June 16, 2017 • 36 mins
This simple, refreshing staple cocktail wouldn't be here if it weren't for heart disease and malaria. We trace the history of gin and tonic water, both separately and together, and explain the science behind why they're so darn tasty.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hello, and welcome to food Stuff. I'm Anyries and I'm
Lauren vocal Bam and this is the second edition of
our cocktail our. Yes, still no cocktails though, Oh no,
we don't know. We we both have water, don't we.
We do. But we did just come straight from a
distillery in Atlanta that makes jim. Yeah, and we sampled
(00:29):
some of the gin there. We did away before lunch,
that's true, but it was for work, so for strictly
research related purposes it uh And it's old Fourth Distillery
in Atlanta, and it was awesome. Yeah, oh yeah, it was.
It was really really cool getting to watch the process
of how gin gets made. And we'll have a video
(00:51):
on that out around the time that this podcast comes out. Yes,
and this is probably the time when we should mention
the cocktail we are discussing tonic. Yes, what you might
know from the from the title of the episode two.
Oh yeah, I hope so, but yeah, it's always good
to get that out there in the beginning. Oh yes, ye,
(01:11):
gin tonic, Yes, that's what we're talking about today, right
or the G and T that's also called sometimes also
called gin tonic without the end and right now it's
having a bit of a resurgence, a little bit of
a moment in the past couple of years, particularly in Spain,
where it's sort of a national drink and borderline obsession.
Really yeah, they they have like a variation on it
(01:35):
that has more ice and a garnish and it's served
in a balloon glass that purportedly enhances your ability to
smell the drink. I have had one of these um
and it was lovely, and it came with one of
those big excuse like circulars. Yeah. Those always make me
really happy. Yeah. Yeah that then again, as we found out,
(01:56):
as we find out every time we go on a
shoot together, very easily entertained. Yes, both of us are.
There's bubbles, bubbles. The people working are like, okay, we're enthusiastic. Yes,
it's it's a positive, Yes, I think at any rate.
The gin and tonic Um, which I very much enjoy,
(02:19):
even just the regular way, of course, has long been
a go to in Britain, where you can even buy
it in pre mixed cans, which I find slightly horrifying
to be super honest. Yeah, I saw one of those
and I thought it was like it kind of looks
similar to a frisca if anyone's familiar with that. So
I went to kind of examine it more closely. Oh,
(02:40):
this is a jinny tonic, Okay. Winston Churchill once said
that quote, the gin and tonic has saved more englishmen's
lives and minds than all the doctors in the empire. Wow.
And the New York Times called the year of the
gin and Tonic. But the gin and tonic has not
(03:02):
always been this trinity summer drink. Yeah. Uh, more on
that in a moment. But first, what's a gin and tonic? Annie? Well, Lauren,
I'll tell you it is a highball cocktail, which is
basically just an alcohol based spirit mixed with a larger
percentage of a mixer. And the alcohol based in this
(03:23):
case is you guessed it, gent gin. And what could
the mixer be, It's tonic. Um. The order of operations
here typically is the gin, the tonic, lime juice if
you want it, that's optional, and ice. I've seen it
done other ways, but that's mostly what I came across
when I was researching this. And then a lime wedger
(03:45):
or twist to garnish rights. And typically the ratio of
gin two tonic is somewhere between one to one or
one to three. And yeah, the lime wedge pretty important.
But that's it. Yeah, I mean, of course there's there's
variations obviously. Um, popular ones put in Astora anger, Stora
(04:07):
think okay, we think mint and all kinds of tonic
water things. There's whatever tonic you choose to put in there. Yes,
there's so many options there. There's artisanal tonic water. My
boyfriend and pretty much everyone I talked to about it
in London swears by fever Tree, excellent brand. Um. You
(04:27):
can make your own tonic sup, or you can do
both and mixing together. Yeah, there's a lot of options there. Um.
And since there are only two ingredients and there's usually
more tonic water than gin, you want to make sure
that you like the tonic water you're using if you
want to enjoy your verage. Yes, and and it helps
if you like the gin that you're using as well. Yeah,
(04:48):
this is a drink that I think you really don't
want to get the cheap stuff. Um. And a personal
note for me, I did not know I liked gin
and tonics until fairly recently, because I is just drinking,
just drinking terrible gam terrible gin and probably terrible tonic juice.
I was one of those people. I was like it
days like a iron tree. Did you just call it
(05:08):
tonic juice? Yeah, that was pretty cool, patented, yes, yes. Um.
My favorite every day affordable gin of choice is eat
Or twenty four by the way, and I did a
tour of their. Uh I almost said brewery. That's not correct.
Distillery in London when I was there, and it was
(05:31):
really really cool. It was really neat man. Yeah, I
all the distilleries now, just from now on, it's all
I want to do. Go visit distilleries, work on that
I find. I wanted to put in that I find
New Amsterdam perfectly acceptable. But of course nice gents are nice.
Um number three London Dry might be my personal favorite
sometimes occasionally. Really I like alcohol, yeah, I mean, work
(05:56):
with what you got, but I do think that this
is one of the drinks that if you can get
something a little better like the one I said is
only only bucks. So that's not terrible, but not at all. Yeah.
But back to tonic water right. Bars in the US
have been criticized for using a soda gun for the
(06:18):
tonic water part um and that stuff. According to some
chefs or mixologists, it doesn't have quinine in it. It
may or may not. It may or may not, which
is a bitter ingredient that we're going to talk about
a lot more. And it's very important. It's this whole thing.
It's it's what makes tonic water tastes like tonic water, right, um.
(06:38):
And that's why I mixologists suggest to your questra tonic
water out of a bottle. But that sounds to me
like I should have just saved some bucks and ordered
something else or made my own at home. Up to you,
and yeah, the key to this drink is balancing this
bitter flavor of the tonic water with the kind of
(07:01):
flowery botanical herbal herbie kind of kind of flavors of
the gin. Right, And the key botanical the key ingredient
is juniper in the gent. Yes, it's the most prominent.
Note it has to be the most prominent. Note. You
have to have juniper. This is very serious, and not
(07:22):
just to annie. But annie is illegally okay, oh that
is serious good in collagen, yes, um. But but of
course there's lots of other ingredients and gin makers used
to flavor their products all kinds of stuff Yeah, lemon peels,
coriander seed, almonds or liquor shroot, and angelica seed. And
they're so so, so so many. The one that I like,
(07:46):
they use tea, I believe. Yeah. And the Gin and
Tonic has been cited as an example of a food
pairing type drink, meaning that the two ingredients taste differently
apart than they do together. And this is because chemistry. Yeah. Yeah,
the molecules that give gin and tonic their flavor are
very similarly structured, so they attract and create aggregates that
(08:10):
change the taste and more than some of their parts. Yeah.
So how did all of this get started? Great question. Yes,
as you might have gathered from that Churchill quote, we
largely have the British to think for the Gin and Tonic,
And according to Slate, there was a period of time
when the G and T was quote as essential weapon
(08:31):
for the British Empire as the gatlinga, which is a
big claim, big claim. Yeah, and it turns out that
it's kind of true. Yeah, kind of, but let's find out. Yes,
as with most things, the origin story of gin is
a little difficult history to been down. But a six
(08:54):
century Dutch physician Silvius the bulb Uh. He developed a
high alcoholic medicinal concoction called geneva Um. He used the
essential oils of juniper berries, which he believed was a
curative and a circulation improver. Yeah, a lot of alcohol.
(09:14):
Started out as a curate. Yes, they're like, oh, yes,
this thing is healthy. We should definitely absolutely drink more
of it. Right. The juniper berry, which comes from a
coniferous plant, has a history of being thought of as
this medicinal thing, going all the way back to Italian
monks using distill spirits flavored with juniper berries as a
(09:38):
not actually working remedy for the plague. Oh yeah, well,
I guess at a certain point you're going to try
anything that you've got. That's true. I probably didn't make
things worse. Maybe it did, so I think I think
at the point of the plague, you you're not your trouble. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
(09:58):
but it might have made you feel better, I guess
us if you yeah, one can hope. Um. The story
goes that the English first encountered Gin either during the
Dutch War of Independence during the fifteen eighties or the
thirty Year War that took place from sixteen eighteen to sixteen,
and they gave it the nickname Dutch courage or Gin,
(10:21):
a shortened version of geneva. Yeah uh. And once William
of Orange became King of England after the Glorious Revolution
of eight Jin's popularity increased dramatically due to high terrors
placed on the previously more popular hard liquor of the day,
French brandy, which motivated the English to find ways to
make cheap and they did, they really did. It was
(10:44):
so very cheap and and was used again in in
a medicinal kind of fashion. It was used to ease
hunger pains uh, warm you against the cold, distract you
from brutal, thankless factory work, you know, and and give
you a buzz right you know, that positive fun thing
out of it too. Um. Also, if the sailors couldn't
(11:05):
find or didn't want to buy juniper berries, they'd use
turpentine or other horrible you should not be drinking this
type things. Yeah Gin. Rooms typically came with this signage
over their door quote drunk for a penny, dead, drunk
for twopennies, clean straw for nothing, but the straw was
(11:27):
usually soaked in foment. Yes, drink responsibly kids. Yes, you
probably should have said that at the top of the podcast.
Oh you're getting it now, Yes, you made it this part. Yes, Um.
English gin consumption would skyrocket in the eighteenth century, leading
(11:47):
to an uptick of public drunkenness, followed by the gin craiz.
It was a freak out among those more well off,
the morality of drinking gin. By the and this was
my favorite part of the beef Ever tour, by the way,
it was like a haunted house. It was like you
were suddenly in a haunted house because they had it
(12:07):
like old London streets and it was dark and their
people screaming and crying. Well, it was crazy. It sounds
I hadn't thought about it this way before, but this
totally sounds like refor madness. Yeah. Yeah, it was really
cool but but but I mean kind of. At the time,
there were some terrible things happening because of the the
(12:29):
the cheapness and the availability of gin in London. The
death rate surpassed the birth rate, and of babies died
by the age of five. Mothers with newborns would give
babies gin to calm them down. Um. The moms themselves
were sometimes addicted to gin and didn't provide their children
with much attention. They're giving that attention to the gin
(12:53):
um are or babies were born with fetal alcohol syndrome.
And because women were more often impacted than men, jin
earned nicknames like quote Ladies Delight and Mother's Ruin, and
that one is still around to this day Truin, and
some popular gin bars are called that. Oh, and this
(13:13):
is very important. The gin we're talking about in old London,
that that's not today's jin. No. No, we have improved
distillation technologies, uh, safety regulations which are pretty okay sometimes Yes.
And according to a Vice article I read quote, the
gin of the eighteenth century was a throat searing I
(13:37):
read in ing vomit, churning hell broth, hell broth. Yeah. Oh,
Vice has a way of putting things. I have to say,
hell broth. I might be hesitant to and vibe a
hell broth, but I don't know. I kind of want
to try it. It would depend if it was a
Halloween type situation. I'd give it a go. I mean,
(13:59):
I'm I'm a first step anyway. I drank mold this week.
That's true. We've had adventures, we have watched the videos. Well,
despite the fact that I would try hell broth, and
certainly a lot of the English were apparently more than
trying hell broth. Uh not. Everyone was on board for
(14:20):
all of this, all of this crazy gin behavior, and
the government had a few things to say about it.
We'll get to those after a quick break for a
word from our sponsor, and we're back, thank you sponsor.
(14:44):
So in response to this gin panic, the English Parliament
drafted a series of laws um eight Gin Acts to
be exact, and these were aimed at minimizing gin drinking
during the seventeen thirties in in what historians compare to
our modern day war on drugs. The first Gin Act,
a steep tax on jin, had this glaring loophole, though,
(15:07):
and that gin was defined as something that had quote
juniper berries or other fruit spices or ingredients. Yeah, so
people just didn't add those things and therefore made what
they what they called parliamentary brandy, and that kind of
(15:29):
There was another Gin Act, and they also people found
a way around that one. And then in four Judas
de four killed her baby and sold the babies clothes
to by gin, which resulted in the third Gin Act,
prohibiting sale of gin over two gallons and enacting a
stiff tariff of one pound per gallon on top of
(15:51):
the fifty pound annual license fee required to sell it.
And this did a good job of putting legitimate sellers
out of business and placing them with corner sellers who
peddled dangerous, cheap stuff that blinded and or killed people.
Because we all know it's always really good when you
when a government tries to crack down on I think
(16:13):
the people really like yeah uh it. And the Fourth
Din Act also rewarded and protected informants, people who would
tell the police give the police information about who was
selling jin, who was drinking gin. But informants had to
know the name of the renter of a property selling
gin for the authorities to act on their tip. So
(16:36):
Captain Dudley brad Street. Captain Dudley brad Street, he sounds
like an upstanding gentleman. Not really, probably not. He circumvented
this in seventeen thirty eight by having a friend rent
a house in London where he nailed the sign of
a cat in the window and hit a pipe underneath
the cat's paw. Captain Bradstreet got some food, thirteen pounds
(16:58):
worth of gin, and barricaded himself inside. After he had
spread the word that the next day jen would be
available from a cat in the alley. I'd be intrigued.
Customers place coins and a slot over the cat's mouth,
and the captain slowly poured gin from the pipe underneath
the cat's paw. And he did this for three months
(17:20):
before copycats caused him to move on. But despite what
you might think and what I thought, this probably isn't
where old tom jin comes from. But it did lead
to the creation of puss and muse houses where mws
like yeah, not like mus an idea yeah, where a
customer wanting to buy jin from a vendor in some
(17:41):
secluded space would say puss and the vendor would say
muse and reveal a drawer that the customer would put
their money in, which the vendor took and then pushed
it back out. But now magically it had ah. That
was magic magic, great kind of magic. H But but
(18:02):
but the but the people would We're not having this.
They wanted their gin. They did, And by seventeen forty
three people were rioting in protest to these tariffs. And
despite the tariffs. Londoners were consuming eleven million gallons of
gin annually by seventeen fifty. Jin informers were killed on
the streets, sometimes by mobs who seventeen hundred, social historian
(18:27):
Thomas Felding wrote in a political pamphlet about the destruction
Gin was reeking on what he called the quote inferior
people um, and he wrote, quote, A new kind of drunkenness,
unknown to our ancestors, is lately sprung up among us, which,
if not put to a stop, will infallibly destroy a
great part of the inferior people. The drunkenness I here
(18:51):
intenders by this poison called jin, the principal substenance parentheses,
if it may be so called, of more than a
hundred thousand people in this goodness. Yeah, so yes. The
government kept trying the Gin Act of seventeen fifty one
up to the costs of operation for gin stores um,
(19:12):
either due to that or more likely the rising grain
costs that translated to higher gin costs for customers that
encouraged them to switch to the cheaper beer. Consumption of
gin did lesson, but it was still miss or mr
popularity as spirits go in Britain, m hmmm. And I
just want to mention here that there's a terrifying picture
(19:35):
about the immoral stuff caused by jin called jin Lane
by William Hogarth, and I stared at it discovering one
horrifying thing after another for a long time on my
store of b theater. Go go look it up if
you're looking for something disturbing. It's oddly mesmerizing and terrifying
(19:56):
will William Hogarth jin Lane. Check it out. M hm.
And the negative connotation Gin earned during this gin craze
is still around to this day, and in phrases like
gin joint, gin drunk, and soaked bats of gin and
gin mills. And I've never heard the term gin drunk,
by the way, but apparently this is becoming mean, our
emotional when you're drunk. Yeah, so that's that's gin. Yeah.
(20:22):
Now we should talk for a moment about tonic. We
should the other key ingredients. Yes, so the tonic that
we know today a sugar sweetened carbonated soda that's flavored
with the bitter tangy Quinine is also a thing that
originated as a medicine, and specifically as a treatment for malaria. Well, now,
(20:43):
quinine is a compound that occurs in nature, specifically in
the bark of a large shrub and or small tree
called the sancona, which is native to the Andes Mountains
in South America. Unlike the Sancona, malaria is not native
to South America. The Spanish brought it with them during
their invade and colonization, starting with Christopher Columbus in the
late fourteen hundreds He's gonna show one day, One day, Christopher,
(21:09):
and malaria was a really huge problem throughout Europe at
that time, where it was generally called the ague. Up
through the mid sixteen hundreds, no one knew what to
do about it. If folks would come down with this
mysterious flu like fever that would come and go and
would frequently cause complications leading to death, and a lot
of people were doing this, although it didn't help that
(21:31):
the medicine in Europe was still focused on the humors
um and popular wisdom was that you should bleed or
or purge a patient with agu uh. Other potential cures
were astrology, of course, and reportedly this one's my favorite,
throwing a patient head first into a shrub and encouraging
him to disentangle himself faster than the disease could disentangle itself.
(21:58):
How the disease disentangle itself because it's a it's a
it's like a little spirit that's hanging out with you.
And so if you can get up faster than the disease,
then you leave the disease in the shrub. I see
totally logical. Completely. I don't know why I haven't tried this.
Let me get someone to throw me ahead first, like
time I've got any kind of like cold that won't
(22:18):
go as Kyle, no worries. But in the sixteen thirties, though,
and Augustinian monk by the name of Antonio di Colancha,
I think, wrote home about the powdered bark of this
Peruvian tree that was working wonders for the treatment of
a Q. Historians think that probably native people's developed this
cure in the couple hundred years that've been dealing with
(22:40):
malaria and passed it on to the Europeans. But since
Augustinian monk was getting excited about it, Pope Innocent the
tenth had some of his people look into it, and
over the next hundred years or so it had become
a major European import and a widespread treatment and preventative
for malaria, because quinine kills the parasite that causes malaria.
(23:02):
It turns out bully. It took a while for the
British to catch on, though, because its associations with the
Catholic Church freaked out a whole lot of Protestants. Oliver
Cromwell supposedly refused treatment with it, leading to his death
in the sixteen fifties, although he also had taihoid fevers,
so it probably didn't help the situation none of those things.
(23:25):
But catch on they did, and the Spanish basically had
a monopoly on the Peruvian crops, so they made a mint.
Legend has it that it was sometimes referred to as
bark from the fever tree. I see. Yeah. Meanwhile, throughout
the seventeen hundreds, Europe would go a little bit nuts
(23:47):
about sparkling mineral waters, first taken from natural springs and
then artificially produced through various carbonation processes. It was a
health trend, and also, you know, fizzies are fun um.
But these healthy sparkling beverages were sometimes called tonics, and
Johann Jacob Schwepp, yes what that swept founded the first
(24:10):
carbonated water manufacturing company in Geneva in three mm hmm
sparkling water Aside in eighteen twenty, after decades of scientists
searching for the compound in Sancona that makes it such
an effective medicine, these two French pharmacists by the names
of do it for me Annie here, Joseph and Joseph n.
(24:34):
I think, oh that's oh see, yeah, that's a lot
better than I would have done thanking. The two of
them isolated uh coining and set up a factory for
its extraction in Paris, and this made it possible to
eat slightly less tree bark while attempting to not get malaria,
which I'm sure a lot of people were very fond of. Sure. Meanwhile,
as this was happening, the Spanish colonies in South America
(24:57):
were fighting for their independence, and afterward they would attempt
to control the lucrative Sintona industry by limiting or flat
out outlawing the exportation of seeds and cuttings of Sinchona plants.
But despite the price, all of the conquering empires, including
the British, were on board with Sincona and Quinine and
(25:20):
used it to start eradicating malaria in Europe throughout the
eighteen hundreds. However, malaria was still a huge problem in
the tropics, which is largely where the conquering empires were
getting their conquer on because of sugar and other stuff sugar, sugar,
and this all came to a head in British run
India during the early eighteen hundreds. People were taking daily
(25:40):
doses of cowining to prevent malaria. Because it's so bitter,
folks were starting to mix it with sparkling water and
a little bit of sugar, and thus tonic water was born,
which brings us to the gin and tonic. But first
it brings us to a word from our sponsor, and
(26:08):
we're back, thank you sponsor. Okay, now that we've got
a gin, we've got our tonic. Where did the idea
of mixing them come from? Well, it was kind of
a Merry Poppin situation. A spoonful sugar helps the medicine
go down. Around British soldiers in India started adding gin
to their daily required quiney tonic water, and also as
(26:32):
an added bonus, the British Navy squeezed in some lime
juice to prevent scurvy. And this is where the nickname
for the British lime it comes from. Oh, I know,
I should have guessed that a long time ago. I
feel very silly now, okay, that's fine. By the eighteen forties,
the British population in India was using, in fact, more
(26:52):
than seven hundred tons a sincona bark per year to
fight to fight m area there wow. And in eighteen
fifty eight the British took over governance of India from
the British East India Company following the violent Suppoy Revolution
also called the Indian Mutiny. A bunch of other names too,
(27:12):
but those are that those cover the bases um. With
more British soldiers and their families in India than ever,
the demand for tonic water increased, which led to Erasmus
Bond's creation the first commercial tonic water in that same year,
which you can still buy. I've never heard of it,
me neating, And that led to your schwepps h the
Indian Quinine tonic in eighteen seventy, and both of these
(27:35):
went on to find success outside of India in Britain
as well. Meanwhile, Charles Ledger, an Englishman who became an
alpaca farmer in Peru smuggled sin connoisseeds out of Peru
to his brother during the eighteen sixties because at the
time it was still illegal to export the trees or
the seeds. Right, he actually had a history of smuggling.
(27:56):
He also smuggled alpaca out of the country. It was
just a smuggler, apparently better at it than Han Solo.
He didn't get caught, Oh Solo vernon the Gin and
Tonic episode. Anyway, the British government would not buy these
these seeds that he that he smuggled out, but the
(28:16):
Dutch government would and did, and they set up plantations
on Java, which was one of their colonial outposts. And
so by World War one the Dutch pretty much dominated
the coining trade, and by the end of the century
they controlled nine percent of the world's supply. That's quite
quite a large percentage, is Epitaph reads by the way
(28:39):
Charles Ledger, he gave coining to the world. H Yeah,
and the G and T was also thought to have
played a role in World War two when the Japanese
forces took over Java and all those Sincona plantations, which
equalled most of the world's supply according to Amy Stuar,
(29:00):
it's book The Drunk Botanist, which I absolutely want to read. Yeah,
the last American plane out of Indonesia had four million
coining seeds on board, but to know immediate a veil
because the trees would take too long to grow to
be of any use during the war. But that didn't
stop the Allies from planting trees in Africa at the
same time putting scientists to work developing a synthetic replacement. Ah,
(29:21):
and both succeeded. To this day, Africa grows natural coining
and the and the synthetic version is used in some prescriptions. Yeah,
because it's still used as an anti malarial m HM
and for some other things. But that's a different episode entirely.
It is it is. That's pretty much the history of
the gin and tonic. We obviously, as always had to
(29:45):
shorten it. Especially we didn't talk about how you still gin.
We're going to do that, Yeah, yeah, yeah, we should.
We should definitely do a whole episode about um more
more gin things. There's really quite a lot. It's it's
such a base alcohol that there's quite a lot to
say about it. And we also just today as we
as we said, we've got to go see it being distilled.
(30:07):
So this is new knowledge that's park lating in our brains.
It's true. We do have a few closing remarks, yes,
including you can make your own gin at home using vodka, um,
juniper berries you have to and other botanicals. Um. And
I know a lot of people say that jen is
(30:27):
basically flavored vodka, and I mean that's true. Yeah, it's
a it's a neutral spirit to which juniper berries have
been added to. That is the definition of jin. Yeah.
So I have to say I was surprised when I
was like, how do you make jin? And there were
so many recipes that were just like cheap vodka for berries,
And I was kind of like at that point maybe
(30:48):
by just but I'm all down for trying things. Yeah,
could it could be great if you want to experiment
with with your own flavors. Then absolutely didn't do it. Yeah,
I mean I want to go put tea and some
gin right now. It was good? Yeah. Uh, tonic water
glows under black light, not because of the quining in it. Yeah.
(31:08):
So that's a really fun Halloween trick. Um. If you
if you want to make a cheap Halloween decorations. Just
toss some coining in some in some vases and let
him go. I thought you're gonna say, like, throw it
on the walls. I'm clean up. That wouldn't be very effective.
That would drive pretty fast, Okay. And finally, here's a
(31:28):
quote from Douglas adams Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Oh,
this is so delightful. Gay. Yes, I'm gonna try to
get through these pronunciations, but we'll see. It is as follows,
of all known worlds in the galaxy, be they primitive,
are highly advanced, have invented a drink called gin and
Tonics or gene and nicks or gen nis, or any
(31:53):
one of a thousand or more variations on the same
phonetic theme. Douglas Adams, Yes, so that brings us to
listener man. Yeah, Sierra wrote in response to our Fried
Chicken episode and Annie's bafflement about Scottish immigrants being associated
(32:14):
with the South, I mean our our mutual bafflement really
um a quote in the recent History of Fried Chicken episode.
I was intrigued by the theory of the Scots bringing
over the techniques of fried chicken to North America. I
believe you mentioned that you were unsure of how possibly
it came to be centralized in the South under this theory,
and I just wanted to throw in my own theory
of how this might have happened based on Scottish history.
(32:36):
After the failed Jacobite Rebellion of seventeen forty five at
the defeat of Clodon, many of the Scots had been
taken prisoners for treason against the crown, and the Highland
ways were systematically being destroyed and disassembled. Many of those
Scots that were taken prisoner that were not immediately executed
were transported to the colonies in America, with some being
sold as a dead church servants to pay for their transportation.
(32:58):
Many of the transported ended particularly in the southern colonies
and Appalachia, with most of the Scottish indentured servants ending
up on plantations. As the Highland clans were broken up
over the next fifty years, many Scots began to immigrate
to the colonies as well, often following where the previous
Scots had been transported to. This has just me spitballing here,
but it could have created a fusion between their techniques
(33:19):
for fried chicken and the techniques of the African slaves
that they were likely in semi close quarters with if
they were indentured servants on plantations. I'm no historian, so
I leave the conclusions to them. It's still a good
a good theory, though, and thank you so much for
writing in UM, because we were baffled and we did
not have time to research, said bafflement. Yes, so thank
(33:43):
you very much. Heidi wrote in with this theory about
why Easter might be the second biggest brunch day of
the year in the US. Quote during the Brunch podcast,
you mentioned that Mother's Day and Easter were two the
biggest brunch days of the year, but could not understand
why Easter was so popular. I have a theory based
on my years as a server and a movie Easter parade.
(34:06):
Many people get a new outfit and hat for Easter.
Are you going to go home after church and take
it off to cook dinner or would you go to
brunch and all your new finery. I loved working Easter
Brunch just for people watching and the hats. Kentucky Derby
has nothing on Easter hat. Wow. I do remember one
year when a fellow server got bumped carrying a tray
(34:26):
of omelets and spilled them all over the most fabulous,
beautiful hat in the dining room. I think the waitress
cried harder than the owner of the hat. Oh my goodness,
I know now I'm I want to go hat watching.
After duly noted, Yeah, all right, we need to track
down the right the right brunch spots in Atlanta to
do this. That We've got almost a year two research,
(34:48):
so I think we can do this. My grandmother did
used to take me out before Easter and I didn't
buy hats, but I usually got a dress. So this theory,
I've never seen it in person, but I I buy
that it's probably that that could be part of it
for sure. Yeah. I mean also, I guess it's a
it's a holiday, give give give mom a break from
(35:10):
doing the cooking again, you know that kind of thing. Yeah. Also,
I did want to mention that U. My my friend
Jessica listened to the brunch episode and she she she
argued with me sternly that um that that brunch is
not always seen as a as a as a bad
server gig. She said that she very much enjoyed her
her brunch gigs because people were in a good move.
(35:31):
They were happy, they were day drinking. It was nice,
and then they would be day drunk and then they
would give her a good tip. Oh good, that makes
me happy, I know, right yeah, so so yeah, I
do have, as I said that episode, some guilt when
I go to brunch. So this tell your friend. Thank
you absolutely, I think, thank you Sierra, Thank you a
(35:51):
Heidie for writing in. Thank you Jessica for talking to
me in person. Um if if you guys would like
to get in touch with us, Ah, we have a
Facebook page and ow wow we do, we do. There's
like two posts on it. Uh yeah. On Facebook we
are food stuff hs W. That's also our Twitter handle
(36:12):
on Instagram we are food stuff and you can email
us yes at food stuff at how stuff works dot com.
We hope that we will hear from you. It is
so terrific to hear from all of you all the time,
and you'll hear from us again soon. In the meanwhile,
we hope that lots more good things are coming your
way
Hello, and welcome to food Stuff. I'm Anyries and I'm
Lauren vocal Bam and this is the second edition of
our cocktail our. Yes, still no cocktails though, Oh no,
we don't know. We we both have water, don't we.
We do. But we did just come straight from a
distillery in Atlanta that makes jim. Yeah, and we sampled
(00:29):
some of the gin there. We did away before lunch,
that's true, but it was for work, so for strictly
research related purposes it uh And it's old Fourth Distillery
in Atlanta, and it was awesome. Yeah, oh yeah, it was.
It was really really cool getting to watch the process
of how gin gets made. And we'll have a video
(00:51):
on that out around the time that this podcast comes out. Yes,
and this is probably the time when we should mention
the cocktail we are discussing tonic. Yes, what you might
know from the from the title of the episode two.
Oh yeah, I hope so, but yeah, it's always good
to get that out there in the beginning. Oh yes, ye,
(01:11):
gin tonic, Yes, that's what we're talking about today, right
or the G and T that's also called sometimes also
called gin tonic without the end and right now it's
having a bit of a resurgence, a little bit of
a moment in the past couple of years, particularly in Spain,
where it's sort of a national drink and borderline obsession.
Really yeah, they they have like a variation on it
(01:35):
that has more ice and a garnish and it's served
in a balloon glass that purportedly enhances your ability to
smell the drink. I have had one of these um
and it was lovely, and it came with one of
those big excuse like circulars. Yeah. Those always make me
really happy. Yeah. Yeah that then again, as we found out,
(01:56):
as we find out every time we go on a
shoot together, very easily entertained. Yes, both of us are.
There's bubbles, bubbles. The people working are like, okay, we're enthusiastic. Yes,
it's it's a positive, Yes, I think at any rate.
The gin and tonic Um, which I very much enjoy,
(02:19):
even just the regular way, of course, has long been
a go to in Britain, where you can even buy
it in pre mixed cans, which I find slightly horrifying
to be super honest. Yeah, I saw one of those
and I thought it was like it kind of looks
similar to a frisca if anyone's familiar with that. So
I went to kind of examine it more closely. Oh,
(02:40):
this is a jinny tonic, Okay. Winston Churchill once said
that quote, the gin and tonic has saved more englishmen's
lives and minds than all the doctors in the empire. Wow.
And the New York Times called the year of the
gin and Tonic. But the gin and tonic has not
(03:02):
always been this trinity summer drink. Yeah. Uh, more on
that in a moment. But first, what's a gin and tonic? Annie? Well, Lauren,
I'll tell you it is a highball cocktail, which is
basically just an alcohol based spirit mixed with a larger
percentage of a mixer. And the alcohol based in this
(03:23):
case is you guessed it, gent gin. And what could
the mixer be, It's tonic. Um. The order of operations
here typically is the gin, the tonic, lime juice if
you want it, that's optional, and ice. I've seen it
done other ways, but that's mostly what I came across
when I was researching this. And then a lime wedger
(03:45):
or twist to garnish rights. And typically the ratio of
gin two tonic is somewhere between one to one or
one to three. And yeah, the lime wedge pretty important.
But that's it. Yeah, I mean, of course there's there's
variations obviously. Um, popular ones put in Astora anger, Stora
(04:07):
think okay, we think mint and all kinds of tonic
water things. There's whatever tonic you choose to put in there. Yes,
there's so many options there. There's artisanal tonic water. My
boyfriend and pretty much everyone I talked to about it
in London swears by fever Tree, excellent brand. Um. You
(04:27):
can make your own tonic sup, or you can do
both and mixing together. Yeah, there's a lot of options there. Um.
And since there are only two ingredients and there's usually
more tonic water than gin, you want to make sure
that you like the tonic water you're using if you
want to enjoy your verage. Yes, and and it helps
if you like the gin that you're using as well. Yeah,
(04:48):
this is a drink that I think you really don't
want to get the cheap stuff. Um. And a personal
note for me, I did not know I liked gin
and tonics until fairly recently, because I is just drinking,
just drinking terrible gam terrible gin and probably terrible tonic juice.
I was one of those people. I was like it
days like a iron tree. Did you just call it
(05:08):
tonic juice? Yeah, that was pretty cool, patented, yes, yes. Um.
My favorite every day affordable gin of choice is eat
Or twenty four by the way, and I did a
tour of their. Uh I almost said brewery. That's not correct.
Distillery in London when I was there, and it was
(05:31):
really really cool. It was really neat man. Yeah, I
all the distilleries now, just from now on, it's all
I want to do. Go visit distilleries, work on that
I find. I wanted to put in that I find
New Amsterdam perfectly acceptable. But of course nice gents are nice.
Um number three London Dry might be my personal favorite
sometimes occasionally. Really I like alcohol, yeah, I mean, work
(05:56):
with what you got, but I do think that this
is one of the drinks that if you can get
something a little better like the one I said is
only only bucks. So that's not terrible, but not at all. Yeah.
But back to tonic water right. Bars in the US
have been criticized for using a soda gun for the
(06:18):
tonic water part um and that stuff. According to some
chefs or mixologists, it doesn't have quinine in it. It
may or may not. It may or may not, which
is a bitter ingredient that we're going to talk about
a lot more. And it's very important. It's this whole thing.
It's it's what makes tonic water tastes like tonic water, right, um.
(06:38):
And that's why I mixologists suggest to your questra tonic
water out of a bottle. But that sounds to me
like I should have just saved some bucks and ordered
something else or made my own at home. Up to you,
and yeah, the key to this drink is balancing this
bitter flavor of the tonic water with the kind of
(07:01):
flowery botanical herbal herbie kind of kind of flavors of
the gin. Right, And the key botanical the key ingredient
is juniper in the gent. Yes, it's the most prominent.
Note it has to be the most prominent. Note. You
have to have juniper. This is very serious, and not
(07:22):
just to annie. But annie is illegally okay, oh that
is serious good in collagen, yes, um. But but of
course there's lots of other ingredients and gin makers used
to flavor their products all kinds of stuff Yeah, lemon peels,
coriander seed, almonds or liquor shroot, and angelica seed. And
they're so so, so so many. The one that I like,
(07:46):
they use tea, I believe. Yeah. And the Gin and
Tonic has been cited as an example of a food
pairing type drink, meaning that the two ingredients taste differently
apart than they do together. And this is because chemistry. Yeah. Yeah,
the molecules that give gin and tonic their flavor are
very similarly structured, so they attract and create aggregates that
(08:10):
change the taste and more than some of their parts. Yeah.
So how did all of this get started? Great question. Yes,
as you might have gathered from that Churchill quote, we
largely have the British to think for the Gin and Tonic,
And according to Slate, there was a period of time
when the G and T was quote as essential weapon
(08:31):
for the British Empire as the gatlinga, which is a
big claim, big claim. Yeah, and it turns out that
it's kind of true. Yeah, kind of, but let's find out. Yes,
as with most things, the origin story of gin is
a little difficult history to been down. But a six
(08:54):
century Dutch physician Silvius the bulb Uh. He developed a
high alcoholic medicinal concoction called geneva Um. He used the
essential oils of juniper berries, which he believed was a
curative and a circulation improver. Yeah, a lot of alcohol.
(09:14):
Started out as a curate. Yes, they're like, oh, yes,
this thing is healthy. We should definitely absolutely drink more
of it. Right. The juniper berry, which comes from a
coniferous plant, has a history of being thought of as
this medicinal thing, going all the way back to Italian
monks using distill spirits flavored with juniper berries as a
(09:38):
not actually working remedy for the plague. Oh yeah, well,
I guess at a certain point you're going to try
anything that you've got. That's true. I probably didn't make
things worse. Maybe it did, so I think I think
at the point of the plague, you you're not your trouble. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
(09:58):
but it might have made you feel better, I guess
us if you yeah, one can hope. Um. The story
goes that the English first encountered Gin either during the
Dutch War of Independence during the fifteen eighties or the
thirty Year War that took place from sixteen eighteen to sixteen,
and they gave it the nickname Dutch courage or Gin,
(10:21):
a shortened version of geneva. Yeah uh. And once William
of Orange became King of England after the Glorious Revolution
of eight Jin's popularity increased dramatically due to high terrors
placed on the previously more popular hard liquor of the day,
French brandy, which motivated the English to find ways to
make cheap and they did, they really did. It was
(10:44):
so very cheap and and was used again in in
a medicinal kind of fashion. It was used to ease
hunger pains uh, warm you against the cold, distract you
from brutal, thankless factory work, you know, and and give
you a buzz right you know, that positive fun thing
out of it too. Um. Also, if the sailors couldn't
(11:05):
find or didn't want to buy juniper berries, they'd use
turpentine or other horrible you should not be drinking this
type things. Yeah Gin. Rooms typically came with this signage
over their door quote drunk for a penny, dead, drunk
for twopennies, clean straw for nothing, but the straw was
(11:27):
usually soaked in foment. Yes, drink responsibly kids. Yes, you
probably should have said that at the top of the podcast.
Oh you're getting it now, Yes, you made it this part. Yes, Um.
English gin consumption would skyrocket in the eighteenth century, leading
(11:47):
to an uptick of public drunkenness, followed by the gin craiz.
It was a freak out among those more well off,
the morality of drinking gin. By the and this was
my favorite part of the beef Ever tour, by the way,
it was like a haunted house. It was like you
were suddenly in a haunted house because they had it
(12:07):
like old London streets and it was dark and their
people screaming and crying. Well, it was crazy. It sounds
I hadn't thought about it this way before, but this
totally sounds like refor madness. Yeah. Yeah, it was really
cool but but but I mean kind of. At the time,
there were some terrible things happening because of the the
(12:29):
the cheapness and the availability of gin in London. The
death rate surpassed the birth rate, and of babies died
by the age of five. Mothers with newborns would give
babies gin to calm them down. Um. The moms themselves
were sometimes addicted to gin and didn't provide their children
with much attention. They're giving that attention to the gin
(12:53):
um are or babies were born with fetal alcohol syndrome.
And because women were more often impacted than men, jin
earned nicknames like quote Ladies Delight and Mother's Ruin, and
that one is still around to this day Truin, and
some popular gin bars are called that. Oh, and this
(13:13):
is very important. The gin we're talking about in old London,
that that's not today's jin. No. No, we have improved
distillation technologies, uh, safety regulations which are pretty okay sometimes Yes.
And according to a Vice article I read quote, the
gin of the eighteenth century was a throat searing I
(13:37):
read in ing vomit, churning hell broth, hell broth. Yeah. Oh,
Vice has a way of putting things. I have to say,
hell broth. I might be hesitant to and vibe a
hell broth, but I don't know. I kind of want
to try it. It would depend if it was a
Halloween type situation. I'd give it a go. I mean,
(13:59):
I'm I'm a first step anyway. I drank mold this week.
That's true. We've had adventures, we have watched the videos. Well,
despite the fact that I would try hell broth, and
certainly a lot of the English were apparently more than
trying hell broth. Uh not. Everyone was on board for
(14:20):
all of this, all of this crazy gin behavior, and
the government had a few things to say about it.
We'll get to those after a quick break for a
word from our sponsor, and we're back, thank you sponsor.
(14:44):
So in response to this gin panic, the English Parliament
drafted a series of laws um eight Gin Acts to
be exact, and these were aimed at minimizing gin drinking
during the seventeen thirties in in what historians compare to
our modern day war on drugs. The first Gin Act,
a steep tax on jin, had this glaring loophole, though,
(15:07):
and that gin was defined as something that had quote
juniper berries or other fruit spices or ingredients. Yeah, so
people just didn't add those things and therefore made what
they what they called parliamentary brandy, and that kind of
(15:29):
There was another Gin Act, and they also people found
a way around that one. And then in four Judas
de four killed her baby and sold the babies clothes
to by gin, which resulted in the third Gin Act,
prohibiting sale of gin over two gallons and enacting a
stiff tariff of one pound per gallon on top of
(15:51):
the fifty pound annual license fee required to sell it.
And this did a good job of putting legitimate sellers
out of business and placing them with corner sellers who
peddled dangerous, cheap stuff that blinded and or killed people.
Because we all know it's always really good when you
when a government tries to crack down on I think
(16:13):
the people really like yeah uh it. And the Fourth
Din Act also rewarded and protected informants, people who would
tell the police give the police information about who was
selling jin, who was drinking gin. But informants had to
know the name of the renter of a property selling
gin for the authorities to act on their tip. So
(16:36):
Captain Dudley brad Street. Captain Dudley brad Street, he sounds
like an upstanding gentleman. Not really, probably not. He circumvented
this in seventeen thirty eight by having a friend rent
a house in London where he nailed the sign of
a cat in the window and hit a pipe underneath
the cat's paw. Captain Bradstreet got some food, thirteen pounds
(16:58):
worth of gin, and barricaded himself inside. After he had
spread the word that the next day jen would be
available from a cat in the alley. I'd be intrigued.
Customers place coins and a slot over the cat's mouth,
and the captain slowly poured gin from the pipe underneath
the cat's paw. And he did this for three months
(17:20):
before copycats caused him to move on. But despite what
you might think and what I thought, this probably isn't
where old tom jin comes from. But it did lead
to the creation of puss and muse houses where mws
like yeah, not like mus an idea yeah, where a
customer wanting to buy jin from a vendor in some
(17:41):
secluded space would say puss and the vendor would say
muse and reveal a drawer that the customer would put
their money in, which the vendor took and then pushed
it back out. But now magically it had ah. That
was magic magic, great kind of magic. H But but
(18:02):
but the but the people would We're not having this.
They wanted their gin. They did, And by seventeen forty
three people were rioting in protest to these tariffs. And
despite the tariffs. Londoners were consuming eleven million gallons of
gin annually by seventeen fifty. Jin informers were killed on
the streets, sometimes by mobs who seventeen hundred, social historian
(18:27):
Thomas Felding wrote in a political pamphlet about the destruction
Gin was reeking on what he called the quote inferior
people um, and he wrote, quote, A new kind of drunkenness,
unknown to our ancestors, is lately sprung up among us, which,
if not put to a stop, will infallibly destroy a
great part of the inferior people. The drunkenness I here
(18:51):
intenders by this poison called jin, the principal substenance parentheses,
if it may be so called, of more than a
hundred thousand people in this goodness. Yeah, so yes. The
government kept trying the Gin Act of seventeen fifty one
up to the costs of operation for gin stores um,
(19:12):
either due to that or more likely the rising grain
costs that translated to higher gin costs for customers that
encouraged them to switch to the cheaper beer. Consumption of
gin did lesson, but it was still miss or mr
popularity as spirits go in Britain, m hmmm. And I
just want to mention here that there's a terrifying picture
(19:35):
about the immoral stuff caused by jin called jin Lane
by William Hogarth, and I stared at it discovering one
horrifying thing after another for a long time on my
store of b theater. Go go look it up if
you're looking for something disturbing. It's oddly mesmerizing and terrifying
(19:56):
will William Hogarth jin Lane. Check it out. M hm.
And the negative connotation Gin earned during this gin craze
is still around to this day, and in phrases like
gin joint, gin drunk, and soaked bats of gin and
gin mills. And I've never heard the term gin drunk,
by the way, but apparently this is becoming mean, our
emotional when you're drunk. Yeah, so that's that's gin. Yeah.
(20:22):
Now we should talk for a moment about tonic. We
should the other key ingredients. Yes, so the tonic that
we know today a sugar sweetened carbonated soda that's flavored
with the bitter tangy Quinine is also a thing that
originated as a medicine, and specifically as a treatment for malaria. Well, now,
(20:43):
quinine is a compound that occurs in nature, specifically in
the bark of a large shrub and or small tree
called the sancona, which is native to the Andes Mountains
in South America. Unlike the Sancona, malaria is not native
to South America. The Spanish brought it with them during
their invade and colonization, starting with Christopher Columbus in the
late fourteen hundreds He's gonna show one day, One day, Christopher,
(21:09):
and malaria was a really huge problem throughout Europe at
that time, where it was generally called the ague. Up
through the mid sixteen hundreds, no one knew what to
do about it. If folks would come down with this
mysterious flu like fever that would come and go and
would frequently cause complications leading to death, and a lot
of people were doing this, although it didn't help that
(21:31):
the medicine in Europe was still focused on the humors
um and popular wisdom was that you should bleed or
or purge a patient with agu uh. Other potential cures
were astrology, of course, and reportedly this one's my favorite,
throwing a patient head first into a shrub and encouraging
him to disentangle himself faster than the disease could disentangle itself.
(21:58):
How the disease disentangle itself because it's a it's a
it's like a little spirit that's hanging out with you.
And so if you can get up faster than the disease,
then you leave the disease in the shrub. I see
totally logical. Completely. I don't know why I haven't tried this.
Let me get someone to throw me ahead first, like
time I've got any kind of like cold that won't
(22:18):
go as Kyle, no worries. But in the sixteen thirties, though,
and Augustinian monk by the name of Antonio di Colancha,
I think, wrote home about the powdered bark of this
Peruvian tree that was working wonders for the treatment of
a Q. Historians think that probably native people's developed this
cure in the couple hundred years that've been dealing with
(22:40):
malaria and passed it on to the Europeans. But since
Augustinian monk was getting excited about it, Pope Innocent the
tenth had some of his people look into it, and
over the next hundred years or so it had become
a major European import and a widespread treatment and preventative
for malaria, because quinine kills the parasite that causes malaria.
(23:02):
It turns out bully. It took a while for the
British to catch on, though, because its associations with the
Catholic Church freaked out a whole lot of Protestants. Oliver
Cromwell supposedly refused treatment with it, leading to his death
in the sixteen fifties, although he also had taihoid fevers,
so it probably didn't help the situation none of those things.
(23:25):
But catch on they did, and the Spanish basically had
a monopoly on the Peruvian crops, so they made a mint.
Legend has it that it was sometimes referred to as
bark from the fever tree. I see. Yeah. Meanwhile, throughout
the seventeen hundreds, Europe would go a little bit nuts
(23:47):
about sparkling mineral waters, first taken from natural springs and
then artificially produced through various carbonation processes. It was a
health trend, and also, you know, fizzies are fun um.
But these healthy sparkling beverages were sometimes called tonics, and
Johann Jacob Schwepp, yes what that swept founded the first
(24:10):
carbonated water manufacturing company in Geneva in three mm hmm
sparkling water Aside in eighteen twenty, after decades of scientists
searching for the compound in Sancona that makes it such
an effective medicine, these two French pharmacists by the names
of do it for me Annie here, Joseph and Joseph n.
(24:34):
I think, oh that's oh see, yeah, that's a lot
better than I would have done thanking. The two of
them isolated uh coining and set up a factory for
its extraction in Paris, and this made it possible to
eat slightly less tree bark while attempting to not get malaria,
which I'm sure a lot of people were very fond of. Sure. Meanwhile,
as this was happening, the Spanish colonies in South America
(24:57):
were fighting for their independence, and afterward they would attempt
to control the lucrative Sintona industry by limiting or flat
out outlawing the exportation of seeds and cuttings of Sinchona plants.
But despite the price, all of the conquering empires, including
the British, were on board with Sincona and Quinine and
(25:20):
used it to start eradicating malaria in Europe throughout the
eighteen hundreds. However, malaria was still a huge problem in
the tropics, which is largely where the conquering empires were
getting their conquer on because of sugar and other stuff sugar, sugar,
and this all came to a head in British run
India during the early eighteen hundreds. People were taking daily
(25:40):
doses of cowining to prevent malaria. Because it's so bitter,
folks were starting to mix it with sparkling water and
a little bit of sugar, and thus tonic water was born,
which brings us to the gin and tonic. But first
it brings us to a word from our sponsor, and
(26:08):
we're back, thank you sponsor. Okay, now that we've got
a gin, we've got our tonic. Where did the idea
of mixing them come from? Well, it was kind of
a Merry Poppin situation. A spoonful sugar helps the medicine
go down. Around British soldiers in India started adding gin
to their daily required quiney tonic water, and also as
(26:32):
an added bonus, the British Navy squeezed in some lime
juice to prevent scurvy. And this is where the nickname
for the British lime it comes from. Oh, I know,
I should have guessed that a long time ago. I
feel very silly now, okay, that's fine. By the eighteen forties,
the British population in India was using, in fact, more
(26:52):
than seven hundred tons a sincona bark per year to
fight to fight m area there wow. And in eighteen
fifty eight the British took over governance of India from
the British East India Company following the violent Suppoy Revolution
also called the Indian Mutiny. A bunch of other names too,
(27:12):
but those are that those cover the bases um. With
more British soldiers and their families in India than ever,
the demand for tonic water increased, which led to Erasmus
Bond's creation the first commercial tonic water in that same year,
which you can still buy. I've never heard of it,
me neating, And that led to your schwepps h the
Indian Quinine tonic in eighteen seventy, and both of these
(27:35):
went on to find success outside of India in Britain
as well. Meanwhile, Charles Ledger, an Englishman who became an
alpaca farmer in Peru smuggled sin connoisseeds out of Peru
to his brother during the eighteen sixties because at the
time it was still illegal to export the trees or
the seeds. Right, he actually had a history of smuggling.
(27:56):
He also smuggled alpaca out of the country. It was
just a smuggler, apparently better at it than Han Solo.
He didn't get caught, Oh Solo vernon the Gin and
Tonic episode. Anyway, the British government would not buy these
these seeds that he that he smuggled out, but the
(28:16):
Dutch government would and did, and they set up plantations
on Java, which was one of their colonial outposts. And
so by World War one the Dutch pretty much dominated
the coining trade, and by the end of the century
they controlled nine percent of the world's supply. That's quite
quite a large percentage, is Epitaph reads by the way
(28:39):
Charles Ledger, he gave coining to the world. H Yeah,
and the G and T was also thought to have
played a role in World War two when the Japanese
forces took over Java and all those Sincona plantations, which
equalled most of the world's supply according to Amy Stuar,
(29:00):
it's book The Drunk Botanist, which I absolutely want to read. Yeah,
the last American plane out of Indonesia had four million
coining seeds on board, but to know immediate a veil
because the trees would take too long to grow to
be of any use during the war. But that didn't
stop the Allies from planting trees in Africa at the
same time putting scientists to work developing a synthetic replacement. Ah,
(29:21):
and both succeeded. To this day, Africa grows natural coining
and the and the synthetic version is used in some prescriptions. Yeah,
because it's still used as an anti malarial m HM
and for some other things. But that's a different episode entirely.
It is it is. That's pretty much the history of
the gin and tonic. We obviously, as always had to
(29:45):
shorten it. Especially we didn't talk about how you still gin.
We're going to do that, Yeah, yeah, yeah, we should.
We should definitely do a whole episode about um more
more gin things. There's really quite a lot. It's it's
such a base alcohol that there's quite a lot to
say about it. And we also just today as we
as we said, we've got to go see it being distilled.
(30:07):
So this is new knowledge that's park lating in our brains.
It's true. We do have a few closing remarks, yes,
including you can make your own gin at home using vodka, um,
juniper berries you have to and other botanicals. Um. And
I know a lot of people say that jen is
(30:27):
basically flavored vodka, and I mean that's true. Yeah, it's
a it's a neutral spirit to which juniper berries have
been added to. That is the definition of jin. Yeah.
So I have to say I was surprised when I
was like, how do you make jin? And there were
so many recipes that were just like cheap vodka for berries,
And I was kind of like at that point maybe
(30:48):
by just but I'm all down for trying things. Yeah,
could it could be great if you want to experiment
with with your own flavors. Then absolutely didn't do it. Yeah,
I mean I want to go put tea and some
gin right now. It was good? Yeah. Uh, tonic water
glows under black light, not because of the quining in it. Yeah.
(31:08):
So that's a really fun Halloween trick. Um. If you
if you want to make a cheap Halloween decorations. Just
toss some coining in some in some vases and let
him go. I thought you're gonna say, like, throw it
on the walls. I'm clean up. That wouldn't be very effective.
That would drive pretty fast, Okay. And finally, here's a
(31:28):
quote from Douglas adams Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Oh,
this is so delightful. Gay. Yes, I'm gonna try to
get through these pronunciations, but we'll see. It is as follows,
of all known worlds in the galaxy, be they primitive,
are highly advanced, have invented a drink called gin and
Tonics or gene and nicks or gen nis, or any
(31:53):
one of a thousand or more variations on the same
phonetic theme. Douglas Adams, Yes, so that brings us to
listener man. Yeah, Sierra wrote in response to our Fried
Chicken episode and Annie's bafflement about Scottish immigrants being associated
(32:14):
with the South, I mean our our mutual bafflement really
um a quote in the recent History of Fried Chicken episode.
I was intrigued by the theory of the Scots bringing
over the techniques of fried chicken to North America. I
believe you mentioned that you were unsure of how possibly
it came to be centralized in the South under this theory,
and I just wanted to throw in my own theory
of how this might have happened based on Scottish history.
(32:36):
After the failed Jacobite Rebellion of seventeen forty five at
the defeat of Clodon, many of the Scots had been
taken prisoners for treason against the crown, and the Highland
ways were systematically being destroyed and disassembled. Many of those
Scots that were taken prisoner that were not immediately executed
were transported to the colonies in America, with some being
sold as a dead church servants to pay for their transportation.
(32:58):
Many of the transported ended particularly in the southern colonies
and Appalachia, with most of the Scottish indentured servants ending
up on plantations. As the Highland clans were broken up
over the next fifty years, many Scots began to immigrate
to the colonies as well, often following where the previous
Scots had been transported to. This has just me spitballing here,
but it could have created a fusion between their techniques
(33:19):
for fried chicken and the techniques of the African slaves
that they were likely in semi close quarters with if
they were indentured servants on plantations. I'm no historian, so
I leave the conclusions to them. It's still a good
a good theory, though, and thank you so much for
writing in UM, because we were baffled and we did
not have time to research, said bafflement. Yes, so thank
(33:43):
you very much. Heidi wrote in with this theory about
why Easter might be the second biggest brunch day of
the year in the US. Quote during the Brunch podcast,
you mentioned that Mother's Day and Easter were two the
biggest brunch days of the year, but could not understand
why Easter was so popular. I have a theory based
on my years as a server and a movie Easter parade.
(34:06):
Many people get a new outfit and hat for Easter.
Are you going to go home after church and take
it off to cook dinner or would you go to
brunch and all your new finery. I loved working Easter
Brunch just for people watching and the hats. Kentucky Derby
has nothing on Easter hat. Wow. I do remember one
year when a fellow server got bumped carrying a tray
(34:26):
of omelets and spilled them all over the most fabulous,
beautiful hat in the dining room. I think the waitress
cried harder than the owner of the hat. Oh my goodness,
I know now I'm I want to go hat watching.
After duly noted, Yeah, all right, we need to track
down the right the right brunch spots in Atlanta to
do this. That We've got almost a year two research,
(34:48):
so I think we can do this. My grandmother did
used to take me out before Easter and I didn't
buy hats, but I usually got a dress. So this theory,
I've never seen it in person, but I I buy
that it's probably that that could be part of it
for sure. Yeah. I mean also, I guess it's a
it's a holiday, give give give mom a break from
(35:10):
doing the cooking again, you know that kind of thing. Yeah. Also,
I did want to mention that U. My my friend
Jessica listened to the brunch episode and she she she
argued with me sternly that um that that brunch is
not always seen as a as a as a bad
server gig. She said that she very much enjoyed her
her brunch gigs because people were in a good move.
(35:31):
They were happy, they were day drinking. It was nice,
and then they would be day drunk and then they
would give her a good tip. Oh good, that makes
me happy, I know, right yeah, so so yeah, I
do have, as I said that episode, some guilt when
I go to brunch. So this tell your friend. Thank
you absolutely, I think, thank you Sierra, Thank you a
(35:51):
Heidie for writing in. Thank you Jessica for talking to
me in person. Um if if you guys would like
to get in touch with us, Ah, we have a
Facebook page and ow wow we do, we do. There's
like two posts on it. Uh yeah. On Facebook we
are food stuff hs W. That's also our Twitter handle
(36:12):
on Instagram we are food stuff and you can email
us yes at food stuff at how stuff works dot com.
We hope that we will hear from you. It is
so terrific to hear from all of you all the time,
and you'll hear from us again soon. In the meanwhile,
we hope that lots more good things are coming your
way
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Lauren Vogelbaum
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