BORIS BURDA: How to introduce a new healthy drink
George Cruikshank. Saturday Evening by the Sea, 1841 / wikipedia.org
ATTENTION — QUESTION!
According to WHO, in 2017, 219,000,000 people suffered from this disease. Currently, up to one million people die from it each year. It is possible that it was the cause of death for Columbus, Dante, Caravaggio, Byron, and many other famous figures. Which soft drink was born from the battle against this disease?
ATTENTION — CORRECT ANSWER!
Tonic — the base of the first tonics is quinine, the main remedy for malaria.
WHERE RECIPES COME FROM
T
he glory of any national cuisine lies in its unique recipes. Usually, they are not infallible and indisputable instructions — the Italians are absolutely right that the number of correct minestrone recipes is roughly equal to the number of good housewives who cook it. But any good recipe can teach you how to make this particular dish.
Uzbek pilaf, Ukrainian borscht, Georgian satsivi, Spanish olla podrida, Polish bigos, Hungarian goulash, Japanese ramen, Indian biryani, and many other truly delicious dishes require knowledge of complex techniques and the use of often a double-digit number of different ingredients. Who came up with this?
There are dishes named after people, but not always the ones who invented them. The dish «Guryev porridge» and «Beef Stroganoff» were not invented by the count of Guryev and Stroganoff but by their chefs. The Peach Melba was not invented by the famous singer but by her admirer, the great chef Auguste Escoffier. There are, of course, exceptions, like Caesar salad, created by chef Caesar Cardini, but they are few…
And there are dishes (more often, it’s drinks) created not for culinary but for medicinal purposes. However, Chinese chefs have always claimed that a dish prepared by a good cook will inevitably also be medicine — but how can healthy people be made to eat medicine? This task is only possible for an army…
YO-HO-HO AND A BOTTLE OF RUM
If the army includes a product or dish in its diet, it will, whether they like it or not, eat it — there’s no way around it. Often, this is quite reasonable and justified. For example, the diet of a Roman legionary was quite varied, heavily depending on what could be obtained in reality, but two ingredients — onion and garlic — were irreplaceable, no questions asked!
Armies also supported new beverages, such as one from the Caribbean islands, which became abundant when Jews fleeing from the Holy Inquisition in Holland applied their known distillation techniques to molasses, a byproduct of sugar production from imported Indian sugarcane. This is how rum came to be.
The British Navy, the foundation of the power of the mistress of the seas, found this drink quite suitable for sailors, as it could be stored for long periods, unlike water or beer; it cheered and delighted the military and made them quite aggressive. Each sailor was given half a pint of rum a day — 284 grams, which was quite a lot, enough to get drunk easily.
There are, of course, claims that moderate amounts of alcohol can even be beneficial for health (the so-called J-shaped curve of the harm of alcohol depending on the amount consumed shows that it’s about 20 grams of pure alcohol per day — a glass of wine, a mug of beer, or a shot of vodka) — but that’s still at least five times more than the minimum, and behavior problems are surely hard to hide!
THE OLD COAT
In 1745, His Majesty’s Admiral Sir Edward Vernon had a thought: does he really need sailors who are always drunk? And he made a bold decision to limit the sailors’ alcohol ration to what we would now consider a small shot. To reduce the level of complaints, the admiral ordered that the same amount be given but supplemented with hot sweet tea.
The sailors grumbled but then calmed down, feeling better after their new ration, which they named the drink in honor of the admiral who introduced it. Not «Vernon», of course — sailors had long since nicknamed the stern officer «Old Grog» due to the waterproof coat (in French, «grosgrain») he always wore while on the deck. And so, the drink became known as grog.
Hot tea with rum was quite a good remedy against the typical cold experienced during long sea voyages. Was it the best? I don’t know because, for any problem, there are three solutions: the correct one, the wrong one, and the military one. But it was probably not that bad, as grog eventually made its way from the navy to the mainland and became particularly popular in the North (it was even nicknamed the «Norwegian soup»).
Experienced chefs quickly refined the sailors’ rough drink, adding spices, lemon, and other tasty ingredients. Today, there are at least several dozen popular variations of it. British sailors were only stopped from being force-fed grog on July 31, 1970 — this day became known as Black Tot Day.
BAD AIR
Grog became a respected drink at fancy parties and sophisticated bars, and it’s hard to imagine that anyone nowadays even thinks about the fact that this creation of the naval supply service originated from an order by a service-minded admiral supported by recommendations from military doctors. Probably, no one would even recall a drink that became popular with such “parents,” right?
Well, you can try. The British Army was as crucial to the empire’s power as the navy. Reaching the main jewel of the British crown, India, still required ships, but to place a yoke on the numerous, fabulously rich, and fiercely warlike Indian rajahs, land troops were also necessary.
Proper European tactics, quality firearms, and military discipline gave the British advantages, but the queen’s army had an enemy against which all these strengths were powerless — tropical diseases, particularly the dreaded intermittent fever, which incapacitated soldiers by the thousands.
No one knew where it came from — only in 1898 did the British scientist Ross and the Italian Grassi discover that it was transmitted by a specific type of mosquito. The disease was typical not only for India — people died from it in America and Southern Europe as well. It was once believed to be caused by bad air from swamps, which is why it was called «bad air» — in Latin, «malaria».
BITTER WATER
Fortunately, there was a cure for this dangerous disease. It was known to the descendants of the Incas, who helped cure the wife of the viceroy of Peru, the Countess de Chinchón, from malaria. In her honor, the tree from which this medicine was made was named «cinchona» or «quinine tree». The «Jesuit powder» made from its bark both cured and helped in prevention.
Soldiers of the British East India Company (seemingly a private army, but how many countries were stronger?), fearing the fever, began regularly drinking the «Jesuit powder» dissolved in water. Some of them, trying to soften the unbearable bitterness of quinine, began diluting the solution with gin. The taste of this alcoholic drink was not only tolerable but even enjoyed by many.
Army supply officers and doctors noticed that soldiers were avoiding the forced consumption of quinine solution (which they called tonic for marketing purposes) and sometimes threw it away, but with gin, they drank it willingly. So, they introduced a new kind of delight into the army rations — gin and tonic. Soon, it became popular among civilian drinkers as well.
In addition to quinine bark, tonics began to contain corn syrup, sugar, and flavorings, and many of them (such as Schweppes) became popular soft drinks. Nowadays, you won’t find a decent bar without gin and tonic. See, it wasn’t just grog that managed to neatly demobilize and make a career in civilian life — the tonic did it, too…
By the way, at least one bitter medicine made a culinary career without a military past. In 1807, a pharmacist from Karlovy Vary, Josef Vitus Becher, invented a bitter tincture using the water from Karlovy Vary to stimulate the appetite. After the war, Becher was deported, production was nationalized, and the drink, instead of being called «Josef Beche», was named «Becherovka».
Now, it’s enjoyed without any doctor’s prescription. By the way, there’s even a cocktail with an unappetizing name «beton» — that’s Becherovka with tonic. In Karlovy Vary, there are 12 bitter springs, and now there’s also a 13th — this is humorously referred to as the factory producing Becherovka, which is as profitable as the others. Here’s another culinary recipe written by doctors!
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