Grab Your Global Swizzle Stick: It’s Cocktail Time!
A lot of recipes are circulating right now for “Plague Water” and other historically based cocktails to help us through the twenty-first-century’s hard times. There were many tough periods in the history of forging Caribbean foodways, too, in spite of the region’s renown as “paradise.” Enslaved Africans were never given enough food or water and routinely had to use the knowledge they brought from across the Atlantic together with the ethnobotanical store of indigenous recipes to feed their themselves and their families in order to survive. At times the African food producers even helped their enslavers live through a hurricane or a famine.
Among the lasting contributions of Caribbean ingenuity was the invention of rum, the famous Caribbean distilled liquor in the seventeenth century. Rum, of course, relied on sugar production. And sugar production relied on Saccharum officinarum originating in Papua New Guinea and spreading via maritime Southeast Asia, in hybridized forms, through the Indian Ocean, to the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds. Its technology depended on Eurasian and African ingenuity. Before rum, there were other Caribbean drinks, fermented and distilled to gain potency.
But the popularity of the rum drink may also owe much to the plump and food-and-drink-obsessed Dominican priest Jean-Baptiste Labat, who arrived in Martinique at the end of the seventeenth century. Labat was much more than a culinary tourist when he confirmed how the island’s local Caribs, the indigenous people who had survived French military encounters, continued to interact with the French in culinary exchanges. The priest resided on the island for more than a dozen years (1693-1706), during which time he frequently dined on what he acknowledged as Carib food and drink, seemingly coming to appreciate the local island flavors.
It is likely that before leaving France, Labat already had read (and digested) the famous culinary treatise Le Cuisinier François (first published in 1651) by chef François Pierre Sieur de La Varenne. Labat’s descriptions of food and the writings of others in the seventeenth century mimicked La Varenne’s book in their preoccupation with French cooking techniques. Its Francophone culinary terminology was reproduced in popular circles in France and translated abroad (in English by 1653, as The French Cook). The influence of French culinary practices registered particularly in the use of French terms, but also in the use of techniques. None was as captivating as vinegar – used by La Varenne in his many sauces, on vegetables, fish and meats, even cold on salads (vinaigrette). Vinegar-making techniques would be helpful in perfecting the manufacture of rum. Du Tertre describes a vinaigrerie for distilling in Martinique in the 1640s. In fact, there was little difference in the techniques employed in moving between the mash that created alcohol and acetic acid. Both absorbed flavors and both preserved food.
Among his reported culinary encounters, Père Labat described many local drinks, including one in St. Kitts called taffia or rum and drunk by Caribs in 1676. Although he claimed never to have loved it, Labat found the liquor most welcome and warming (233). On one occasion in Dominica, he dispatched a crew to bring thirty quarts of drink. He and his party were well received. According to Labat, “How could it be otherwise? We had rum” (96). These early rum supplies were thanks to the visionary producers in the early industry in Barbados, where “rumbullion” was a sugarcane-based alcohol sometimes called “Kill Divill, and this is made of Suggar cones distilled [to create] a hot hellish and terrible liquor” (Giles Silvester 1651, quoted in Smith 2005, 16).
Of course, the other essential bar item for early rum drinks was the swizzle stick. Although “swizzle” was itself a term for a drink, long before the invention of the modern cocktail, the stick with which one should stir together the rum with other flavorings was the swizzle made from the peculiar branches of a bush native to the Caribbean sometimes called “swizzle tree” (Quararibea turbinata). At its end were spikey extensions (“prongs”) naturally set perpendicular to the branch stem. A bartender could hold the smooth end of the stick between the palms of the hand and twirl it to make a mixed, frothy concoction, encouraging the aromatic flavors of the bark to enter the liquid.
I couldn’t end this essay without sharing a recipe for a “Kill Divill” or “Plague Water” to toast our own captivity. It’s worth finding a bottle of Angostura Bitters, associated with Trinidad & Tobago, where it is made today, but originating with a German surgeon in nearby Venezuela in the 1820s. It was alleged to have restorative properties and the medicinal recipe remains a secret. The herbal tonic “bitters” is the mystery guest for every plague party: One-part rum/four parts sweetened pineapple juice/a generous splash of bitters over shaved ice, and well-stirred with your personal swizzle stick.
Further Reading
Goucher, Candice. 2014. Congotay! Congotay! The Global History of Caribbean Food. New York:
Routledge.
Labat, Jean Baptiste. 1970. The Memoirs of Père Labat, 1693-1705, translated by John Eaden.
London: Frank Cass.
Smith, Frederick H. 2005. Caribbean Rum: A Social and Economic History. Gainesville: University
of Florida Press.
