Before the mid-seventeenth century, the principal European drinks were what today would be considered alcoholic: beer, ale, mead, cider, perry (fermented pear juice), and wine. Until that time, and beyond, there was - certainly in England - a distinct prejudice against drinking water, as such, unless from sources of proven reputation. Nor was this prejudice wholly unjustified given the contamination of much of the water supply, particularly in populous districts. Nonetheless, cheaper and weaker ales (“small ales”) and beers (“small beers”), containing insignificant amounts of alcohol, were produced for those who could afford nothing stronger, and for children. In his fourteenth-century Piers the Plowman, William Lang-land refers to halfpenny ale and penny-ale as beyond the pockets of the poorest laborers. In Leicester, the brewers were especially enjoined to make “good wholesome small drink for the poor people” (Bateson 1901,2:288).
An English cookery book of the fifteenth century contains a list of “herbs for the cup..’Among those to be grown in the garden were sage, rosemary, hyssop, marjoram, and gillyflower; these were as likely to be used for flavoring mead (made from honey) as for small beers. Nettle beer and heather ale were also found among the small beers. Not surprisingly, small beer was despised by the more hardened drinker. “Doth it not show vilely in me to desire small beer?” asked Shakespeare’s Prince Hal before his reformation (Henry PV, Part II 2.2.7). And, in mentioning Shakespeare, it is humbling to note that for him, “to chronicle small beer” was to deal in very minor matters indeed!
The strength of church ales is less certain. They were drunk as both a social custom and as a fund-raising exercise. In the seventeenth century, John Aubrey recalled the church ales of his youth as a means of raising funds for the poor before the introduction of a formal system of taxation by local government: “In every parish is, or was, a church house to which belonged spits, crocks etc., utensils for dressing provision. Here the housekeepers met, and were merry and gave their charity: the young people came there too, and had dancing, bowling, shooting at butts, etc., the ancients sitting gravely by, looking on. All things were civil and without scandal” (Barber 1988:184).
Church ales were numerous but their names distinguished them more by use than by strength. Among them were bride ale, wake ale, and Whitsun ale, all intended for fund-raising of various sorts. Aubrey noted that “the clerk’s ale was in the Easter holidays, for his benefit” (Barber 1988: 184).These ales were probably stronger than the small beers; despite Aubrey’s assertion of their innocent intent, they certainly attracted clerical and Puritan criticism as giving rise to licentiousness and disorder.
Small beer, however, survived the years. It was to be found in the coffeehouses of late Stuart and Georgian London. In the early nineteenth century, William Cob-bett noted that the grass mowers’ drink allowance was “two quarts of what they call strong beer, and as much small beer as they can drink” (Jekyll and Jones 1939: 112).An inventory of the cellars of a Berkshire squire at his death in 1822 showed 210 gallons of small beer out of 2,630 gallons of beer and ale of all sorts. Small beer, indeed, but still a measurable quantity.
In his 1833 report The Poor Laws in London and Berkshire, Edwin Chadwick noted that every convict on board hulks in England was allowed one pint of small beer a day as part of his diet, and Dr. Jonathan Pereira’s Treatise on Food and Diet of 1843 included small beer - or, as he called it, table beer - among his dietaries of London hospitals and other institutions. Pereira incidentally noted that whereas a barrel of best Burton ale contained 40 to 43 pounds weight more than an equivalent barrel of water, a barrel of good table beer contained 12 to 14 pounds more, and “common table beer” but 6 pounds more than water. Although in the 1790s Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s Zoono-mia had recommended small beer as part of a diet against “gaol [jail] fever” (typhus), we may suspect that the drink was preferred by these institutions as much for economy as for health.
Other brews were not necessarily so weak. Spruce beer, flavored with leaves of the spruce fir, was known to sailors in the Baltic from at least the sixteenth century, and Canadian Indians taught Jacques Cartier to use it against scurvy at much the same time. In New Zealand in 1773, the explorer Captain James Cook brewed spruce beer and reckoned it a useful defense against the same disease. Unlike most small ales and small beers, which continued to be brewed as and when required rather than being bottled for trading, spruce beer made the transition to the commercial market for prepacked soft drinks, and “spruce beer manufacturer” was to be found as an entry in the London trade directories of the early nineteenth century. And whatever its earlier strength may have been, spruce beer was excluded by the Licensing Act of 1872 from its definition of intoxicating liquor.
Ginger beer and ginger ale are products of the commercial era, but their acceptability, no doubt, owed much to the tradition of small beers and herbal brewing, which continued in the production of hop bitters and the like.
Cordials and Other Domestic Drinks
As small beers derived from the arts of brewing, so cordials owed their origins to the secrets of distillation. Heavily sweetened and highly flavored so that they might even be diluted with water before drinking, cordials would vary in alcohol content according to the recipe of their maker, often a well-to-do country housewife, whose object - partly pleasurable, partly medicinal, but at all times designed to tempt the palate - was summed up in Shakespeare’s phrase, “a taste as sweet as any cordial comfort” (Winter’s Tale 5.3.77).
Homemade cordials survived well into the era of commercial soft drinks, and as late as 1856, George Dodd in The Food of London described them as “more frequently the handiwork of some Lady Bountiful, some housewife more than ordinarily clever in domestic economy, than of manufacturers who prepare them for sale” (Dodd 1856: 498). Nonetheless, by then, cordials were also available from commercial manufacturers in both alcoholic and nonalcoholic varieties, the latter being popular as temperance drinks, and they continued in essence-based peppermint, ginger, and clove cordials, the thought of their medicinal origins having for the most part faded.
Among other drinks from the domestic sickroom was barley water, an infusion of pearl barley and water dating from late medieval times, which Thomas Fuller in the seventeenth century described as “an invention which found out itself, with little more than the bare joining the ingredients together” (Fuller 1662: 366). For sixteenth-century invalids there was “water imperial,” apparently containing sugar and cream of tartar and flavored with lemons, as well as “manays cryste,” a sweetened cordial flavored with rosewater, violets, or cinnamon.
Fruit-Flavored Drinks
In view of the heavy. Arab influence on Italian Renaissance cuisine, lemonade may have originated with the Arabs. But in any event, sixteenth-century Italians seem to have been the first Europeans to enjoy this beverage made from freshly squeezed lemons, sweetened with sugar or honey, and diluted with water to make a still, soft drink that could be prepared, sold, and consumed on the premises. Its popularity spread to France and gradually to the rest of Europe, until by the eighteenth century, lemonade of this sort was available from the inns of Scotland to the Turkish baths of Constantinople. In France, lemonade was sold by the itinerant limonadier, who stored the drink in a tank carried on his back. In 1676 the limonadiers of Paris were formed into a company and granted a patent or monopoly by the government, continuing to sell their drink in this way until at least the end of the following century. During the eighteenth century, lemonade was also valued by the medical profession, and Erasmus Darwin recommended it, among other things, for the relief of kidney stones and gout and in cases of scarlet fever.
Orange juice was first introduced into mid-seventeenth-century England; Samuel Pepys in the 1660s noted with approval this drink that was new to him. A little later, orangeade was also to be found, often containing oranges too bitter to be eaten fresh. Orgeat, a cooling drink flavored with almonds and orange flower water, became a favorite of the patrons of eighteenth-century London refreshment houses and pleasure gardens.
Lemons and Scurvy
In the eighteenth century and earlier, citrus juices were among many articles of diet used in attempts to find a cure for scurvy, a disease which only in the twentieth century was discovered to result from a dietary deficiency of vitamin C. Scurvy particularly affected sailors on extended voyages of discovery with few opportunities for revictualing with fresh foods. Until its cause was known, any cure could only be found by empirical tests. Beer brewed from the spruce fir was considered effacicious. Unsuccessful, however, was malt, although it too had its advocates for a time.
Lemon juice was favored by the early Spanish explorers as an antiscorbutic, and Dutch and English voyagers also included it in their ships’ stores, although it was more likely to find a place among the medicines than as a regular article of diet. In the mid-eighteenth century, James Lind conducted and published the results of experiments at sea. His 1753 A treatise on the scurvy showed that sailors treated with lemon juice recovered from scurvy, whereas other sailors given other substances did not. But further practical tests were less conclusive, almost certainly because of the loss of vitamin C during the preparation and storage of the juice.
For instance, Captain Cook on his voyages to the Pacific was supplied with lemon juice as a concentrated syrup, with most of the vitamin C unwittingly boiled out in the preparation. Not surprisingly, he was unenthusiastic about the efficacy of citrus juices, even though Joseph Banks, the botanist on the voyage with Cook, successfully dosed himself with lemon juice against what appeared to be the onset of scurvy. It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that the British Admiralty Board introduced lemon juice into the seaman’s diet, where it was usually preserved by mixing with rum. In the mid-nineteenth century, lemon juice was largely replaced on British ships with West Indian lime juice. Botanical differences between lemons and limes were little appreciated at that time, and in fact, lime juice, with its lower levels of vitamin C, was less suited to the purpose (Carpenter 1986).
World History
