise (or ¼ tsp whole green cardamom seeds)

¼ tsp ground long pepper (or ¼ tsp ground black pepper)

¼ tsp ground black pepper

½ tsp whole caraway seeds

½ tsp whole cumin seeds (or ¼ tsp ground)

½ tsp whole fennel seeds

1 tbsp fresh celery leaves

1 tbsp fresh parsley (or 1 tsp dried)

1 tbsp fresh sage (or 1 tsp dried)

1 tbsp fresh mint (or 1 tsp dried)

1 tbsp fresh thyme (or 1 tsp dried)

Put all the ingredients into a pan and warm very gently until just beginning to steam. Transfer to a large heat-proof jar (a Kilner jar or similar) and seal immediately. Leave to steep in a dark place at room temperature for around a week. Strain through a fine muslin and leave for another day or two. Strain again through a coffee filter, and bottle your own medieval cure-all.

The practice of distillation came to these shores when some French monks who knew the method founded monasteries in England. The first monasteries gave birth to further ‘daughter’ houses, and soon distilling monks had spread right across the country and out into Scotland, Wales and Ireland. The earliest definite record of spirit distilling in Britain is the order for the purchase of a still (stillatorium) for 12d in the year 1355, for the Infirmarius of the Benedictine monastery at Durham. Distillation had finally arrived in Britain.

Once spirits were available as a medicine it didn’t take too long for the population to discover their other uses. Ireland had the honour of being the first part of the British Isles to record a death from drinking too much spirit. Richard MacRaghnaill, heir to a chieftaincy, was laid to rest after drinking uisce-betha (water of life) to excess in 1405. It’s also still held by locals that the thirteen monasteries built around the Mull of Kintyre were later replaced by thirteen distilleries.

The aristocracy of all of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland were among the first to adopt the practice of drinking spirits and have not quit it to this day. Later they would constantly condemn the habit in the general population while continuing to import the finest brandy for themselves. King Henry VI was recorded as having his own distiller in his household as early as the 1430s, joining a staff that already included an ale brewer, a beer brewer and a yeoman of the cellar.

Aqua vitae was originally distilled from wine, which was imported and expensive, but it was soon discovered that fine spirits could also be made from the cereal crops that were grown locally. The earliest record of this is of some malted barley that was granted to Friar John Cor to make aqua vitae in the Scottish Exchequer of the Rolls in 1494. This was the first step towards making whisky as we know it now, and in Scotland it was available in four different strengths: usquebaug (twice distilled), testarig (three times distilled) and usquebaug baul (four times distilled and reputedly so strong that two spoonfuls could endanger a man’s life).

In Scotland as well as in Ireland they were well on the way to a pure distilled whisky, a national drink they could be proud of. In England it was more common to flavour the spirits in the same way as described in the composite or perfect aqua vitae recipes, but adapting the recipes to the locally available herbs. A mish-mash of different regional and personal recipes existed, with no particular flavour leading the pack to become England’s national drink. England wouldn’t find a national spirit for another 200 years.

ENGLISH AQUA VITAE: THE ORIGINAL

One recorded recipe for a compound spirit reads:

A handful each of wormwood, the tenderness of bay leaves, radish, chervil, southernwood, rue, penny-royal and other herbs; a handful and a half of liverwort and maidenhair; two handfuls of sowthistle, and three of hartstongue fern all went into the still-base, crushed and mingled together . . . and for every pottle [quart] that ye stylle, put among your herbs and wine aqua vitae of anise, and fennel and cumin.

Many of these herbs, once common, have fallen so much out of favour that they are almost entirely unknown, and many recipes are now impossible to recreate without a specialist garden. However, this anonymous recipe from 1420 uses much more familiar herbs, providing a taste of just one of the huge variety of different recipes:

Sage, fennel-roots, parsley-roots, rosemary, thyme and lavender of every each a like much.

From the notebook of William Worcester, as told to him by Brother John Wellys (c.1860–70)

THE ALCHEMIST’S VERSION

2 tbsp fresh sage (or 2 tsp dried)

1 x 5cm cube of fennel, finely grated

2 tbsp fresh parsley roots (or finely diced celery)

1 tbsp fresh thyme (or 1 tsp dried)

2 tbsp fresh lavender (or 2 tsp dried)

300ml vodka

In a large mixing bowl, crush the herbs into the vodka using the end of a rolling pin (as if you were making a giant mojito), then transfer the whole into a jar. Seal and leave to infuse at room temperature for two days before straining through fine muslin and bottling.

The practice of distillation finally and truly passed into the secular realm with the dissolution of the monasteries in 1560. With no other means of supporting themselves, the monks who had been thrown out of the monasteries seized by the crown had to turn to whatever commercial skills they had. Many took up positions as private chaplains, tutors or clerks, while others used their medical skills to set up as apothecaries and distillers.

Around the same time it began to be fashionable for the country houses of the rich to have their stills, which many had owned previously but used only to make non-alcoholic herbal waters, turned to the task of making aqua vitae. With home-distillers dabbling in making things to their own taste, the recipes were as varied as cake recipes. They were typically used for the flimsiest of medical reasons – one recipe, credited to a John Partridge, was intended to aid the digestion, but bears a striking resemblance to absinthe, right down to the wormwood and aniseed. Another simply made a ‘speedy drink which travellers may make for themselves when they are distressed for want of good beer or ale at their inn’, and could make a good case for being the first recorded cocktail.

A TRAVELLER’S DRINK: THE ORIGINAL

Take a quart of good water, put thereto five or six spoonfuls of good Aqua composita which is strong of the aniseeds, and anounce of sugar with a branch of rosemary, brew [pour] them a pretty while out of one pot into another, and there is your drink prepared. Or if you leave out the sugar it will be pleasing enough.

Hugh Plat, Sundrie New and Artificiall Remedies against Famine (1596)

THE ALCHEMIST’S VERSION

1 sprig fresh rosemary

100ml water

50ml sambuca (or absinthe for the brave)

2 tsp sugar

Lightly bruise the rosemary by rolling it between your hands. Add it, and all the other ingredients, to a pint glass, or one half of a cocktail shaker. Take a second pint glass, or the other half of your shaker, and pour the whole drink swiftly from one to the other. Repeat this action for 3–5 minutes, or until your arms are tired, then strain into a glass.

Drink to recover from the strain of mixing it. For true authenticity, save yourself the strain and have your valet make it.

Other flavourings for various supposed medicinal uses abounded: cinnamon or black cherry against fainting or swooning; clary to revive the heart and strengthen the back; saffron for smallpox or ague. Less pleasant were ‘cordial waters’, as they were known, which used animal ingredients. Cockwater used the body of a healthy young cockerel in amongst the herbs and spices of the still, to try to pass on his vitality. Snailwater was made with fresh garden snail, angelica, rosemary and cloves, and was said to protect against jaundice. The recipe then added that it would benefit even more with the addition of a quart of earthworms.

Meanwhile, amongst the poor, the drinking of simple (raw) spirits as a pick-me-up was beginning to take off in earnest. But it is in 1643 that the story of illicit spirits finally begins, with the introduction of excise duty.

Excise was created by the Long Parliament during the civil war to raise funds for the fight against the king (although when the monarchy was eventually re-established, they were more than happy to keep it in place). The excise was unique in being the first ever tax on goods produced in Britain for domestic sale, and it was just as uniquely hated. Although it later grew to encompass a huge range of goods, including meat, salt, hats, paper and tobacco, it began with only five: beer, ale, cider, soap and strong waters (spirits). Only with the introduction of a tax to be avoided did the divide begin between spirits that were produced legally under the eyes of the excise men and those which had to be produced furtively, secretly, illicitly; a divide which has now been a constant source of comedy and tragedy for almost 400 years.

CHAPTER TWO

THEY’LL NEVER TAKE OUR WHISKY

The argument over whether the Scots or the Irish were the first to invent whisky has raged for generations. I’m definitely not about to take sides, but I do know that the honour of making the first illicit whisky goes to Scotland. The reason that illicit distilling got an earlier start in Scotland is simple: the Scottish were the first to have excise imposed on them by the dastardly English government.

Excise duty was introduced in England in 1643 and was the first ever tax on home-produced goods. The introduction of the law caused an outrage (which may be difficult to imagine in an age when 20 per cent VAT has become the norm), but despite the anger there was little practical resistance. When the excise was expanded to cover Scotland in 1644, the reception was definitely no warmer. However, the excise had little effect on drinking, since the law only covered spirits produced for sale and not those made for home consumption. Making your own was far more popular. Beer and ale also remained more popular than whisky and were still untaxed. It was not until the introduction of the Malt Tax in 1713 that things really started to get serious.