Below is another example of an excerpt of our book in progress. It comes from the chapter: Industrious Bedford County and the section titled: Inns And Taverns Encourage The Growth Of Towns. Again, notice that the text is fully footnoted where necessary.
Excerpt. . .
“Early
Americans consumed spirits at a prodigious rate.”1 That is how
one statistician described the consumption of alcoholic liquids in America
prior to the American Revolutionary War. That same statistician estimated that
every white male over the age of fifteen would have consumed an average of
forty gallons of cider, wine or distilled spirits each year. That was estimated
at roughly three pints of rum each week, or an average of seven one-ounce shots
each day. But before one jumps to the conclusion that the people of the 1700s
were all drunken sots, it must be remembered that refrigeration, and the ability
to keep liquids fresh, was not something that the people of the 1700s
possessed. Glass bottles were expensive and not expendable like they are today.
They were primarily used at taverns to transport the liquids from storage to
the table. Liquids were stored for long periods of time in wooden casks. And
those liquids that were available fresh and unfermented had a tendency to
become fermented, if stored for very long in the wooden casks of the time.
The variety of liquids that we drink
today were not all available to the people of the 1700s. Water, a very common
liquid that we take for granted today, would have been obtained from either
streams or hand dug wells, both of which would not have been totally free of
disease-causing micro-organisms. Those micro-organisms were the source of
diseases such as diarrhea and ‘the flux,’ or dysentery. At the present time,
we, who live in industrialized societies, wonder that such diseases are still
common in third-world countries, but they can often be traced to impure water
supplies. Pennsylvania in the 1700s was not so different than the third-world
countries of today in regard to the cleanliness of water. In fact, one food
historian stated that the colonists in North America would have had a “built-in
resistance to water” because of centuries of learning that many diseases were
brought on by drinking water that was less than clean.2 Milk,
another common liquid in our diet at the present time, was primarily used for
making butter and cheese. The milk that was drank would not have been
pasteurized, a technique to sterilize the milk using heat, therefore diseases
borne in unclean water were also found in unclean milk. Pasteurization was not
used to ‘clean’ raw milk until Louis Pasteur developed the process in the
mid-1800s. Carbonated ‘soft’ drinks and powdered fruit flavored drinks were not
available until the 1900s.
The primary liquids that were
swallowed as refreshment or nourishment by the people of the 1700s were cider,
alcoholic liquors, tea, coffee and cocoa. Of these drinks, tea, coffee and
cocoa might have been the least common. They required a lot of preparation each
time that they were to be drank since tea was only available in dry, loose form
and coffee was not very palatable when simply boiled in water; it needed to be
percolated to be properly enjoyed. Despite having originated in the western
hemisphere, cocoa was not drank in the English colonies of North America until
about the 1760s.3 Cocoa, which had been drunk ceremonially, as a
sort of sacred homage to their gods by the Olmec civilization as long ago as
three thousand years, and later by the Maya, Toltec and Aztec priesthood, had
been introduced into Europe by the Spanish invaders in the 16th Century. The
bitter drink that the Spanish conquistadors carried to their kings and queens
became refined and, as chocolate, spread throughout Europe for a century and a
half before being carried to North America. The first cocoa / chocolate
manufacturing company was established in Massachusetts in 1765. It simply wasn’t
drank widespread. Also neither tea, coffee or cocoa kept well in bottles or
wooden kegs because they didn’t ferment like other liquids.
Cider, pressed from apples, and its
sister drink, peary, made from pears, were very popular in early Pennsylvania.
According to a food historian, as apple orchards sprang up through New England
and southward into Pennsylvania: “cider
intake of the colonists rapidly reached gargantuan proportions”4
Cider was widely available for consumption in autumn, and during that season
would have been very fresh and sweet tasting. As time passed, though, the
cider, which was commonly stored in wooden barrels, fermented into hard cider. Hard cider, the alcoholic
content of which could vary between 3 and 12 percent, was a common beverage for
the whole family. In fact, practically all of the alcoholic drinks downed in
the 1700s were drank by both men, women and children.5 Cider
provided a number of vitamins that people otherwise would not have gotten in
their usual diet. The Germans generally ate a breakfast which included cider or
beer thickened with flour to make a sort of pancake.6 Apples were
also used to make apple brandy and a liquor called applejack. Cider, but sometimes ale, was the basis of a kind of
punch drank during the Christmas holiday called wassail. The name derives from the Middle English Waes Haeil, that translates as ‘good
health’ or ‘health to you.’ Wassail was basically a hot mulled (i.e. heated) punch with the addition of
sugar and spices including cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger.
