{"product_id":"and-a-bottle-of-rum-revised-and-updated-isbn-9780525575023","title":"And a Bottle of Rum, Revised and Updated","description":"\u003cb\u003eNow revised, updated, and with new recipes, \u003ci\u003eAnd a Bottle of Rum\u003c\/i\u003e tells the raucously entertaining story of this most American of liquors\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrom the grog sailors drank on the high seas in the 1700s to the mojitos of Havana bar hoppers, spirits and cocktail columnist Wayne Curtis offers a history of rum and the Americas alike, revealing that the homely spirit once distilled from the industrial waste of the booming sugar trade has managed to infiltrate every stratum of New World society. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCurtis takes us from the taverns of the American colonies, where rum delivered both a cheap wallop and cash for the Revolution; to the plundering pirate ships off the coast of Central America; to the watering holes of pre-Castro Cuba; and to the kitsch-laden tiki bars of 1950s America. Here are sugar barons and their armies conquering the Caribbean, Paul Revere stopping for a nip during his famous ride, Prohibitionists marching against \"demon rum,\" Hemingway fattening his liver with Havana daiquiris, and today's bartenders reviving old favorites like Planter's Punch. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn an age of microbrewed beer and single-malt whiskeys, rum--once the swill of the common man--has found its way into the tasting rooms of the most discriminating drinkers. Complete with cocktail recipes for would-be epicurean time-travelers, this is history at its most intoxicating.Toasts to \u003ci\u003eAnd a Bottle of Rum\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eAnd a Bottle of Rum\u003c\/i\u003e is a fascinating tale of cultural metamorphosis, tracing rum’s remarkable journey from colonial rotgut to SoHo cocktail. A book with as many revelations about American history as about this archetypally American drink.” —Jack Turner, author of \u003ci\u003eSpice: The History of a Temptation \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“History never tasted so good. What Herbert Asbury did for the gangs of New York, Wayne Curtis does for rum: The profiteers who traded it, the pirates who raided it, the underclass who guzzled it, the mixologists who exalted it, and the corporations who homogenized it—Curtis tells their tale with style and sweep in a tour de force of social history, urban anthropology, and cocktail ‘alcohology.’ A delight from first sip to last.” —Jeff Berry, author of \u003ci\u003eBeachbum Berry’s Grog Log\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eIntoxica!\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eTaboo Table\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eAnd a Bottle of Rum\u003c\/i\u003e reveals the facts behind rum’s colorful history while telling a great story of rebellion and rumbustion!” —Dale DeGroff, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Craft of the Cocktail \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Wayne Curtis breaks fascinating new ground in this very palatable history of the world-through-rum-colored glasses. The writing shows what makes modern journalism so great: clean, succinct, inclusive smoothness—not unlike great rum—and Curtis is a virtuoso at it.” —Ted “Dr. Cocktail” Haigh, author of \u003ci\u003eVintage Spirits\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eand\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eForgotten Cocktails\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eWayne Curtis\u003c\/b\u003e was the spirits and cocktails columnist for \u003ci\u003eThe Atlantic\u003c\/i\u003e magazine for eight years, and has also written about drinks for the \u003ci\u003eWall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eImbibe\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Daily Beast\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eThe American Scholar\u003c\/i\u003e. In 2002 Curtis was named Lowell Thomas Travel Journalist of the Year by the Society of American Travel Writers. He lives in New Orleans and Maine.Chapter 1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    [ Kill-devil ]\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The people have a very generous fashion that if one come to a house    to inquire the way to any place, they will make him drink, and if the    traveler does deny to stay to drink they take it very unkindly of him. —Henry Whistler on Barbados customs, 1655\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Rum—a spirit distilled from the juice of a sugarcane plant or its by-products—was first invented in the early seventeenth century on the    British island colony of Barbados.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Or not. In which case it may have been invented on the Spanish    islands of Hispaniola or Cuba (where it would have been called    aguadiente, or “burning water”), or by Portuguese colonists on the    coast of Brazil (where it would later be called cachaça). Or possibly    it was first distilled by the French on one of their Caribbean island    strongholds (where the poorer grades of rum were known as tafia). On    the other hand, it may have been first concocted in the 1400s    somewhere in Europe by secretive alchemists searching for the elixir    of life and feeding through their retorts whatever fermentable matter    they could get their hands on. Or just maybe it was invented even    earlier by an anonymous chemist tinkering near the cane fields of    coastal India.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The thing is, no one really knows when rum first appeared. If you    want to know about the history of sugar, overflowing archives provide    enough information to lead to mental obesity. But for rum, it’s a    starvation diet. The West Indian island of Barbados has long claimed    that first Barbadians invented rum, and it’s telling that no    historians have roused themselves to seriously dispute this point.    Some, like rum expert Edward Hamilton, have argued that rum was first    produced commercially in the Portuguese or Spanish colonies, probably    in Brazil, and he has been rooting around for customs documents or    ship manifests to back this up. He hasn’t found anything yet. (And he    guesses he may never: Rum exports from the colonies were prohibited    by Spain and Portugal, which meant any rum produced was smuggled and    undocumented. And even if it had been documented, the ports of the    West Indies were laid waste by attackers with numbing regularity, so    the archives of the earliest days are often nonexistent.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    This much at least is known about rum: Sometime around the middle of    the seventeenth century, an outbreak of rum occurred almost    everywhere the Dutch, Spanish, French, and English were engaged in    their New World errand-running. The British sea captain John Josselyn    wrote of a dinner held on a ship off the coast of present-day Maine    in September 1639, at which another captain toasted him with a pint    of rum. Laws controlling the sale of rum abruptly cropped up in    different colonies, as a warden in pursuit of a persistent truant—in    Bermuda in 1653, in Connecticut in 1654, in Massachusetts in 1657.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Then, sometime shortly before 1650, rum surfaced at an extravagant    feast held at the Barbados estate of James Drax, the most important    planter on Great Britain’s most important island colony. For anyone    curious about the cultural history of rum—or who wants to learn about    the ancestry of that bottle of West Indian rum in the back of their    liquor cabinet—I’d argue that this is as fine a place to begin the    story as any.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    P\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Barbados is pear-shaped and just twenty-one miles long by fourteen    miles wide—or about one-seventh the size of Rhode Island. On a map of    the Caribbean, Barbados lies far to the east, like a wayward child    refusing to stand in line with the rest of the Lesser Antilles, which    sweep in a great arc from Puerto Rico to Trinidad. Adventurers from    Portugal and Spain landed here in the sixteenth century, but finding    no precious metals to mine nor Indians to enslave, they lingered only    long enough to name the island “Los Barbados,” after the “bearded”    fig trees. Barbados lay unmolested until 1625, when a British sailing    ship stopped off while heading home from Brazil. The captain claimed    the island for the British throne and reported on its pleasing    qualities to Sir William Courteen, the ship’s owner. Courteen    hastened to cobble together a syndicate, then dispatched a ship with    supplies to support several dozen colonists. On February 20, 1627,    eighty colonists—plus ten slaves captured along the way—disembarked    near present-day Holetown on the island’s west coast.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The mandate given the first settlers by Courteen was not complicated:    Go forth and produce. Specifically, produce for export such things as    were in demand in England. The colonists tried growing cotton,    indigo, and fustic wood, the latter a sort of tropical mulberry    useful in making yellow dye. These crops did not produce great    fortunes. Taking a cue from the colony at Virginia, which had been    settled two decades earlier, the islanders planted tobacco, which was    then the most profitable agricultural staple in the colonies. But a    glut in London soon undercut prices, and Barbados tobacco was    hampered by another problem: It was “so earthy and worthless,” wrote    one seventeenth-century island visitor, that it provided “little or    no return from England.” A 1628 shipment was described as “foul, full    of stalks, and evil colored.” Even the islanders wouldn’t smoke it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And then came sugar.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The species Saccharum officinarum (“sugar of the apothecaries”), a    freakishly tall and sharp-edged grass, had first appeared around 4000    b.c. in Asia, most likely in Papua New Guinea, where primitive    agriculturists had selected the sweetest canes for further breeding.    These plants migrated eastward with traders, to India and on to the    Mediterranean. In 325 b.c. a general under Alexander the Great came    upon sugarcane for the first time and described it with wonder as a    plant that “brings forth honey without the help of bees.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Sugar soon became an essential crop in the colonial Atlantic islands    off Africa, including Madeira, the Canary Islands, and the Azores. It    made the leap to the New World with Christopher Columbus, whose    father-in-law was a Madeira sugar planter. On the explorer’s second    trip across the Atlantic in 1493, he brought live sugarcane seedlings    and oversaw their planting on Hispaniola. The sugar grew fabulously,    and colonists were quick to establish plantations over the next two    decades in Mexico, Cuba, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico. The Portuguese,    demonstrating a flair for running complex businesses in difficult    environments far from home, planted cane aggressively on the damp    Brazilian coast and brought in sugar presses and copper boiling vats    from home. The number of sugar refineries in Brazil grew from 5 in    1550 to 350 less than a century later. With great quantities of sugar    now being produced in the New World, the price fell, and many of the    sugar producers of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic islands were    ruined. The New World sugar era was dawning.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Barbados made the most of it. In England, the demand for sugar soared    as it quickly evolved from a luxury for aristocrats to a staple for    the masses. It was in great demand for making sweets, masking the    taste of rancid meat, and sweetening new beverages, including coffee    (which arrived in Britain in 1650), chocolate (1657), and tea (1660).    Between 1660 and 1700, the per capita consumption of sugar in England    quadrupled, and then it doubled again in the next quarter century.    The value of sugar shipped to England and Wales was worth twice that    of tobacco by the end of the seventeenth century.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    With reports filtering home of great fortunes being made, thousands    of British colonists boarded ships for the West Indies. The well-off    paid for their outbound trips and brought enough cash to acquire some    acreage and build a sugar works or two. Those unable to afford the £6    trip traded passage and board by signing on as indentured servants,    typically committing to seven years of labor on a plantation, after    which they would be freed and given a small parcel of land. A third    group washed ashore on the islands: thieves and petty criminals, who    were exiled from England to the West Indies much as later    undesirables would be shipped off to Australia. Slaves from Africa,    too, were beginning to arrive in great numbers against their will,    imported by the sugar planters to work the expanding fields. The    population of Barbados swelled from just 80 in 1627 to more than    75,000 by 1650.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    James Drax—later Sir James Drax—arrived on Barbados in 1627 among the    first wave of settlers. He began by planting tobacco, then switched    to sugarcane. He quickly amassed an estate of 850 acres, which    yielded a torrent of cash. Drax was the first to build island    windmills, which were expensive but more efficient and productive    than cattle-powered mills. His wealth grew, and he had plenty of    company. “It is seldom seen that the ingenious or the industrious    fail of raising their fortunes in any part of the Indies,” wrote one    planter to an acquaintance in England. Another noted in 1655 that    Barbados was “one of the richest spots of ground in the world,”    adding that the gentry there “live far better than ours do in England.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In England, architects had been flirting with a hybrid style for    British manor houses, mixing elements of Gothic and classic. The    results were often eye-catching, although not always in a good way.    The planters commissioned dozens of similarly grand homes of coral    stone smoothed with plaster. Drax’s great house was three stories and    featured a carved mastic archway near a grand staircase, the whole    pile capped with angular gables and studded with corner finials. Such    homes were notably ill-suited for the tropical weather, and many    were, oddly, built with fireplaces. One visitor marveled that the    planters, who spent afternoons indoors drinking spirits and smoking    pipes, did not spontaneously combust.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Just as the houses were ill-designed for the stifling heat, so, too,    were colonial island fashions. Merchant ships laden with current    London styles would arrive with jackets and gowns unsuitable for the    oppressive tropics. Yet the fashionable were undaunted. “One may see    men loaded and half melting under a ponderous coat and waistcoat,”    noted an early visitor to Jamaica, another thriving British colony,    “richly bedaubed with gold lace or embroidery on a hot day, scarcely    able to bear them.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Through happy circumstance, these planters inhabited one of those    rare junctures of time and place when money seemingly tumbled out of    the sky. Sugar was king, the source of instant fortunes, taking on    the role that railroads, oil, and the Internet would later play in    North America. In the mid-seventeenth century, Barbados was the    wealthiest colony in the budding British empire, as well as its most    populous. The free white men of the islands had a net worth several    times that of even the most industrious colonists on the North    American mainland. Barbados produced more sugar and employed more    shippers than all the other British West Indian islands put together.    The island’s moment was to last for decades; as late as 1715, the    value of exports from Barbados exceeded not only that of the other    islands, but of all the other British North American colonies (island    and mainland) combined. The city of Bridgetown in the seventeenth    century was bigger and more prosperous than Manhattan.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The wealth that flowed back to England was immense. A writer in 1708    likened Barbados to a massive gold or silver mine being excavated for    the benefit of the homeland and claimed that trade with the island    supported sixty thousand people in England. The other British    islands, like St. Christopher, Nevis, Jamaica, and Antigua, also    contributed to the fortunes flowing back across the Atlantic, and the    planters and their agents saw little that couldn’t be improved with    gilding. In one well-known encounter, King George III and his prime    minister were riding near Weymouth, England, when they were all but    forced off the road by an extravagant carriage accompanied by a great    many outriders in flamboyant clothing. The king was informed that the    procession was that of a sugar planter from Jamaica. “Sugar, sugar,    hey? All that sugar!” said the king. “How are the duties, hey, Pitt,    how are the duties?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    One of those attracted to Barbados was Richard Ligon, who arrived    under circumstances not wholly of his own choosing. A British    royalist who had lost his business during the convulsions of the    English rebellion, Ligon set off for the island in June 1647 with    five acquaintances. The group acquired and managed a sugar estate,    and Ligon remained on the island until 1650. His account is not only    the chief source of information about early island life, but an    enchanting chronicle, in large part because Ligon never lost his    capacity to marvel in the face of great hardships. Barbados was in    the throes of a yellow fever epidemic when he arrived, with the    disease (by one accounting) killing six thousand inhabitants. Ligon,    who nearly died of the fever three times himself, wrote that “the    living were hardly able to bury the dead.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Yet Ligon was endlessly enthusiastic about the island’s charms,    including the incomparable taste of pineapple juice (“certainly the    Nectar which the Gods drunk”) and the succulence of the feral pigs    descended from swine abandoned by early Portuguese mariners (“the    sweetest flesh . . . and the loveliest to look on in a dish, either    boyl’d, roasted, or bak’d”). Given his persistent good cheer, it’s    all the more striking that Ligon wrote A True and Exact History of    the Island of Barbadoes (1657) while confined to an English debtor’s    prison, into which he was tossed upon his return from the West    Indies. (Ligon’s experience shows that not every colonist came home    burdened with fortune.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Historian Lowell Ragatz has written that new arrivals on the island    were often astounded by the “gastronomic feats” performed at    plantation feasts. “In violation of all rules of dietetics, huge    quantities of heavy food and drink were disposed of,” Ragatz wrote.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Indeed, Drax hosted one such feast, where the offerings might have    intimidated Falstaff. Ligon was there, and he reported that it began    with a first course of fourteen beef dishes, featuring a cow    especially fattened in a private pasture of abundant forage. Its    breast, rump, and cheeks were variously roasted, boiled, and baked.    The legs and head went into a spiced stew, and the tongue and tripe    were made into a meat pie seasoned with currants and finely minced    sweet herbs.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Then came the second course. It included a leg of pork and boiled    chicken and shoulder of mutton and a young goat, its belly filled    with a pudding. There was veal loin dressed with oranges, lemons, and    limes, and a suckling pig served in a sauce of claret, sage, nutmeg,    and brains. (The pig was “the fattest, whitest, and sweetest in the    world,” Ligon wrote.) Then came three turkeys and two capons and two    hens (served with their own eggs) and four ducklings and three    rabbits and eight turtledoves and, for good measure, Spanish bacon.    And oysters and caviar and olives and a potato pudding and a piquant    relish made of fish eggs.","brand":"Crown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303851544805,"sku":"NP9780525575023","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780525575023.jpg?v=1767721549","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/and-a-bottle-of-rum-revised-and-updated-isbn-9780525575023","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}