I read about a reference to distillation in the Pirotechnia, so I decided to look up the book. According to Wikipedia, "De la Pirotechnia is considered to be one of the first printed books on metallurgy to have been published in Europe. It was written in Italian and first published... Read more →
I was searching for some information on Wenham Lake Ice and stumbled across this article in The Food Journal, published in London in 1873. Wenham is a lake in Massachusetts and its ice was famous and exported to London (I have some interesting info about that in Doctors and Distillers),... Read more →
If you attended Tales of the Cocktail - virtually or in person - you have access to some recorded seminars. I watched and this post reports on one of those seminars: From Usquebaugh to Aqua Fructum: The Early Modern English Origins of English Gin By Jared Brown and Anistatia Miller... Read more →
At Tales of the Cocktail this year, I attended a seminar called The 10 Books from Cocktail History You Never Knew You Needed (Until Now), which was lead by Robert Simonson of the New York Times and Dr Nicola Nice of Pomp & Whimsy gin liqueur. You can find brief... Read more →
A very important early book on distillation is Hieronymous Braunschweig's The Virtuous Book of Distillation. It is otherwise known as the Large Book on Distillation, and it was first published in 1512, after the Small Book in 1500. I believe it was first printed in German, then translated into Dutch,... Read more →
I just finished reading Caribbean Rum: A Social and Economic History by Frederick H. Smith. (Buy it from these links on Bookshop or Amazon and I earn a tiny commission.) The book brought me so much new information, and I strongly recommend it. Most of the time when we study... Read more →
I recently read the book Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History by Sidney W. Mintz [amazon][bookshop]. This book compares sugar production and consumption patterns specifically looking at the place of sugar in England as it grew from a luxury item to an everyday necessity. The book... Read more →
For the Alcademics Book Club, we're reading Sweetness and Power, about sugar. Every time I read about the history of sugar, particularly the heyday of slavery-powered production in the 1700s in the Caribbean, I'm always like, "What happened to Portugal-controlled Brazilian sugar?" The Portuguese were early leaders in sugarcane production... Read more →