1. Marie’s Crisis – 59 Grove St, West Village, Manhattan.

Located in the basement of the building that Thomas Paine died in, patrons keep liberty alive by singing show tunes around a piano bar `til all hours of the night at Marie’s. Not to put too fine a point on this, but this place is a dive. That said, it’s been named “best bar in the world” by everyone I’ve ever taken there.

2. The Tonga Room and Hurricane Bar in the Fairmont Hotel – 950 Mason Street, San Francisco, California.

The Tonga Room is brilliant, over-the-top, high-end tiki, with excellent mai-tais and an actual barge floating down a “river” in the middle of the lounge area. An absolute must on the bar bucket list.

3. Green Parrot Bar – 601 Whitehead Street, Key West, Florida.

Every time I’ve been to the Green Parrot in Key West, I’ve seen mind-blowingly good live music. It’s also off the dreaded Duval strip, which means a greater likelihood of interaction with the locals, and at our last call, home to a charming bar cat, Frank.

4. Sun Liquor – 607 Summit Ave. E, Capitol Hill, Seattle, Washington.

I’m a little too old to be a regular at Sun Liquor, but this is the only bar I’ve ever walked into that desperately made me want to be a bar owner. The décor and service are understated yet perfect and the cocktails are phenomenal.

5. The Chart Room – 300 Chartres Street, New Orleans, Louisiana.

For history and beauty, go to New Orleans’ Napoleon House or Tujagues. For a nice, relaxed good time, the Chart Room is the ticket. Although it’s an open bar on a corner two blocks from Bourbon, it feels like a hidden gem.

6. Bukowski’s Tavern – 50 Dalton Street, Boston, Massachusetts.

The other Bukowski’s is in Cambridge and I hear it’s even better. That said, the Back Bay location is one of the more comfortable places to pass a few night-time hours in downtown Boston. Despite being named after the dive-bar bard, it caters to a wide range of clientele and offers excellent beer choices in a wholly unpretentious setting.

7. Al’s Wine and Whiskey Lounge – 321 Clinton Street, Syracuse, New York.

If this bar were in New York City, people would still have to remark on the first-rate selection of hard liquor. The fact that it’s in Syracuse makes it all the more amazing. It’s a veritable library of booze staffed by passionate and knowledgeable bartenders.

8. The Lodge Tavern – 21 West Division Street, Chicago, Illinois.

I struggled between Chicago’s Andy’s Jazz Club which boasts great music and a classy atmosphere and The Lodge, which, I swear is where Springer recruits his guests. In all fairness, for the people-watching, I have to pick The Lodge.

9. The Saloon in the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station – 49 E. 42^nd Street, New York, New York.

Hard to pick just one iconic bar in New York, but the saloon at the back of the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station ought to be mentioned. Replete with a secret entrance and a nautical theme, it puts one in mind of a different era.

RIP

The Sea of Happiness Lounge, helmed by Captain George in the Cass Hotel in Chicago. The charming George was usually more inebriated than his patrons, and he remains one of the more memorable hosts I’ve had the pleasure to meet.

When in Baltimore, I never failed to drop in to the Whistling Oyster, a bar which catered to both tourists and locals, particularly those who work on the boats at Fells Point. It really is the kind of place where you wind up making friends with strangers and occasionally taking the party down the street to the neighboring Cat’s Eye or Horse You Came In On Saloon, the latter haunted by that other bar-room bard, Edgar Allan Poe.

Christine Sismondo is a writer and lecturer in Humanities at York University in Toronto. She has written numerous articles about film, literature, drinking, and vice, and is most recently the author of America Walks into a Bar: A Spirited History of Taverns and Saloons, Speakeasies and Grog Shops. Listen to an interview with Sismondo here.

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After two centuries of consolidation and closing down of small breweries, a counter-revolution is under way. Fed up with the lack of variety and the control of large brewing holdings over their favorite drinks, beer lovers have taken their beverage back into their own hands. All over the world, new beers and breweries are emerging every day. What started as the micro-brewery movement in the USA has spread to other countries and created a remarkable turnaround in convention. For instance, in Belgium – famed for its influential beer culture – when consolidation threatened the availability of beer varieties, the fastest growing segment in the beer market is now beers brewed by monasteries and ‘abbey-style’ beers.

Until the thirteenth century, monasteries were the only places where beers were manufactured on anything like a commercial scale in Europe. Beer was brewed for the monks and for guests, pilgrims, and the poor. Later, monks started to brew beer for noblemen, to sell their brew in ‘monastery pubs’, and provide their produce for church celebrations and feasts where peasants could drink for free.

However, monastic beer production became increasingly undermined by commercial breweries from the fourteenth century onwards. Demand for beer increased with income growth, the expansion of trade and towns, and an increasing awareness of water pollution. Traveling merchants wanted lodging, food and drink, and ‘inns’ and ‘taverns’ sought to provide it. Cities of trade – such as London, Bruges, Hamburg and Munich – soon became important centers of brewing.

The decline in monasteries’ beer production was also influenced by innovation and local politics. The introduction of hops was a major innovation that would ultimately transform the global beer economy, however, it took centuries to be widely accepted because of its impact on local taxes. Before hops, local rulers taxed breweries through a tax (‘grutrecht’) on herb mixes (‘grut’) to flavor and preserve beer – of which they controlled the production and sales. While hops improved the taste and preservation of beer and allowed for transportation over longer distances, hops threatened the local rulers’ tax revenue as they could not control the sale of hops. To compensate for the lost tax income, rulers wanted to impose taxes on beer itself. Yet as monasteries were absolved from paying taxes, rulers favored seeking their supplies from commercial breweries which they could tax.

Intertwined geo-political and religious changes also played a role in the historic decline in monastery-brewed beer. During the Reformation, many Catholic monasteries were destroyed in large parts of Europe – and, with it, their beer production ceased. Inevitably, commercial breweries replaced them. The final straw was the French Revolution which clamped down on the Catholic Church. Under Napoleon, the French expansion destroyed the remaining European monasteries – and their breweries too.

Scientific discoveries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also caused a dramatic transformation of the beer industry. Increased knowledge of yeast, steam engines, and refrigeration made it possible to produce new types of beer and to control the production process more accurately. Thus, the brewery industry embarked on the road to industrialization, causing notable consolidation of the market. In the USA, the number of breweries decreased from just over 1800 breweries in 1900, to only 1345 in 1915. In 1950, that number had decreased to 407, and by 1950 there were only 101 breweries still in business. Conversely, the average brewery output grew from 2.6 million liters in 1900 to 219.2 million liters in 1980. In the UK, the number of breweries collapsed from 6447 in 1900, to just 142 in 1980, whilst their average output grew from 0.9 million liters to 48.1 million liters over the same period.

Consolidation was reinforced by scale economies in distribution and the arrival of TV advertisements and globalization. During the 1980s and 1990s, breweries started looking abroad for expansion. Breweries such as Heineken (Holland), SABMiller (South Africa), and Interbrew (Belgium) acquired breweries in Eastern Europe, North and South America, and Asia. The largest brewer, Anheuser-Busch Inbev NV, is a product of the 2004 merger between (Belgian) Interbrew and (Brazilian) AmBev and the 2008 merger with Anheuser-Busch. This holding now produces 25% of the world’s beer.

Furthermore, all over the world, traditional ales largely produced with top fermentation lost market share to lager beer brewed with bottom fermentation. Lager beer (‘pils’) came to dominate the beer market globally. A further shift to even lighter beers was caused by grain shortages in the first half of the 20th century and growing consumer preferences for low-calorie products. Cheaper grains such as corn and rice were used, resulting in ‘light lager’ like Budweiser. In response to a growing demand for low calorie foods and drinks, brewers discontinued the production of dark beer and produced ‘diet’ or ‘light’ beers, such as Miller Lite. Light beer quickly became the most popular option in the US.

However, the growing domination of increasingly standardized lager and light beers produced by increasingly fewer brewing companies has led to a counter movement, which started in the US. New breweries with ‘special beers’ and ‘older’ style beer were labeled ‘microbreweries’ because of their small scale. Similar developments can now be observed in many countries. While the share of the microbreweries in the total global beer production is still relatively small, they are growing rapidly.

In countries like Belgium, beer brewing in (collaboration with) monasteries and abbeys has witnessed a remarkable revival and abbey beers are now the fastest growing segment of the Belgian beer market. Yet only a few of them – mainly the very popular Belgian Trappist beers – are still produced in monasteries. Most are recipes new and old brewed by smaller breweries, yet others are attempts by larger beer brewers to imitate the microbreweries or even take them over.

Because of their success, some of these breweries have since outgrown the ‘micro’ level, but are still labeled microbreweries because of the style of beer they are producing. Some are now referred to as ‘specialty brewers’. Paradoxically, today the largest US owned brewery is the Boston Brewing Company, which started only a few years ago as a microbrewery. This example powerfully illustrates how the global beer markets appear to have come full-circle via consolidation, global mergers, and acquisitions, back to the growth of the microbrewery.

Johan Swinnen is Professor and Director of the LICOS Centre for Institutions and Economic Performance at the University of Leuven, a Visiting Professor at Stanford University, and Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), Brussels. He was previously Lead Economist at the World Bank and Economic Advisor at the European Commission. He is President-Elect of the International Association of Agricultural Economists. He holds a PhD from Cornell University. He has published widely on political economy, institutional reform, trade, and agricultural and food policy. His latest book is The Economics of Beer.

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You’ve heard of the ever-popular wine and cheese pairing–perhaps you’re even a big fan.  But you may not know that even wine experts says you haven’t tried a good pairing until you’ve had cheese and beer.  While the combinations of beers and cheese are seemingly infinite, Garrett Oliver points us in the right directions with a few suggestions.  The pairings listed below were excerpted from The Oxford Companion to Beer.  Enjoy, and if you have a favorite beer and cheese pairing, be sure to let us know. – Lana Goldsmith, associate publicist, OUP USA.

Cheese (pairing) is one of the finest food partners for full flavored beers and also among the most traditional. Made side by side in farmhouse kitchens for centuries, cheese, beer, and bread once made up a large proportion of the caloric intake of many societies, particularly in Europe. Indeed, at a stretch, one might even say that all three foods come from the same original source given that both barley and wheat are grasses, and grasses make up much of the diet of cows, sheep, and goats. Today, wine is often thought of as the most appropriate partner for great cheeses, but many wine experts feel differently, with some going so far as to suggest beer as a superior substitute.

Traditional and craft beers have a very wide range of flavor, far wider than that of wine. This is partly because brewing is actually a form of cooking, at least before fermentation is involved. Many ingredients may be used; grains can be caramelized or roasted, spices can be added, and fruit may be infused. Common strengths for beer range from 3% to 12% alcohol by volume, and this allows a wide variation of intensity. The level of carbonation, ranging from a mere prickle to a Champagne-like mousse, will influence texture. Yeasts may bring very different aromas, ranging from bright fruit to pungent earth. All of these features may be brought to bear in the service of cheese pairings.

Cheese itself is a very diverse food, but what nearly all cheeses have in common is relatively high amounts of both salt and fat. Beer generally brings some residual sugar from malt, and this makes a pleasant contrast with salt—anyone who has ever eaten potato chips or other salty snacks with a beer knows this. Both carbonation and hop bitterness provide cutting power that breaks through fats, refreshing the palate. Without carbonation to work through it, the fat in such foods as cheese and chocolate can coat the tongue, physically shielding the taste buds from the flavors of a beverage. This is a common problem for wine and cheese pairings.

Because cheese and beer are so diverse, it is impossible to explore all possibilities here. However, it is possible to provide some ideas about where to start. This is probably best done by looking at the three different milks from which cheese is commonly made and the general types of cheeses these milks produce.

Soft Cow’s Milk Cheeses
Here we include bloomy-rinded cheeses such as brie, Camembert, and triple crèmes such as St André and Brillat-Savarin. The paste of these cheeses is usually mildly flavored, with sweet buttery and lactic notes posed against the salt. Many beers will pair well with the paste, but with many of these cheeses, the bloomy rind itself can be the determining factor in the success of the pairing. Bloomy rinds, which are formed by white molds, give an earthy, mushroomy character when the cheese is young. This flavor pairs well with softer farmhouse ales, particularly French bières de garde, which often have their own earthiness. Belgian-style tripels work especially well with triple crème cheeses. As these cheeses age, they become more pungent and the rinds may give a bitterness that interacts poorly with hops. Here it can be best to stick with Belgian and German wheat beers that will match the cheese without adding bitterness to the equation.

Washed-rind Cow’s Milk Cheeses
These are what we often call the “smelly” cheeses. Good classic examples are Taleggio, Livarot, and Epoisse. Descriptors for the earthy aromatics range from “forest floor” to “barnyard,” but the actual flavors of these cheeses are often very mild. The aromas are derived from the rinds, which have been washed with brine, beer, wine, or sometimes a form of brandy. The washing encourages the growth of certain molds and bacteria, which give the rind orange and green colors and ripen the cheese from the outside in. French bières de garde once again work well, but the best pairings are with non-sour barrel-aged beers showing Brettanomyces influence. The earthy “brett ” character mingles perfectly with washed rind cheese aromatics, and the vanilla-like flavors derived from oak work nicely against the sweetness of the milk. Many Brettanomyces-influenced sour beers can work here too, but pairings are best found individually because they will partly depend on the degree and type of acidity in the beer.

Semihard Cow’s Milk Cheeses
This category covers a wide range, from tommes to Beaufort and various types of cheddar. Most will have notable acidity, some grassy and fruity flavors, and plenty of salt. Pale ales and India pale ales are a good place to start here. Most of these cheeses work well against hops, meld their fruitiness nicely with ale yeast character, and can pick up on caramel notes derived from specialty malts. German-style and Bohemian-style pilsners also pair well with most of these cheeses.

Hard Cow’s Milk Cheeses
Parmigiano-Reggiano, Grana Padano, well-aged gouda, gruyeres, and aged farmhouse cheddars fit here. Most have concentrated, almost explosive fruit and salt, some caramelized flavors, and plenty of umami. Here there are two good directions. One direction is the use of contrast—here once again saison and pilsner are good—with the brightness of the beer balancing the concentration of the cheese. The other direction is to use harmony, and here barley wines make a good choice. The rich malt and fruit character melds with these cheeses, and the residual sweetness of the beer makes a good foil for the salt.

Goat’s-Milk Cheeses
Goat’s milk cheeses have a bright white paste and tangy acidity. When fresh, goat’s milk cheeses have no rind. Fresh goat’s milks cheeses are usually at their best when they are only a week or two old and not very far from the farm. These cheeses are very brightly flavored, and good examples show a range of citrus notes. They pair especially well with dry saisons and with wheat beers, especially Belgian-style witbiers. They are also excellent with gueuze. Semiaged versions such as crottins or buttons will have rinds; here saisons may or may not work, depending more on the state of the rind than on the beer. Aged goat-milk cheeses can become very cakey and mouth coating; very high carbonation, usually developed by bottle conditioning, tends to help these pairings work well. Once again, think gueuze and saison.

Sheep’s Milk Cheeses
Sheep’s milk cheeses are often characterized by a soft , earthy nuttiness. They actually retain a smell of lanolin, an aroma recognizable in lamb chops and even in damp wool. Among the best are made in the French Pyrenees, including the excellent Ossau-Iraty, but the American Vermont Shepherd is also very good. This cheese and others of its type are very well paired with brown ales and porters; the nutty character of the sheep’s milk mirrors caramel and chocolate malts particularly nicely. Manchego, although much sharper, is also a good pairing for these two beer styles.

Blue Cheeses
Some blue cheeses are quite difficult to pair because of the sharpness developed by the bluing molds. Danish blues and Roquefort can develop an almost tongue-numbing bitterness that tends to clash with hops. Fortunately, many other blues are full bodied but milder, and these can pair very successfully. Stilton is the royalty of this type, and it combines a powerfully earthy aroma with a rich, buttery, salty paste. Barley wines are very good here, particularly the strong British variant, where plenty of residual sugar teams up with caramel and dark fruit notes to wrap around the cheese. When these beers have a few years of bottleage, the pairing can be profound. Although it may seem counterintuitive, imperial stout often works very well with Stilton also. The roasted coffee and chocolate notes can bring out fudge-like flavors in the cheese, and the beer is one of the few styles capable of matching Stilton’s intensity. Aside from Stilton, Gorgonzola Dolce, even when it has become quite runny, can often manage a very fine pairing with barley wine or imperial stout.

Of course this only scratches the surface of pairing possibilities, and the serendipity of the unexpected pairing always awaits. Pairings of fruit beers with fresh dessert cheeses, flights of older cheeses with older beers—those with adventurous palates will surely be rewarded by further explorations.

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This year we are delighted that beer geeks, foodies, industry professionals, and many others just curious about all-things-beer have added The Oxford Companion to Beer to their holiday wish list, along with other Oxford companions such as The Oxford Companion to Wine and The Oxford Companion to Food. But we also wanted to know what else the beer connoisseurs and oenophiles are putting on their holiday reading wish lists. Check out some of their recommendations below.

Bob Townsend from the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s Drink: A Beer, Wine, and Spirits blog recommends these books:

- Craft Beer Bar Mitzvah by Jeremy Cowan with James Sullivan

- Brewed Awakening: Behind the Beers and Brewers Leading the World’s Craft Brewing Revolution by Joshua M. Bernstein

- The Great American Ale Trail: the Craft Beer Lover’s Guide to the Best Watering Holes in the Nation by Christian DeBenedetti

Jon Bonné at the San Francisco Chronicle recommends:

- Bitters: A Spirited History of a Classic Cure-All by Brad Thomas Parsons

- Terry Theise’s Reading Between the Vines

According to Esquire.com:

- “The New Beer Bibles a Man Should Read” include The Craft of Stone Brewing Co. by written by Greg Koch, Steve Wagner and Randy Clemens

But what do the book people want in their kitchen? What are they hoping to drink and eat through the holiday season? We took a survey and put together a list from OUP staff of all the things they’d like to go along with this stellar set of books.

JENNIFER ABRAMS, Senior Demand Planner
Le Creuset Signature Round Wide Dutch Oven:
This item from Le Creuset would be a perfect addition to my current cookware collection. I have a new love of making Jambalaya and this would be a wonderful pot to utilize!

All-Clad d5 Stainless-Steel 4-Qt Soup Pot:
I have recently found a great recipe for Wild Mushroom soup, and I’m looking to change over my cookware to stainless-steel. A soup pot would encourage me to find additional recipes.

TIM BARTON, Managing Director, Global Academic Publishing
A bottle of Barbera from Piemonte in Italy, since it reminds me of a fantastic year I spent there after university, teaching English, learning Italian, eating too much Italian food and wine, and generally having a very easy and fun time.

BETSY DEJESU, Senior Publicity Manager
Spiral Stemless Martini Glass Set of 4 – 12oz.:
Added because I love my martinis shaken, not stirred—and definitely not spilled. Stemless means easier to carry while navigating a crowded room during a party.

ARYANA FARGO, Publicity Assistant
Breville Slow Cooker:
I added this item to my wish list because I enjoy coming home to a warm, home-cooked meal when it’s cold, and this item allows me to throw a bunch of ingredients together in the morning, turn on the cooker, and come home to a savory, satisfying hot dish.

LANA GOLDSMITH, Associate Publicist
Wok: I love stir fry because it’s simple to make, delicious, and you can pretty much throw anything in it. It really makes a difference when you have the right equipment, so a nice big wok to make at least a few days’ worth of dinners or lunches would be amazing to have.

Ice cream maker: Realistically, I should probably never have one of these—it’s too dangerous! My dad used to make amazing banana and strawberry ice creams when I was a kid and I just loved it. I would enjoy getting creative with the flavors I could make if I had my own ice cream maker.

JOE JACKSON, Associate Editor

Four Oven Cooker (In pistachio)

Baccarat Harcourt Black Angel Highball Glass (set of twelve)

Revol Porcelaine Straight-Sided Ramekin (twelve, as well, please)

TARA KENNEDY, Publicity Manager
Beer Classics Beer Connoisseur Set:
Added this to my wish list because I’ve given Riedel glassware as a gift many times, but would love to have some of my own. This set is perfect because I drink and serve various kinds of beer.

KitchenAid 7-Cup Work Bowl food processor:
Added this to my wish list because my apartment lacks counter space. I might do more cooking if I had this appliance to do the prep work for me.

PURDY, Director of Publicity
Peter Luger Steak Sauce:
Every time I have been to Luger’s I’ve gorged on rolls and steak sauce before the steak even arrives at the table. If I cannot have a Luger’s steak, give me the steak sauce and some warm rolls, then you can call me content.

Gavi di Gavi black label wine:
Former OUP Trade Publisher Ellen Chodosh turned me on to this oh so delicioso Italian white wine. Best shared with friends, definitely.

Apple Pie ala Mode:
My hometown, Cambridge, NY, is the “home of pie ala mode.” Surely folks were eating pie and ice cream together for ages, or as the name suggests “in the fashion,” but it was the Cambridge Hotel that first put it on the menu. My fave is hot apple pie and French vanilla ice cream washed down with some Irish coffee. You know I’m in food coma after that dessert.

NATHALIE RAMIREZ, Sales and Marketing Coordinator
Fireside Chat Winter Spiced Ale:
Once a Californian, always a Californian? I love that my favorite East Village beer store stocks special editions of 21st Amendment Brewery beers and I’m hoping that they have this one. Actually, I’m hoping someone delivers it to me ASAP!

JUSTYNA ZAJAC, Publicist
Nespresso Pixie Espresso Maker:
All I can say is coffee, coffee, coffee…perhaps I have already had too much. I can’t resist a kitchen appliance with the word pixie in the name, and I could always add a touch of Irish Cream to my espresso drink and have the perfect winter cocktail.

Williams-Sonoma Three Months of Cheese:
For three months Williams-Sonoma sends you an assortment of cheeses from California, Vermont, and Utah! It’s a great opportunity to try a delicious variety and pave the way to becoming a cheese snob.

MAX SINSHEIMER, Associate Editor
Beer Bottle Tree:
I brew beer and this bottle stand will save both room in my kitchen and time spent drying. After sanitizing the bottles and rinsing them out with water I’ll leave them on this stand to air dry. And it holds 45 bottles, perfect for most home brewers.

Beer Tasting/Hop Appreciation Kit:
I actually got this for my birthday, and it’s a bit of a novelty item, but fun. It comes with about a dozen small jars filled with different varieties of hops, and encourages you to taste your beer (not included) and then smell the jars, to help train your nose to the different hop aromas present in beer. There is also some reading material included about beer, and about tasting beer.

Beer of the Month Gift Subscription:
There are lots of these, and I’ve linked to just one, called Gourmet Monthly Clubs. The idea is that the club will ship you a selection of 12 microbrewed beers each month (or international beers, depending on which subscription you choose). This is perfect for beer lovers – the idea of trying new and flavorful beers each month is quite exciting!

It’s tea now.  Once again I have little to add to what anyone can find in the OED and other easily available sources, though it will be a pleasure to continue singing praises to Hobson Jobson, and there is a redeeming quality to this post: at the end I’ll say something about tea caddy.  But first here are three quotations.  “That excellent and by all physicians approved China drink called by the Chineans Tcha, and by other nations tay, alias tee, is sold at the Sultana Head Coffee House, London.” (Mercurius Politicus, Sept. 30, 1658; The Century Dictionary).  “I remember well how in 1681 I for the first time in my life drank thee at the house of an Indian chaplain, and how I could not understand how sensible men could think it a treat to drink what tasted no better than hay-water” (1726), and finally, “There is among our people, and particularly among the womankind a great abuse of Thee, not only that too much is drunk…but this is also an evil custom to drink it with a full stomach; it is better and more wholesome to make use of it when the process of digestion is pretty well finished…. It is also a great folly to use sugar candy with Thee” (1672; the last two quotations are from Hobson Jobson).  In 1545 Chiai was said “to remove fever, headache, stomach-ache, pain in the side or joints,” and many other ailments, including gout.  I remember reading similar nineteenth-century ads, except that they recommended cigars for alleviating pain and clearing the lungs.

It will be seen that the main question about tea is the same as about coffee, namely: How did the form tea conquer its numerous rivals?  And the rivals were indeed many, though they can be divided into two groups: those beginning with ch- and sounding cha, chai, and the like, and those beginning with t- and spelled tee, tea, thee, etc.  Both variants are still known in the European languages: for example, English has tea (like Malay te), while Russian has chai (like Chinese Mandarin chha, according to one system of transliteration), homophonous with the first syllable of the word China.  In this case, the Malay may have been an intermediary between China and the rest of the world, but the word’s source is Chinese, for, as Hobson Jobson explains, “te [is] the utterance attached to the character in the Fuh-kien dialect.”  Knowing nothing about Chinese, I can only repeat what specialists say, and they seem to be unanimous in explaining the origin of the two variants.

The numerous forms of coffee (see them in the post for November 23) show that there was no progression in the development of the English name of this beverage.  We only witnessed different episodes in the history of its adaptation—a usual process in the fortunes of exotic articles of trade, plant and animal names, and so forth.  The same holds for tea.  Different forms coexisted, were affected by the pronunciation and spelling of the word in other languages (in English, Dutch and French influence has to be reckoned with), and at long last one such form became standard.  The state of “peaceful coexistence” is testified to by the first of the three quotations given at the beginning of this post and by an almost identical ad in The Gazette, which, also in 1658, advertised a China drink, “called by the Chinese Toha, by other nations Tay, alias Tee.”  Apparently, the norm had not yet solidified.  In 1711 Alexander Pope rhymed tea with obey.  In 1720 the rhyme tea / pay occurred.  In 1770 Samuel Johnson extemporized the verses in which tea was coupled in rhyme with me.  The spelling the (with an h) seems to be a borrowing from French, and it is amazing that English, despite its penchant for redundant letters, did not cling to the less rational variant.  Although mentioned by some Europeans considerably earlier, in England no citations of tea predate 1598.  In the seventeenth century, the product and the word gained in popularity, and the OED, like Hobson Jobson after it, gives multiple examples.  English has been spared the cacophony hidden in a phrase like “hot tea in a china cup,” but, if the Fuh-kien “utterance” had survived, the clash of two ch-words would have been obvious.

The history of caddy (originally, a box containing a certain weight), as in tea caddy, cannot be called dramatic. Authorities trace caddy to a Malay form, which is catty.  The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology calls the substitution of -d- for -t- an unexplained alteration.  The first edition of the OED spoke of an apparent corruption of catty.  In those days, corruption was a common term in etymological studies.  Skeat went so far as to say: “Better spelled catty.”  I am not sure what would have been gained if a word universally pronounced caddy were spelled catty, but I would like to suggest that nothing has been corrupted or even altered in it.  Is it possible that the Englishman who transmitted catty as caddy was a speaker of a dialect in which t between vowels had become d?

The voicing of intervocalic t in American English is an open secret: matter and madder, latter and ladder, seated and seeded, tutor and Tudor, sweetish and Swedish, futile and feudal, Plato and play dough, and many others like them are homophones pairwise (textbooks usually cite writer and rider).  However, the Americans did not invent this pronunciation.  It has been attested almost all over the British north (I think it also occurs in Irish English), and the earliest example in a text goes back to the first half of the sixteenth century.  At least one word has even made its way into the Standard: French potage became poddidge and later porridge; the same happened to porringer.  (The change of a weakly articulated d to r is a process known from many modern Germanic dialects.  Incidentally, a change of some consonant to r is called rhotacism, from the name of the Greek letter rho.)  Assuming that our merchant or traveler was from Lancashire or from any part of England in which matter merged with madder, the origin of the present day form caddy will stop being a riddle.  Unfortunately, there is no way to raise the spirit of that adventurous man.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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Rice is not the first thing that comes to mind when you are drinking a nice, cold beer. And if you’re a beer connoisseur, even less so. For many years, it has been considered to be an affront to the institution of craft beer making to use rice. However, some beer makers are toying with the use of rice in beer again as homage to the practices that occurred before the Prohibition. This counterculture attitude reflects how beer brewers are looking to the past to evolve current drinkers’ palates. The following excerpt from the The Oxford Companion to Beer goes into detail on exactly how rice is used. Enjoy! — Nathalie

Anheuser-Busch is the largest single buyer of rice in the United States. Budweiser beer is brewed with rice making up a large portion of the grist.

[...]

It is commonly held, at least among craft brewers, that the use of rice in beer is to be abhorred. To quote Maureen Ogle, from an article in the LA Times, “Rice is considered by many brewers to be what the nasty, industrialized brewers use to water down their beer” and “craft brewers treat rice almost as if it were rat poison.” The article goes on to state that rice lowers the body, flavor and color of beers made with elevated rice adjunct levels, which seems rather to reinforce the notion.

In fact, German brewers arrived in America to find that it was difficult to make good beer using the high-protein, six-row barleys available in the United States at the time. Looking for ways to dilute the malt, they began to use rice and corn. The end result bears little resemblance to good German or Czech lagers but their customers enjoyed this form of beer and millions of people still do. Although rice may once have been a cheap alternative to barley malt, it no longer is. Sharply rising prices have resulted in much higher material costs for brewers employing rice in their mashes.

Interestingly, despite the assertions by many American craft brewers and beer enthusiasts that rice is anathema, some craft brewers are experimenting with production of “pre-Prohibition” lagers that mimic the beers made in the United States in the late 1800s. These are relatively highly hopped but are very light bodied, the result of the use of up to 20% rice in the mash. Other craft brewers are experimenting with the use of specialized rice types that actually add interesting flavors to the beers.

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Oxford staffers Stephanie Porter, Tara Kennedy, and Lana Goldsmith are here to show you how to pair beer with cheer as we enter the holiday season.  Below is the first of our posts that will be featured every Thursday this month.

Now that the calendar has turned the page to December, holiday season is in full swing. Aside from the lights and decorations flooding streets and buildings everywhere, this is the season of holiday parties! We will be celebrating The Oxford Companion to Beer through the month of December, and to kick off the month, we are turning our attention to hosting a holiday beer tasting.

First, a brief overview of the season’s beer history about the special brews available this season from contributor Chris J. Marchbanks.

Christmas ales is a catch-all descriptive phrase given to special beers made for Christmas and New Year celebrations, often with a high alcohol content 5.5%–14% ABV and marked by the inclusion of dark flavored malts, spices, herbs, and fruits in the recipe. A medieval instance of a Christmas ale was called “lambswool”—made with roasted apples, nutmegs, ginger, and sugar (honey)—so-called because of the froth floating on the surface. Today’s versions tend to be based on old ale, strong ale, and barley wine recipes, using cinnamon, cumin, orange, lemon, coriander, honey, etc. to create a warming, dark, and luscious festive beer. See old ales and barley wine. This tradition is closely related with the “wassail”, a mulled wine, beer, or cider usually consumed while caroling or gathering for the Christmas season. Most country breweries produce a Christmas or seasonal ale, some with long histories—notably in Belgium, England, Scandinavia, and the United States—which are usually matured for many months. There is no fixed recipe for these special ales as it is an opportunity for the brewer to expand boundaries and explore new tasty ingredients for Christmas, as the brewer’s gift to yuletide. The category includes some of the strongest beers brewed in the world including Samiclaus, which is a rich, aged Doppelbock with 14% ABV, originally brewed by Hurlimann in Switzerland but now in Austria at the Eggenberg Brewery. In the United States, Christmas Ale at Anchor Brewing (also known as “Our Special Ale”) contains a different blend of spices every year and helped spawn an interest in Christmas ales in the early days of the craft beer movement.

Since beer can have a cornucopia of flavors in every glass, you and your guests talk about the subtleties of each different beer. I might play a matching game where everyone writes down what they taste, and then the host can read the flavors from the label; or steam the labels off and have each person guess which label goes with which beer based on design. Either way, you will want to know how to create the perfect pour, and luckily, we know just the man to show you.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now that you have the pour down, what can you serve your beer in? It turns out that beer glassware has a long history, and the glass you serve it in matters. Take a quick tour of some of the elaborate glasses beer used to be served in, and grab some ideas of what will best suit your chosen suds.

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You may not be an expert, but you are definitely ready to pepper your guests with a little beer wisdom. So have fun, be safe, and enjoy good company over a delicious drink. And should you run into the questions about your choice of beverage, you can always refer them to Garrett.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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OUP’s Online Marketing Manager Stephanie Porter reflects on the beers to accompany her Thanksgiving meal.

Thanksgiving is all about tradition, and if you are like my family, your dinner will probably be served with wine. But having recently spent some time with The Oxford Companion to Beer and its Editor-in-Chief Garrett Oliver, I am thinking about adding a little twist to the end of the meal.

“Dessert, often thought of as the province of sweet wine, is actually usually better with beer. The maxim in wine—that the wine must be at least as sweet as the dessert—does not hold force with beer. In fact, it is the relief of sweetness from the palate that is the key to success. After a few forkfuls, the palate is overwhelmed by the sugar in most desserts. That is one reason why coffee often seems so pleasant with dessert; it is not nearly as sweet as the dessert.”

So after the turkey has been carved, eaten, and relocated to the fridge for tomorrow’s sandwiches, I will be breaking out a few choice beers to serve alongside my cousin’s famous French silk pie. Here are a few easy suggestions for incorporating a delicious brew into your Thanksgiving dinner. According to The New Republic reviewer Alexander Nazaryan, it might be almost as American as apple pie.

Pour a coffee flavored stout with your pecan pie:

Not to suggest that you have to forgo the coffee altogether, but my mouth starts to water just thinking about this pairing.

“Bigger beers with some caramel or roasted character tend to do best. With a chocolate tart, for example, we can pair a coffeeish, chocolaty imperial stout. In this pairing, we have both contrast and harmony—the
roasted malts match the chocolate, whereas the beer cleanses the palate of sweetness; the dessert can come back tasting fresh.”

I would aim for something with rich flavor, but that isn’t too heavy. I might go for two of my all-time favorite beers, Full Sail Session Black or Köstritzer Schwarzbier. But any of the beers listed in this link—Great Brewer’s Beers with a coffee flare—(or in your grocer’s isle) could have a similarly great effect.

Swap a Pumpkin Ale for your Pumpkin Pie:

As full as I am after a big meal, it just wouldn’t feel like Thanksgiving without a little something sweet to finish it all off. And since pumpkin ale is an American original, it seems even more fitting.

“As a general rule, pumpkin ale has an orange to amber color, a biscuit-like malt aroma, and a warming pumpkin aroma. Modern pumpkin ales are almost always made with “pumpkin pie spices,” which usually include cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, and sometimes vanilla and ginger. The finish tends to be dry because of many fermentable sugars derived from the pumpkin.”

Pumpkin ale has seems like it has secured its place in bars and bottles across the country, so you should have no trouble picking up this new classic. I love the light flavor of Brooklyn’ Brewery’s Post Road Pumpkin Ale, but as this would be in lieu of pumpkin pie, I might go for something with even more pie-like goodness like Dogfish Head’s Punkin Ale. Check out Draft Magazine’s Pumpkin picks, too.

Pour a rich barrel-aged beer over vanilla ice cream:

This pairing is all about pleasant contrast. Concurrent with the flavor of the wood itself may be the flavor of whatever beverage the barrel held previously. While some brewers do buy new barrels, this is relatively rare; not only are they very expensive, but their flavors can be overwhelming. The spirits or wine a barrel previously held will have extracted a lot of this flavor but also left much intact and possibly imparted its own flavors. (View the list of 2011’s Top Ten Barrel Aged Beers.) Common flavor notes include vanilla, caramel, toasted almond, or even apple and cider flavors, but since these beers can take on many flavors, make sure you read the description before choosing it for your dessert!

Watch the video to see Garrett talk about the worldwide craft brewing movement.

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All sources inform us about the Arabic-Turkish home of the word coffee, though in the European languages some forms were taken over directly from Arabic, so that the etymological part of the relevant entry in dictionaries and encyclopedias needs modification.  There is a possibility of coffee being connected with the name of the kingdom of Kaffa, but this question need not bother us at the moment.  The main puzzle is the development of the form coffee rather than its distant origin.  The OED is, as always, helpful, but particularly instructive is the array of variants found in a book with the funny title Hobson-Jobson.  Far from being a book of humor, it is a wonderful dictionary of Anglo-Indian words.  In its pages we find recollections about a very good drink called Chaube (1573), Caova (1580), cohoo (1609) and, surprisingly for such an early date, coffee (also 1609), cahue (1615), coho, and copha (1628).  The route to Europe is supposed to be from Arabic quahwa via Turkish kahveh.  Later coffee became the standard form in English.  But, as we can see, there was no real progression: in 1609 some people said cohoo, while others already knew coffee.  The cause may be that the Arabic and the Persian pronunciations competed, one being prevalent on the coast of Arabia, the other in the mercantile towns.  The writers quoted above were mainly English, Dutch, French, and Italian.  All of them recorded the foreign word according to their speech habits, though some may have repeated what they had heard from their countrymen.  (Incidentally, the transliteration of the Turkish word as kahveh and the Arabic as qahwah may not be quite right, for the so-called round gaf of the Turkish word, as this consonant is known among the Anglo-Indians, sounds very much like Arabic q.  I would be grateful to specialists for either corroborating or refuting this statement.  Perhaps there are dialectal differences of which I am unaware.)

Several researchers wondered how hw could become f.  This, I think, is less of an enigma than many people think.  The opposite change of f to hv (with a guttural h, that is, kh, approximately as in German ach and Dutch Schipol) often occurs in non-standard Russian.  At one time, the consonant f was alien to it, and names like Filip (stress on the second syllable) turned into Khvilip.  The same substitution still happens in Russian dialects.  To produce the consonant f, one needs a passage of air (otherwise, the result will be p) and active lips (or at least an active lower lip).  The group hv satisfies both conditions, except that breath and the lips participate in its production consecutively instead of concurrently, as happens in f.  Since, as a general rule, seventeenth-century Europeans could not pronounce hw or hv, they combined both elements of articulation in one sound and ended up with f.  Its voiced partner v fits the situation even better, and we should applaud the man who wrote caova.  Chaube (that is, khaube) is a close relative of caova, because b is also a labial sound. Some speakers were lazy and left out w altogether; hence cohoo and its likes.  For comparison, one may cite Finnish kahvi and Polish kawa.

The vowels give us grief too.  Both Arabic and Turkish have a in the first syllable, while the English word has o.  The Dutch for coffee is also koffie, as opposed, for instance, to German Kaffee.  These differences have never been explained to everybody’s satisfaction, but the suggestions known to me make sense.  The vowel a is extremely tricky.  It can be pronounced in the front part of the mouth, as in French papa, more or less in the middle of the mouth cavity, as in Engl. cuff, or far back, as in Engl. spa.  It seems that as late as the middle of the nineteenth century u in Engl. cuff was rather close to what one today hears in American Engl. curry.  In any case, Russian speakers did not identify it with their a, as they do now.  Likewise, o varies greatly from language to language and from dialect to dialect.  Although hot is spelled alike in British and American English, it is pronounced so differently in the two countries (especially when America is represented by the Midwest) that foreigners have trouble distinguishing between hot and what they believe should be hut.  Russian immigrants pronounce the first syllable of Boston like Italian basta and listen in disbelief when someone tries to convince them that dot.com is not dut.come.  Those who learned English in its British r-less variety are apt to take even Bob for Barb.  The assumption that the Europeans confused a and o in the native (Arabic or Turkish) name of the drink looks plausible.

Finally, we notice that Engl. coffee has stress on the first syllable, while some other languages accent the end and that the word’s second vowel is sometimes a and sometimes e.  The plural of Arabic kahwe is kahawi.  Both the Turkish form and the European forms with -e seem to go back to the Arabic plural.  Polish kawa and Czech kava adapted themselves to the Slavic system of declension and do not reflect an ancient ending.  Stress on the second syllable is clearly more “genuine,” but one should always reckon with the possibility that it was borrowed from French.  In similar fashion, those languages that have initial accent may have been influenced by English.  It appears that there are at least as many variants of the word coffee as there are varieties of the product.  This is nice, for diversity is supposed to make us happy.

Now a few words about the promised kingdom of Kaffa in modern Ethiopia (formerly in Abyssinia).  Coffee trees do flourish there, and coffee is the main article of export from that part of the world.  Disclaimers to the effect that we lack sufficient evidence connecting coffee with Kaffa do not go far, because no competing (preferably Arabic) etymology of coffee has been offered.  I was pleased to discover that Paul Kretschmer, an extremely cautious etymologist, saw no objection to the derivation of coffee from Kaffa.

John Jourdain, a Dorsetshire seaman, wrote in his diary (1609) that the group “rested in the plaine fields untill [sic] three the next daie, neer unto a cohoo howse in the desert.”  Lloyd’s “cohoo howse,” the oldest establishment of this type in London, was certainly not opened in a desert.  While reading this blog (the first thing to do early in the morning every Wednesday, wherever you live), enjoy your cup of coffee and forget about many wars that were fought against this beverage in the past.  The coffee haters are now forgotten; the drink has won (as expected).

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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Perhaps your interest has been sparked by the new Ken Burns documentary, or perhaps you’ve always been curious. Either way, there’s a lot to learn about (and learn from) Prohibition. The following article by Pete Brown is from The Oxford Companion to Beer, edited by Garret Oliver.

Prohibition, or “the Noble Experiment,” refers to the period between 1919 and 1933 when the sale, manufacture, and distribution of alcohol were illegal in the United States. Although it may have  lasted only 14 years, Prohibition was the culmination of decades of protest and lobbying and has ramifications that are still felt today. It remains the focal point of the ongoing debate surrounding the potential dangers and benefits of alcohol and people’s right to drink as they please.

Motivations

It is easy for those who enjoy alcohol to dismiss prohibitionists as radical fundamentalists or miserable killjoys, so it is important if we want to understand Prohibition properly to appreciate the conditions by which it came about. Throughout the history of alcohol, epidemics of destructive drinking have always occurred at times of massive social upheaval, when populations face the stressful shattering of their lifestyles and the uncertainty of new economic and societal realities.

One such era was the rapid industrialization of the United States in the latter half of the 19th century. Just as Britain had experienced its own gin epidemic in the world’s first Industrial Revolution a century before, so the United States was transformed by forces that ran almost out of control. The big businesses that built railroads, manufacturing industries, and financial centers marched on for a time with unfettered power, with little regard for the social consequences of their actions. Poverty, crime, slavery, prostitution, and alcoholism were seen as blights on the face of a young nation, and the middle classes were keen to define a morality and sense of society that they felt could be described as American.

Alcohol was one of several targets—with some justification. Although many saloons were well run, there were also those that encouraged children to drink to get them into the habit or enticed men with free food or free beer to persuade them to carry on drinking. Alcohol-fueled violence and disorder, although perhaps not epidemic, were certainly significant problems in urban areas.

The Maine Law

In Maine in 1851, a law was passed to prohibit the sale of all alcoholic beverages except for “medicinal, mechanical or manufacturing purposes.” It was an attempt to “validate American family values,” like the laws against adultery, dueling, and lotteries that were being passed by state legislatures at the time. The Maine example quickly spread elsewhere, and by 1855 a total of 12 states had joined Maine in total prohibition.

The law was highly unpopular, and opposition soon turned violent. Disturbances such as the Lager Beer Riots in Chicago in 1855 ultimately led to repeal in 1856. But these laws were not really working anyway—dry states could do nothing to prevent the transport of liquor across state lines, and some states simply chose not to enforce them. Whereas alcohol consumption was actually declining before the Maine Law was passed, consumption of beer, wine, and whiskey in the United States all increased between 1850 and 1860.

The year 1861 saw the outbreak of the American Civil War. Within the new society’s emerging moral compass, the campaign against slavery temporarily pushed the Temperance issue into the background. The anti-drink lobby retreated to reconsider and began to reorganize much more effectively.

The Women’s Christian Temperance Movement and the Anti-Saloon League

In 1873, the Women’s Christian Temperance Movement came together not, in fact, to advocate temperance—or moderation—but the outright universal Prohibition of alcohol. They did so because they believed the saloon was the center of society’s ills and campaigned to have them closed down using a mixture of prayer and direct, confrontational action.

The Movement’s most infamous member, Carrie Nation, was an imposing lady, 6 feet tall, dressed in black, and accessorized with an axe. In 1890 Kansas was a dry state, but the law was not being enforced. With a group of her sisters, Nation prayed and read the Bible outside a saloon in the town of Medicine Lodge, hoping God would force it to close. Eventually she grew tired of waiting, strode into the saloon with her axe, and smashed the place to matchwood, while patrons fled and staff stood agape. Between 1900 and 1910 she was arrested 30 times for violent conduct and criminal damage. She paid her fines with fees from lecture tours and sales of souvenir axes. In her own words, she was “a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what He doesn’t like.”

The Anti-Saloon League (ASL) favored careful politicking over sensational stunts and was ultimately more effective. This, the first real single-issue pressure group, was founded in 1893 in Oberlin, Ohio, by Howard Hyde Russell, who circumvented the politics and infighting that dogged other groups by organizing it more like a bureaucratic corporation than a democratic, committee-led special interest group. The ASL had a clear focus on how politicians voted rather than whether they personally drank. It supported dry political candidates, put pressure on waverers, and succeeded in making Prohibition a vote-winning issue.

Apart from direct pressure on politicians, the ASL carried out a very effective public relations campaign demonizing drink. Using baseless “scientific” studies and scare stories, their simple, effective propaganda portrayed drinkers as victims, lured in and broken down by the saloon. They claimed that alcohol killed 50,000 people a year and that after one taste of alcohol people were hooked and would develop a ruinous habit. Powerful cartoons appeared, such as one showing a man handcuffed to a giant beer bottle labeled “drinking habit” on a saloon bar, while at home his daughter asks, “Mummy, why doesn’t Daddy come home?” Another, “Christmas morning in the Drunkard’s Home,” simply shows children in ragged nightclothes weeping at the sight of their empty stockings.

Over a few decades, popular opinion turned against alcohol. By 1920, some Americans regarded drinkers with such disgust that, at the Fifteenth International Congress Against Alcoholism in Washington, two doctors were able to seriously consider their outright extermination, before pulling back and proposing what they called the more “humane method” of simply rounding them up into concentration camps and sterilizing them.

Against all this, the brewing industry did little to help itself. Unsavory sales promotion practices in saloons continued, and when spirits manufacturers suggested a joint lobbying campaign against Prohibition, the brewers refused to acknowledge the common cause. As late as 1916, a brewing trade publication declared that “All people hate drunkards and whisky makes them. Men drinking beer exclusively may become ‘funny’ but never drunk.”

Th at same year, Congress passed the Sixteenth Amendment, which gave federal government the right to raise a nationwide income tax. A powerful argument against Prohibition had always been that taxes on alcohol sales provided the government with 40% of its revenue. Now, the Prohibitionists argued, those vital funds could be raised by other means.

The Volstead Act

In January 1917 the 65th Congress convened, in which “dries” outnumbered “wets” by 140 to 64 in the Democratic Party and 138 to 62 among Republicans. With America’s declaration of war against Germany in April, the powerful, pro-beer German American lobby was silenced, whereas simultaneously the debate about the best use of raw materials during the war eff ort added yet another argument to the Prohibitionist’s armory.

On December 18, 1917, the Senate proposed the Eighteenth Amendment, establishing a legal definition for intoxicating liquor, outlawing the manufacture, sale, and transportation of any drink stronger than 0.5% alcohol, and setting out penalties for doing so. (Interestingly, the consumption of alcohol was never itself prohibited.) Thirty-three of the then 48 states were already dry by this time: the Act was simply ratifying what many already believed. President Woodrow Wilson exercised his veto, raging,

These miserable hypocrites in the House and Senate . . . many with their cellars stocked with liquors and not believing in prohibition at all— jumping at the whip of the lobbyists . . . The country would be better off with light wines and beers.

The veto was immediately overturned, and the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified on January 16, 1919, and put into effect a year later.

The Prohibition Era

It quickly became clear that Prohibition was impractical. The first problem was smuggling. It was illegal to transport alcoholic beverages across state lines; it was also illegal to transport them across national borders. But there was a large difference between stating this and enforcing it. There simply were not enough agents to prevent alcohol entering the United States from Canada. As one commentator observed, “You can’t stop liquor from dripping through a dotted red line.” There are no figures for how much booze was smuggled over the Canadian border, but revenues from liquor taxes to the Canadian government increased fourfold during Prohibition, at the same time as consumption statistics suggest the quantity of spirits drunk by the Canadian population virtually halved.

Spirits also entered the United States from the West Indies. The Rum Runner Bill McCoy became so famous for the quality of his liquor that “The Real McCoy” entered the language to describe the genuine article.

Those who could not get the Real McCoy simply made their own. It is hard to make illegal a process that occurs in nature, and homemade alcohol was easy to manufacture. An estimated 70 million gallons of moonshine were made from corn sugar every year. This was mixed with glycerine and juniper oil to create “bathtub gin” (so called not because it was mixed in bathtubs, but because it was diluted with water from bath taps.)

Most of this imported and home-distilled alcohol was sold in covert drinking clubs or speakeasies. One Prohibition agent reckoned that in 1926 there were 100,000 in New York alone, and although they were sometimes raided, it was futile to make any serious att empt to eradicate them when many numbered city officials and dignitaries among their regular customers.

It is often suggested that Prohibition was such a failure that alcohol consumption actually increased during the years it was enforced. Although there can be no accurate measure of clandestine consumption of illegally brewed booze, this is probably not true. But what is undeniably true is that Prohibition ultimately had the opposite effect of what the original temperance campaigners intended. Before Prohibition, there had been a steady shift from consumption of spirits toward beer. Once alcohol consumption was illegal, speakeasy customers tended to be dedicated drinkers, favoring the more direct alcohol hit from spirits. Beer was also much harder to produce illegally compared with bathtub gin. Those who defied Prohibition therefore tended to become harder drinkers than they had been before. From a position where beer was by far the dominant drink, during Prohibition spirits rose to account for 75% of all alcohol drunk in the United States.

If hypocrisy allowed Americans to keep drinking while supporting Prohibition (one wag said people would “vote dry as long as they were able to stagger to the polls”), the economics of illegal alcohol sales eventually turned public opinion toward thoughts of repeal. Bootleg booze fueled the growth of organized crime across the United States. Most famously, Chicago became a haven for  mugglers, profiteers, and drinkers. Gangsters such as Al Capone and his rival Bugs Moran made millions of dollars from illegal alcohol sales. By the end of the 1920s Capone controlled all of Chicago’s 10,000 speakeasies and ruled the bootlegging business from Canada to Florida. But when people started dying in intergang rivalry—most notably in the St Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929—the public began to feel that the power of the gangsters was out of control.

Other events that same year also put an end to one of Prohibition’s most persuasive arguments. With income tax in place, Prohibitionists had been able to argue that on the one hand, central government no longer needed liquor tax to keep the treasury running. On the other, they argued that the money being poured into saloons would be freed up and spent on other goods and services, fueling the manufacturing industry rather than lining brewers’ pockets. This never happened—those who still chose to drink ended up spending more as prices increased, and the huge cost of att empting to enforce Prohibition further emptied state coffers. And following 1929’s Wall Street Crash, the Great Depression left the country broke. The economic arguments for Prohibition—which everyone knew was not working anyway—simply fell apart, and the lost revenue from liquor taxes started to look too good to go without.

In 1932, industrialist John D Rockefeller Junior wrote,

When Prohibition was introduced, I hoped that it would be widely supported by public opinion and the day would soon come when the evil effects of alcohol would be recognized. I have slowly and reluctantly come to believe that this has not been the result. Instead, drinking has generally increased; the speakeasy has replaced the saloon; a vast army of lawbreakers has appeared; many of our best citizens have openly ignored Prohibition; respect for the law has been greatly lessened; and crime has increased to a level never seen before.

That year, Franklin Roosevelt stood for the Presidency on a repeal platform. He won one of the biggest landslides in electoral history.

Repeal

On March 22, 1933, Roosevelt signed into law an amendment to the Volstead Act known as the Cullen–Harrison Act, allowing the manufacture, transportation, and sale of some alcoholic beverages. Prohibition was repealed at midnight on April 7, 1933. At 12.01 am , the brewers of Milwaukee and St Louis opened their gates and shipped 15 million bottles of beer. The first consignment from Anheuser-Busch went to the airport, from whence it was delivered to the White House and to pro-repeal lobbyists in New York by the company’s new Clydesdale horses. The manufacture of spirits still required various licensing agreements, and by a simple administrative oversight, homebrewing would remain illegal until 1979. By the time Jimmy Carter legalized homebrewing, American beer enthusiasts felt they sorely needed it.

The Prohibition Aftermath

By any true measure, Prohibition can only be regarded as a failure. But it has had lasting repercussions for the United States. Anti-alcohol sentiment ebbs and flows, but still runs very high in American society: 35% of the population do not drink, half of them for religious reasons. Neo-Prohibitionists on the religious right still run campaigns attempting to equate beer with heroin or crack cocaine.

America has Prohibition to thank for the growth of organized crime. Mafia groups had largely confined their activities to gambling and theft before 1920. By 1933, with powerful infrastructures in place and corrupted law enforcement officials under their control, gangs and families simply moved into different product lines once alcohol was no longer quite so profitable to them.

And Prohibition had a permanent effect on America’s beer palate. Of the 1,392 brewers in operation before Prohibition, only 164 remained afterward. America’s fledgling wine industry was destroyed entirely and would take decades to re-emerge. A generation that had known nothing but soft drinks rejected the bitt erness of the Bavarian-style beers that had been popular in America before Prohibition and demanded something sweeter. Modern American beer, less characterful than traditional beer styles, became ubiquitous, and it would only be after the 1979 legalization of homebrewing and the growth of craft brewing that America would once again know an interesting variety of beer styles and tastes.

It was not all bad: the popularity of speakeasies did lead directly to the spread of jazz music across America. But although this is obviously a good thing, it is unlikely that those who suffered the lasting effects of organized crime or bad liquor would consider it a worthwhile legacy.

Barr, Andrew. Drink: A social history. New York : Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1999.
Ogle, Maureen. Ambitious brew: The story of American beer. Orlando, FL : Harcourt Books , 2006.
Peck, Garrett. The prohibition hangover: Alcohol in America from demon rum to cult Cabernet. New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press, 2009.

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Great American Beer Festival
Breweries in attendance: 466
Beers poured: 2,375
People in Attendance: 50,000
Size of Convention Center: 5.2 football fields

By Max Sinsheimer

Associate Editor, Reference

The Oxford Companion to Beer in hand, I took off for three days at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver last week. This beer-lovers Mecca boasts the largest collection of American beer ever served, its popularity growing with each passing year. In 1982, the festival’s first year, there were 800 attendees in a 5,000 square foot festival hall. This year’s festival sold out 50,000 tickets in the first week tickets went on sale. A small pavilion at the back of the convention center recreated the layout of the original 1982 festival for this year’s GABF 30^th anniversary, and looking at that modest room against the backdrop of the Denver Convention Center was like looking at a tiny ceramic tile within an extensive mosaic. In 1982 Charlie Papazian, a legend in the beer world, chose a rather audacious name for the festival he founded. But that name has proved visionary in 2011.

So who are these hordes who flock to Denver for GABF each year? Mostly hardcore beer fans, of course, and there are many of them. One gauge might be to look at the number of homebrewers in the country. The American Homebrewers Association estimated that there were around 750,000 active American homebrewers in 2010. I asked a few individuals if they had anything fermenting back home, and heard everything from honey porters to seasonal spiced and pumpkin ales. The strangest answer was from a man brewing a lager using 7Up as a sugar source. He claimed it was a big hit with his friends.

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• The Oxford Companion to Beer is now on sale

   

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• Where's Waldo? At GABF, of course.

   

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• Well, of course there are beer maids.

   

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• Halloween costumes are in the bag keg

   

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• Brooklyn Brewery Brewmaster Garrett Oliver pours "Sorachi Ace" for thirsty attendees.

   

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• Ben Keene takes a break to sample some brew.

   

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• Serious (beer) business

   

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• Editor-in-Chief Garrett Oliver signs copies of The Oxford Companion to Beer.

   

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• Today's pairing: flour-less pudding, chocolate, and peanut butter brittle with a stout.

   

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Not everyone at the GABF was a professional or amateur brewer, but everyone was passionate about beer, and that passion manifested itself inventive ways. At the first session I attended on Thursday, I saw a group of men waiting in line dressed in Where’s Waldo outfits. I entered the floor to find a bevy of costumed attendees. There were lederhosen and kilts, of course, and beer maids in traditional Bavarian attire. But there were also more unusual beer garments. “Hop heads” (people who love very hoppy beers) wore rubber hop cones on their heads, or laurels made from hop vines. Three men wore cut-outs of actual kegs around their waists. There were the sillier costumes that had no discernible connection to beer, but contributed to GABF’s celebratory atmosphere. A group of grown men wore white bathrobes. A convincing Charlie Chaplin tapped his cane and tipped his top hat for photographs. Tigger the Tiger bounced about beside a group of twenty-somethings dressed as monks. Halloween came early for me this year.

But for all there was to see at GABF, it was the beer that took center stage. Try a flight of beers at a good beer bar, or drink a few beers from a well-stocked refrigerator, and you get some variety. It is another thing entirely to walk about the GABF floor armed with a single ounce plastic tasting glass, sipping 30 or 40 beers in a session. It was a bit like the first time I visited the Boston Aquarium as a child. I thought I had a pretty good handle on fish, but when I went to the aquarium and saw luminescent squid, Moray Eels, and colorful reef dwellers, the huge range of these creatures that I thought I had known overwhelmed me. The rows of brewery tables were like those fish tanks, demanding that I pay attention, because beer is more plentiful, more exotic, just more than I knew existed.

The most unusual beer I tried? That would be the Humidor IPA, brewed by Cigar City Brewing in Tampa, FL.  Aged on Spanish cedar, the same wood used for cigar boxes, this beer smelled and tasted exactly like a Cuban cigar. It was so odd, but delicious, and proved the endless creative potential inherent in beer. Further proof was everywhere I looked. The Grapefruit Jungle beer brewed by the Sun King Brewing Company in Indianapolis is an IPA that uses three hops with grapefruit-like characteristics. It has a subtle aroma that builds slowly and convincingly – you can really smell, and taste, the grapefruit. Kriek, a sour beer flavored with cherries, is a style that I had heard of but never tried, until I stopped by the Sam Adams booth for their American Kriek. It tasted to me like sour cherry soda, and I while I didn’t love it, I was amazed that beer could taste this way.

Garrett Oliver, Editor-in-Chief of The Oxford Companion to Beer and Brewmaster at the Brooklyn Brewery, told me recently that “beer is the new wine,” and I better understand what he means after attending the Great American Beer Festival. The creativity, quality, and quantity present in the American beer scene today spells a renaissance in craft brewing the likes of which has not been seen since before Prohibition. There are plenty of statistics to support this claim, but I’ll leave you with one of my favorite anecdotes: Garrett was recently asked to curate a serious craft beer menu for a chain of airport bars.

Some of you may know that today is Interational Coffee Day. I’ve, personally, been trying to ignore the free/discounted offers around New York City since I’m trying to cut back, and decided to distract myself by putting together this quick video post about coffee and caffeine.

Now, I would be reimiss if I did not first mention the fantastic book Buzz: The Science and Lore of Alcohol and Caffeine by Stephen Braun. This is a tried-and-true OUP favorite. In the book, we discover that more than 100 plant species produce caffeine molecules in their seeds. It’s not surprising then that caffeine is far and away the most widely used mind altering substance on the planet, found in tea, coffee, cocoa, chocolate, soft drinks, and more than 2,000 non-prescription drugs. (Tea is the most popular drink on earth, with coffee a close second.) Braun also explores the role of caffeine in creativity: Johann Sebastian Bach, for one, loved coffee so much he wrote a Coffee Cantata (as Braun notes, no music captures the caffeinated experience better than one of Bachs frenetic fugues), Balzac would work for 12 hours non-stop, drinking coffee all the while, and Kant, Rousseau, and Voltaire all loved coffee. And throughout the book, Braun takes us on many engaging factual sidetrips–we learn, for instance, that Theodore Roosevelt coined the phrase “Good to the last drop” used by Maxwell House ever since; that distances between Tibetan villages are sometimes reckoned by the number of cups of tea needed to sustain a person (three cups being roughly 8 kilometers); and that John Pemberton’s original recipe for Coca-Cola included not only kola extract, but also cocaine.

Now, I promised you videos, so here are some videos.

Fascinating compilation from C. G. P. Grey — Coffee: The Greatest Addiction Ever

Click here to view the embedded video.

and for those of you who enjoy more academic history…

Steven Johnson answers, Did Coffee Fuel the Age of Enlightenment?

Click here to view the embedded video.

The senses are a vital source of knowledge about the objects and events in the world, as well as for insights into our private sensations and feelings. Below is an excerpt from Art and the Senses, edited by Francesca Bacci and David Melcher, in which Charles Spence, Maya U. Shankar, and Heston Blumenthal look at the ways in which environmental sounds can affect the perceived flavour of food.

Charles Spence and Heston Blumenthal conducted two experiments together with the members of the audience who attended the opening session of the ‘Art and the Senses’ conference held in October of 2006 that were designed to examine whether (and/or to demonstrate that) environmental sounds would influence people’s perceptions of the foods that they were eating. In the first experiment, 40 audience members were asked to taste two samples of ‘bacon and egg’ ice cream, one after the other, and to rate the flavour of each scoop. They were instructed to rate the relative strength of the bacon and egg flavours by making a mark on a scale provided on a sheet of paper. A different soundtrack was played in the background while the members of the audience consumed each of the ice creams: one soundtrack consisted of what sounded like bacon sizzling in a frying pan, while the other consisted of the clucking sounds of farmyard chickens. The ice cream was served with the farmyard soundtrack and a yellow plastic spoon (e.g. consistent with the colour of eggs) while the other sample was presented with a blue spoon.

The results showed that the audience rated the ice cream tasted in the presence of the sizzling bacon soundtrack as having a significantly more bacony flavour than the ice cream sample that was tasted in the presence of the farmyard chicken sounds. Interestingly, however, both scoops of ice-cream had come from the same batch—that is, the flavours were actually identical. These results show that auditory cues can be used to bias people’s perception of the relative strength of two competing flavours in a food.

More generally, it should be noted that the disambiguation of the flavour of a food dish can be achieved by a number of means: either visually, by changing the colour of the food, verbally by means of labelling, by presenting pictures or other cues on the packaging, and/or by the presentation of auditory cues, as described in the present study. Furthermore, even saying the word ‘cinnamon’ has been shown to activate the olfactory cortex (i.e. the part of the brain that processes smells; see Gonzalez et al. 2006). Playing the sizzling bacon soundtrack at the ‘Art and the Senses’ conference may therefore have influenced the audience’s perception of the bacon flavour in the ice cream simply by making them think of bacon. All provide putative explanations of how listening to the sound of frying bacon might make bacon and egg ice-cream taste more bacony! It is at present an open question as to whether simply writing the word bacon on the screen in the front of the auditorium would have had the same effect. The soundtracks were presented at a clearly audible level in this study and some of the audience members could feel that their flavour perception was being changed by the soundtrack; a few even tried to override this form of auditory manipulation by repeating the word ‘bacon, bacon, bacon. . .’ to themselves like a mantra when listening to the farmyard chickens clucking away, but to little avail. One suggestion is that environmental auditory stimuli may activate superordinate knowledge structures and hence prime related stimuli.

In a second study, 33 members of the audience were asked to taste and rate two oysters in terms of their pleasantness and intensity of their flavours. One oyster was served in the shell from a wooden basket (of the type that one commonly sees at the seaside). The other oyster had been removed from the shell and was served in a petri dish instead. The first oyster was served while the audience listened to the ‘sounds of the sea’ soundtrack in the background (this consisted of the sound of seagulls squawking and waves crashing gently on the beach), the second while they listened to the ‘farmyard noises’ used in our first experiment. The results revealed that the audience rated the oyster that they had consumed while listening to the ‘sound of the sea’ as tasting significantly more pleasant than the oyster that had been tasted while they listened to the farmyard noises instead. Interestingly, however, no such effect was found for the intensity ratings. That is, changing the sound had no effect on people’s perception of the intensity of the flavour of the oysters.

Taken together, the results of these two experiments, conducted at the ‘Art and the Senses’ conference, highlight just how dramatically environmental sounds can influence (or bias) people’s perception of the foods they consume. Interestingly, these results led directly to the introduction of the ‘Sound of the Sea’ seafood dish on the tasting menu of The Fat Duck restaurant in Bray. With this dish, diners are presented with a plate of food that is reminiscent of a beach (with foam, seaweed, and sand all visible on their plate). The diners are also presented with a mini iPod hidden inside a sea-shell, with only the earphones poking out. The diners are encouraged to put on the headphones (whereupon they hear the ‘sounds of the sea’ soundtrack) before starting to eat the dish placed in front of them. The response of diners on the tasting menu has been very positive. The diners appear to really enjoy the dish. In fact, it has become a signature dish at the restaurant. The dish appears to work at several levels: by getting the diners to think about the role of hearing in eating and by helping to illustrate the importance of sound to the appreciation of food. Second, we believe, on the basis of the evidence reported here, that the dish is so successful because the soundtrack serves to intensify the flavour of the dish. That is, it heightens the flavour. It is also worth noting that wearing the headphones has the originally unanticipated additional effect of concentrating the diners’ attention on the dish since it becomes difficult to converse with one’s dinner partners while listening to the seaside sounds.

Professor Charles Spence is the head of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory based at the Department of Experimental Psychology, Oxford University. Maya U. Shankar is also in the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University. Heston Blumenthal is a well-known chef and owns The Fat Duck Restaurant in Bray, which holds three Michelin stars and was voted the best restaurant in the world in 2005.

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E. B. White was correct when he wrote more than sixty years ago that New York is a city of neighborhoods, and he was even more correct that every neighborhood has its own “little main street.”   “No matter where you live,” he says, “you will find within a block or two a grocery store, a barbershop, a newsstand and shoeshine shack, an ice-coal-and-wood cellar.., a dry cleaner, a laundry, a delicatessen” and on to the “hardware store, a liquor store, a shoe-repair shop.”  Except for the coal merchant, a little main street like that has been the mainstay of my neighborhood in Greenwich Village and the existential linchpin of my life.

But when I recently returned from a six-month sojourn in Amsterdam, I was shocked by the changes.  Though the storefronts look pretty much the same as before I left, many shops I knew have vanished.  They weren’t just victims of the owner’s retirement or economic recession.

The branch of a local supermarket chain, “family owned since 1932,” had lost so many customers to a nearby Whole Foods Market that it closed.   The longtime photo shop, which had clung to life for the past few years by taking passport pictures and digital images for eBay sellers, is now a Middle Eastern humus restaurant.  While I was away a corner diner morphed into an “artisanal gelato” shop selling small five-dollar cones.  The futon store turned into an informal but upscale “pasta pizza bar.”


• Pasta Pizza Bar

   

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• Univ Pl Pop Burger

   

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• Univ Pl Rugby

   

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• D'Agostino's closed

   

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• Gelato Artigianale

   

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• Grey Dog cafe

   

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You should understand that University Place is a short and fairly placid shopping street.  Though Greenwich Village has been reputed to be the capital of hip culture since before the first hipster was born, you might find a local shopping street like this in Boston, Philadelphia or Dallas.  When I moved there in the 1970s I found the usual bread-and-butter stores that White describes.  I could buy a loaf of rye bread, shop for fresh fish for dinner, and have my prescriptions filled and my pants dry cleaned.  I could buy flowers for my husband’s birthday, browse a well-stocked bookshop or hardware store and tell the butcher which cut of beef I wanted.  I could get a burger at any of three diners or eat Italian or Japanese.

This wasn’t Nobu territory.  None of the stores boasted gourmet quality products.  But in those days there was no Yelp to rate the local bagel store and in most of the small shops you could talk with the owner.  This made the street feel like home, as Jane Jacobs famously pointed out for the street where she lived on the other side of the Village.

For a long time University Place shared the area’s rakish reputation as a breeding ground for artists, writers and political radicals.  The Hotel Albert, built in the 1880s, had hosted Mark Twain, Walt Whitman and Hart Crane.  In the 1950s the owner commissioned Salvador Dali to design an open-air bus called a Loconik, named for both the railroads’ means of transportation and the Village’s denizens, beatniks, to give free tours of the neighborhood.  Also in the postwar years the Abstract Expressionist artists and their literary friends drank and argued through the night at the Cedar Tavern, two blocks away.

By the end of the sixties, though, the street’s reputation for louche rebellion had run aground.  Some of the Albert’s last celebrated guests, rock bands, fell apart because of drink and drugs, and the hotel declined into seedy disrepair.  Like a dowager forced to pawn her last string of pearls, the Albert was sold and transformed into condos.

At the same time the blocks around University Place were also being transformed.  The brownstone houses were still as grand as they had been in Henry James’s lifetime, but the loft buildings where small factories, artisans’ workshops and artists’ studios had coexisted peaceably for years began to be converted to living lofts and offices for psychotherapists, architects, and small film companies.

While the creative class was setting up shop, the two nearby private universities, New York University and The New School, began to expand.  There were financial problems and hasty acquisitions but overall their student bodies and tuition revenues grew, which gave them motivation and capital to expand even more.

As a result, “studentification” is reshaping University Place in the universities’ image.  Though this has been a neighborhood where white-haired residents are not afraid to pick their way with their caretakers or walkers, the crowd of pedestrians grows younger and faster every year.  A good portion of the young women are so tall and skinny they look like fashion models.

I don’t mind the mix of ages and body types but the stores are changing to meet a young, affluent and mobile market.  My “little main street” is losing the local character praised by E. B. White and mimicking the food court in an upscale mall.

This is happening not only on my shopping street, but in neighborhoods throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn.  The stock market, recession and U.S. debt limit crisis haven’t stopped the upward trend of real estate prices here.  Young white families with children are still moving in, balancing the demographic trend toward lower-income nonwhites and single member households that began in the 1950s and 1960s.  Young families and older folks are the ballooning extremes of Manhattan’s demographic dumbbell.

Yet both groups face a crunch of public services, starting with overcrowded classrooms in public schools and the fiercest ever competition for private school enrollments, and a shutdown of senior citizen centers. Meanwhile the city and state governments have joined the nationwide uprising by public officials to curb the costs of the public labor force by all possible means.  Though it isn’t easy to fire teachers and other employees who are still protected by labor union contracts with local authorities, the retrenchment of the public sector makes life in the city harder.

During this torrid summer I am painfully aware of the city’s always needy infrastructure: the uneven surfaces, not to mention potholes of midtown streets, the hot and airless subway platforms, the aged water and sewage pipes that need to be replaced.  Money, as always, is tight.

I know that Amsterdam, like all European cities, faces similar problems.  Cutbacks to public services and their continued privatization provoked brief labor strikes and a lot of grumbling during my stay there.  Individual homeowners and the city government as well face the high costs of replacing old building and bridge foundations, for the beautiful 17th century canal houses of Amsterdam’s UNESCO World Heritage Site were built in the water.

Despite the unrelenting homogenization of city life though I have found one thing in New York unchanged.  New Yorkers still love this city because it is gritty and lively, and probably the most sensually diverse city in the world.  But their sense of feeling at home in their neighborhood depends on keeping their little main street truly local.

Sharon Zukin is Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Loft Living, Landscapes of Power (winner of the C. Wright Mills Award), The Cultures of Cities, Point of Purchase, and most recently Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places. You can read her previous posts here.

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It’s Friday, and many of you, dear readers, may be headed to the pub this weekend. Now, I know none of you would ever think of being involved in a bar fight, but to discourage you just in case, we present this list by Christine Sismondo, which originally appeared on Brow Beat and is reposted with permission.

1. The Philadelphia Election Riots, 1742
No reported deaths, several injured, one election lost.

Never piss off your bartender. That’s a time-honored rule understood by all regular drinkers. Obviously, this wouldn’t include Quakers Thomas Lloyd and Israel Pemberton, Jr., who had headed off to Philadelphia’s Indian King Tavern one election-day morning to see what they could do about defusing a potentially violent situation.

At stake was the election of the Assembly (the colonial lower house which represented the people), which many Anglicans felt was being rigged by Quakers ‘bussing’ in unregistered German immigrants from outlying areas to support the Quaker candidate.

At the Indian Head, the two Quakers urged tavern-keeper Peter Robinson to stop serving the rabble and to cut off anyone who was getting “too warm.” Many of the warmed-up patrons were sailors working on their morning buzz before the polls opened. Robinson responded that he’d serve whomever he pleased and proceeded to pour a huge glass of rum for the chief agitator, one Captain Mitchell.

“Every man his dram and then we march,” said Mitchell, ignoring Lloyd’s and Pemberton’s pleas for calm.

At 10 in the morning, sailors armed with clubs stormed from the tavern with the expressed intent of knocking down the “broad brims.” In the end, the sailors’ actions backfired as many voters, horrified by the ensuing violence, readily defeated the Anglican candidate.

2. The Astor Place Riots, 1849
An estimated 25 dead and the “Scottish” play’s reputation further damaged.

Hard to believe that one of New York’s most shocking riots started over rival interpretations of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Apparently, the bad-luck Scottish play came by its reputation honestly.

In 1849, it was opening at the freshly-minted, hi-falutin’ Astor Opera House on Broadway, with William Macready on the marquee. Macready was a staid, traditional British actor, who had long feuded with American thespian Edwin Forrest, the people’s choice for Macbeth.

Five Points saloon-keeper Isaiah Rynders saw this as an opportunity for mischief, since theatergoing was one of his patrons’ most passionate pastimes. Shakespeare was the NASCAR of its day and Forrest, who had debuted at the Bowery Theater, was the working classes’ favorite actor.

Rynders, one of the most powerful men in the city thanks to his control of the gangs of New York, bought tickets to the Astor House performance and distributed them to every ruffian in his network of watering holes. But not before winding them up on booze and anti-British sentiment.

The drunken mob descended on Astor Place, took their seats, and began pelting the stage and audience with rotting fruits and eggs, forcing actors to pantomime the rest of the show, since nobody could hear the dialogue. As they say, though, the show must go on, and, three nights later, Macready took the stage again. This time, Rynders’ crew had swelled to some 10,000. This brought out the militia and, in the end, a reported 25 deaths before the riot was quelled. The Astor Place became known as the Dis-Aster Place and was converted into a library not long after.

3. The New York City Draft Riots, 1863
Over 120 dead, more than 2,000 injured.

Fourteen years after the Astor Riots, Rynders had lost considerable influence when it came to winding up a mob. Unfortunately, firemen at the Black Joke Engine Company 33, who wielded their political and social influence out of the Ivy Green tavern on Elm (now Lafayette) below Canal in lower Manhattan, were happy to pick up the slack.

The troubles this time stemmed from the draft for Civil War soldiers—a draft that had no effect on the rich who could simply buy their way out of service for $300. “Copperhead” Democrat politicians, who didn’t support the Republican war, turned to saloon allies, including the Black Joke, which rallied a crowd of 500 on July 13, marched to the draft office, and burnt it down.

The mob then headed to Bull’s Head Tavern on 44th Street and demanded free booze. When refused, it burnt down the tavern, then grew intensely violent. A black orphanage was attacked, as were the mayor’s office and those of newspaper publisher Horace Greeley.

All told, over 120 were killed and more than 2,000 injured. Many of the attacked and tortured victims were black, since rioters perceived them to be the root cause of the Civil War.

4. The Atlanta Race Riots, 1906
Estimated 25 to 40 dead, not including the saloon.

Black saloons, white Atlanta residents felt, were the root of an awful lot of evil—vagrancy, loitering, and attacks on the white population, particularly white women. Ironically, it was drunken white residents pouring out of white saloons who would cause the all the havoc in this case.

On Saturday, Sept. 22, Atlanta was getting its drunk on in saloons that were alive with talk of the forthcoming gubernatorial election, but also of a recent police raid on the black saloons on Decatur Street. Uncovered in this raid were ‘racy’ pictures of white women that black men were accused of gazing upon while consuming gin—gin that allegedly caused them to relapse into an animal state in which they could no longer control their urges. On top of this, for the preceding two months, local newspapers had been whipping up a yellow journalism scare about an “epidemic” of black assaults on whites.

That night, the mob spilled out of the saloons and made its way to Decatur. While many of the black saloons were demolished, the estimated death toll of 25 to 40 would surely have been higher if patrons had not caught wind of the rioters and abandoned shop. Georgia voted to go dry not long after, and riots like these helped boost the popularity of Prohibition in the South.

The Black Cat Tavern Riots, 1967
Three injured, many arrests, one cause advanced.

As most revellers were kissing at Los Angeles’ Black Cat Tavern to ring in the New Year of 1967, some patrons, apparently, pulled out their stop-watches.

These were the undercover cops—known in the gay community as “Betty Badge” or “Lily Law” —who were working another of their sting operations. When it was determined that the kissing had lasted longer than could be deemed suitable for the occasion and had strayed into lewd and disorderly behaviour, gay and lesbian couples were arrested on the spot.

It was not uncommon for police to resort to this tactic to bust gay bars. Life Magazine had reported that the LAPD sent out police “dressed to look like homosexuals—tight pants, sneakers, sweaters or jackets” to save the city from the “aggressive” homosexuality, which was only “getting worse” because of increased “homosexual activity.”

That night, the patrons protested the raid and a small riot spilled out onto the streets. Police responded by beating two bartenders unconscious. Another protest followed shortly thereafter and the small surge in awareness and political action is thought to have been responsible for Richard Mitch and Bill Rau’s decision to start their own gay publication—The Advocate. It also foreshadowed the far more dramatic Stonewall Riots two and a half years later.

Christine Sismondo is a writer and lecturer in Humanities at York University in Toronto. She has written numerous articles about film, literature, drinking, and vice, and is most recently the author of America Walks into a Bar: A Spirited History of Taverns and Saloons, Speakeasies and Grog Shops. Listen to an interview with Sismondo here.

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By F. Bailey Norwood and Jayson L. Lusk

 
After fighting each other for over a decade, the egg industry and the largest animal advocacy organization came to an agreement, one which will increase the welfare of egg-laying hens but also increase egg prices.  The United Egg Producers, under persistent pressure from the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), has agreed to transition hens out of battery cages and into enriched colony cages.  The HSUS certainly believes the higher welfare standards are worth the increase in egg prices, but do consumers agree?  My research says that when consumers are informed about the issue, yes, they applaud the move—even when they know higher egg prices will follow.

Most consumers do not wish to see farm animals crammed into small cages, but if they take the time to discover the source of their pork and eggs, these cramped animal cages are what they will see.  Chickens raised for egg production are placed in groups of 4-6 birds and raised their entire lives inside a cage so small that they cannot turn around without bumping into another chicken.  Spreading their wings is out of the question.  Sows (female hogs used for breeding) are confined even tighter, spending most of their lives in a stall so small the sow cannot even turn around.  There are more farm animal welfare issues than just space allotments.  Both layers and sows desire to forage for food, scratch or dig, socialize, and find comfortable places to rest.  All of these “behavioral” needs are neglected in the typical egg and pork production facility.  By transitioning from battery cages to enriched colony cages, the egg industry goes a long way towards meeting these space and behavioral needs.

Why are animal cages used in the first place, when the average person finds them disturbing?  In the competitive marketplace for food, farmers must employ confined production facilities to keep their costs low, because consumers generally emphasize low prices over animal welfare at the grocery store.  Yet, at the same time, consumers who purchase food from so-called “factory farms” donate money to the HSUS, who uses some of this money to ban the same animal cages used to produce most eggs and pork.  In surveys, referendums, and economic research, consumers consistently support the banning of the same cramped animal cages used to produce the food they purchase.

One reason the farm animal welfare debate cannot be quickly resolved is that consumers have difficulty resolving the issue for themselves.  They want livestock to be treated kindly, but they also want low food prices, and it is difficult to reconcile the tradeoff between animal well-being and food prices in the grocery store and/or in referendums.  For these reasons, the farm animal welfare debate is a messy, contradictory debate—the trademark of a democratic process.

Although consumer attitudes can be elusive to identify, research has revealed a few facts.  The most important fact to stem from consumer research is that, when consumers are informed about how layers and sows are raised, they consistently state they are willing to pay the higher food prices that would result from better animal care.  This does not imply that regular grocery store shoppers will reflect this level of concern in their willingness-to-pay for food, because the regular grocery store shopper is uninformed. 

However, the farm animal welfare debate is largely a policy debate.  Should we ban colony cages for layers?  Should we ban gestation stalls for sows?  It would seem prudent to base policy on the opinions of informed consumers, as opposed to uninformed consumers.  When employing this prudent procedure, there is little doubt that the ban on cramped animal cages occurring in the European Union and US states is justified, and should be stretched across the map of industrialized countries.  Although the United Egg Producers rarely hear from informed consumers, I can tell them from my research that these consumers offer them many adulations for adopting enriched colony cages.  For the producers sake, let’s hope uninformed consumers in the grocery store share some of this enthusiasm.

F. Bailey Norwood is Associate Professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics, Oklahoma State University, and Jayson L. Lusk is Professor and Willard Sparks Endowed Chair, Department of Agricultural Economics, Oklahoma State University. They are the authors of Compassion, by the Pound: The economics of farm animal welfare.

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Ever heard the phrase “as American as apple pie”? Chances are you have. But how “American” is apple pie, really? And furthermore, when did McDonald’s begin serving them? How could Ritz crackers be a substitute for the apples? Why would Ralph Waldo Emerson ask what pie was for? The answers to these questions and more lie in the pages of The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink, edited by renowned food historian Andrew F. Smith. In honor of Independence Day, I present the “Apple Pie” entry from that very volume. Have a safe and happy 4th, everyone.     -Lauren Appelwick, Blog Editor

Apple Pie
The typical American pie made from uncooked apples, fat, sugar, and sweet spices mixed together and baked inside a closed pie shell descends from fifteenth-century English apple pies, which, while not quite the same, are similar enough that the relationship is unmistakable. By the end of the sixteenth century in England, apple pies were being made that are virtually identical to those made in America in the early twenty-first century.

Apple pies came to America quite early. There are recipes for apple pie in both manuscript receipts and eighteenth-century English cookery books imported into the colonies. Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery (1796) contains two different recipes for apple pie, one flavored with rose water or wine. The anonymous New American Cookery, published in 1805, contains a recipe for dried-apple pie.

Apple pies can vary in many ways: the type of sweetener used, if any; the type of fat; the type of crust, whether solid or made of crumbs; the use of such extra ingredients as raisins, lemon juice, or almonds; and the choice of spices. While the most common apple pie in America is the two-crust pie, there are other versions as well, including one-crust pies and pies with bottom crusts and crumb toppings. One-crust pies have been found in the United States since at least 1820. Mary Randolph’s The Virginia House-Wife (1824) contains a recipe for Baked Apple Pudding, which is an apple pie variant that has already-baked apples, butter, sugar, eggs, and lemon rind baked further in a one-crust pie shell.

Apple pies rapidly became an iconic part of the American culture, witnessed by the cliché “as American as apple pie.” In Louisa May Alcott’s Little Men (1886), one of the first things Jo teaches her niece Daisy to cook is an apple pie. Even imitation ones were devised. In the 1930s, a mock apple pie recipe, which used Ritz crackers instead of apples, was printed on Ritz cracker boxes. In 1968, McDonald’s added an apple pie dessert to its menu.

Apple pies have been eaten not only as a dessert. In the nineteenth century, apple pie was also a common breakfast food among Yankees and people in rural communities, prompting Ralph Waldo Emerson’s alleged comment, “Well, what is pie for?” The use of pie as a breakfast food had declined by the end of the nineteenth century.

Although homemade apple pies were most common through the early twentieth century, bakeries and grocery stores in urban settings started offering apple pies for sale in the nineteenth century. In the early twentieth century, a woman by the name of Mrs. Smith, who baked pies which her son then marketed, turned her pie company, Mrs. Smith’s Pies, into a mass-market industry, still in existence in the early twenty-first century. By the mid-twentieth century, frozen apple pies became available.

Apple pies are often served with a topping. The two most common are vanilla ice cream, first served with the title “à la mode” in the 1890s, and cheese. The poet Eugene Field in the late nineteenth century praised the latter combination in a poem asking “the Lord to bless me with apple pie and cheese.”

By Purdy, Director of Publicity, OUP USA

As a proud potato-eater of Irish descent, I was often told by my grandmother Rafferty, “Eat all your potatoes if you want to grow tall and strong.”  It seems my grandmother was on to something. Between 1000 and 1900, world population grew from under 300 million to 1.6 billion, and the share of population living in urban areas more than quadrupled, increasing from two to over nine percent. The increase in population accelerated dramatically over time and occurred almost entirely towards the end of the period.  Many demographers, historians, and economists alike have speculated as to the reasons for such growth on a global scale.  The authors of an article published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian, argue that perhaps the potato holds the answer.

“Potatoes provide more calories, vitamins and nutrients per area of land sown than other staple crops.  Potatoes dramatically improved agricultural productivity, and provided more calories and nutrients relative to pre-existing Old World staples,” notes Nathan Nunn, Assistant Professor of Economics at Harvard University. “Old World regions that were suitable for potato cultivation experienced larger increases in population and urbanization after the introduction of potatoes.”

The estimates are robust to a number of sensitivity checks, which include controlling for a large number of alternative determinants of population and economic growth. These include legal origin, identity of the colonizer, the prevalence of disease (measured as distance from the equator and potential prevalence of malaria), distance from the coast, a history of Roman rule, the prevalence of Protestantism, being an Atlantic trader, and the historic volume of the slave exports.

“Baseline estimates suggest that the potato accounts for approximately 25-26% of the increase in total population and 27-34% of the increase in urbanization in the period studied,” said Nancy Qian, Assistant Professor of Economics at Yale University.  “Estimates suggest that for villages that were fully suitable for potato cultivation, the introduction of the potato increased average adult heights by approximately one-half inch.”

According to the article, findings contribute to the historical debate about the importance of nutritional improvements in explaining part of the rapid population increase over the past three centuries. Furthermore, since urbanization rates and adult heights provide reasonable proxies for economic development and overall standards of living, the results suggest that the availability of potatoes also played an important role in spurring economic growth in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The statistics and figures above have been provided courtesy of The Quarterly Journal of Economics. To read the full article for free online, click here.

See transcript below.

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Featured in this Episode:

Christine Sismondo, cocktail columnist and author of America Walks into a Bar: A Spirited History of Taverns and Saloons, Speakeasies and Grog Shops.

Transcript
Christine Sismondo: American bars are a lot more dynamic in general. As soon as we, we drove here, and we stopped in Scranton, Pennsylvania. We went to Ruby Tuesday.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Christine: And, I mean, it’s not exactly painkiller, right? You know, this is a chain bar. And I looked at the menu and they had pretty good cocktails, and everyone at the bar was talking to each other!

Michelle Rafferty: What did you get?

Christine: Oh, I think I just had a margarita.

(Soundbite of Ben Daniels Band’s “Drippin’ Indigo”)

Michelle: Hello and welcome to The Oxford Comment. I’m Michelle here with the lovely-

Justyna Zajac: Justyna.

Michelle: And you just heard us chatting at the local bar The Ginger Man with author Christine Sismondo who just wrote a book for us called America Walks into a Bar: A Spirited History of Taverns and Saloons, Speakeasies and Grog Shops.

Justyna: And Christine is Canadian. She is also a cocktail columnist and actually schooled Michelle and I on the fact that American bars are superior to Canadian bars and that even includes our lovable chain Ruby Tuesday.

Michelle: Justyna, I’m looking at their menu right now, their cocktail menu, and they have something called a “Ruby Relaxer” which has been around for 35 years. Ooo and they also have something called a “Lavender Pear Martini” which is new, a “Watermelon Martini” and, a “Pomegranate Margarita.” I think these all sound like very promising drinks for the holiday weekend.

Justyna: I agree. Like the “Lynchburg Lite Lemonade Jack Daniel’s Lemon Juice.”

Michelle: Mmm. Which brings us to the real reason we’re having the podcast today. What better way to celebrate America than with drinks?

Justyna: Happy Birthday America!

(Soundbite of glasses and Ben Daniels Band’s “Drippin’ Indigo”)

Michelle: That was the sound of two cocktail glasses toasting. And without further ado, we take you back to the bar for the rest of our conversation with cocktail expert Christine Sismondo. She’s Canadian and proud, but does admit America has way better bars.

Christine: American bars are much more interesting for the large part than Canadian bars and they have better selection of drinks because of where I live in Ontario. We are first of all, the equivalent of a control state, like Pennsylvania where it’s very hard to get interesting liquor in.

Michelle: What does that mean, a “control state”?

Christine: In the liquor legislation there are some control states in the United States, which are states where the sale and importing and distribution of alcohol is controlled by the actual state. New York State is not one of them. That’s one of the reasons why New York is relatively cheap, fairly vibrant, has a lot different selection. Pennsylvania on the other hand, it’s a much tighter control over the type of liquor. And Ontario, where I live, is absolutely atrocious, and it’s just starting to get a little bit better. For example, we didn’t have legal cocktails in bars until 1947. And I can remember when I was a kid you could never just walk through a store to buy your liquor or your beer. You had to go up to a counter, just like you were getting a prescription at a drug store, and put in your order, and then somebody would go to the back and get you your little mickey of gin and sell it to you. And you had to have ID, and some places they even had a passport kind of thing so they could look at how much you bought over the year.

Michelle: Really?

Christine: Yeah.

Michelle: So if someone was buying a lot what would happen?

Christine: Well, in Ontario until sometime in the 1980s they had, and this is terrible, what they called the “Indian List.” And the “Indian List” applied to all First Nations people and also to anybody who was known for drinking too much. And they would actually be barred from buying at our controlled liquor stores in Ontario. So obviously the most scandalous part of that is the fact that Native North Americans were automatically on the list.

Justyna: Right.

Christine: Right. But you know, it’s just really, there’s a big difference. And it’s because of the laws.

Justyna: Christine, do you think that since it was so restrictive, did it actually cause more bad behavior?

Christine: I think that’s really hard to say. Not to get too academic about it, we’re so invested in this idea that prohibitions create bad behavior that sometimes we make more of it than we should. For example, prohibition in America, everyone says this: “Oh they drank more during prohibition than they did before.” And that’s not true. People actually drank much less during prohibition than they did before, because it was really expensive and it was really hard to get. So the type of drinking that happened may have been more dangerous because people have a tendency in a control state, they still drink less because it’s hard to get it. But they tend to drink maybe more dangerously because they’ll buy a larger quantity, maybe from a smuggler, and it might not be safe. And you don’t have a nice atmosphere where you can order just a beer and food. You have to drink it in the back ally. It leads to a different type of drinking. Yeah. An uglier type of drinking I think most people would say.

Justyna: Because actually my initial thought was increase drinking, it’s actually less drinking, just-

Michelle: in shady places.

Christine: Yeah, yeah!

Michelle: So you were saying Ontario is a control stay. What’s your favorite drink that you can’t have at home that you can have here?

Christine: Framboise beer. This one’s really good. I love Framboise beer. It’s one of my favorite things.

Michelle: What is it, Framboise?

Christine: It’s a dark raspberry beer. Go ahead and try some.

Justyna: Mmmm. It’s like jam!

Christine: Isn’t that great?

Michelle: It tastes like raspberry!

Christine: I know it really does, doesn’t it? Not like bullsh*t raspberry flavor. Right? It tastes like actual raspberries.

Justyna: That is so lovely.

Everyone: Cheers!

Michelle: To Christine and her new book!

Justyna: Yes!

Christine: Thank you.

(Soundbite of Ben Daniels Band’s “Drippin’ Indigo”)

THE HAPPY END: FROM BOOZE TO MILK

(THE WORD BEESTINGS)

By Anatoly Liberman

The word beestings once had its day in court.  About half a century ago, American linguists were busy discussing whether there is something they called juncture, a boundary signal that supposedly helps people to distinguish ice cream from I scream when they hear such combinations.  A special sign (#) was introduced in transcription: /ais#krim/ as opposed to /ai#skrim/.  The two crown examples for the existence of juncture in Modern English were nitrate versus night rate and beestings versus bee stings.  I remember asking myself: “What exactly is beestings?”  Well, it is “first milk from a cow after calving,” considered a delicacy in some quarters, for example, in Iceland, as an old dictionary informs us, and perhaps elsewhere; colostrum is its Latin synonym and gloss.  More or less along the same lines the nonexistent difference between wholly and holy in oral speech bothered phoneticians.  If I am not mistaken, unprejudiced informants treated the members of such pairs as homophones, and the term juncture disappeared from linguistic articles and books, the more so as around that time about everybody agreed that most of pre-Chomskyan linguistics had been a sad aberration, and the terminology that dominated the previous period lost its relevance.  In this drinking bout, bee stings and beestings are connected in a rather unpredictable way: mead played an important role in my discussion (and mead is inseparable from honey and, consequently, from stinging bees), while beestings may share the root with booze and, according to a bold hypothesis, also with beer.

Obviously, -ings is a suffix in beestings, a word that has been attested in numerous similar-looking shapes.  Old English already had the forms with the suffix (bysting) and without it (beost), and beest has wide currency in modern British dialects.  The German, Frisian, and Dutch cognates of beest are unmistakable: they sound alike and mean the same.  A probable Norwegian (dialectal) cognate has also been discovered.  The most authoritative dictionaries call beestings and the related forms words of unknown origin, but, as always, everything depends on how we define “unknown.”  Some words are so impenetrable that nothing at all can be said about their past, while others are obscure to varying degrees.  As a rule, numerous conjectures have been put forward about the derivation of hard words, and, even if the problem remains unsolved (the most common case), some contain the proverbial grain of truth.  “Origin unknown” is a loose concept.  This also holds for beestings.

Early attempts to connect beest with an Old Romance word for “curdled” (such as Provençal betada “clotted” and 17^th-century French caillebotes “curds”) have been abandoned, and indeed, Old Engl. beost and betada resemble each other by chance; nor is the resemblance impressive.  A more serious riddle is whether Old Engl. beost has anything to do with Gothic beist “leaven, yeast” (Gothic is a dead Germanic language, recorded in the 4^th century).  Many lexicographers combined them (some even used the treacherous adverb certainly in their entries, a sure sign of insecurity), but ei and eo are not allowed to alternate in the same old root (explaining why there is a prohibition of this type would take me too far afield; suffice it to say that vowel rows are like parallel railway tracks, with ei and eo belonging to different ones).  Beist is believed to be akin to bite and therefore to bitter.  The name given to yeast depends on whether beer yeast or baking yeast is meant, but the emerging picture is remarkably uniform: yeast is called this because it either forms the “dregs” or produces froth (this is where verbs for foaming come in); its taste does not seem to play any role in designating the product.  If people associated beestings with froth or if its laxative effect was noticed, Gothic beist may still belong with beost, though the incompatible vowels remain a formidable barrier. Irregular alternations are hard to explain (otherwise they would have been called regular!).  Regardless of Gothic beist, beest seems to have acquired its name because of its foaming, frothy character.

Words for bread and milk tend to wander from language to language.  The Greek for “beestings” is pyos.  Once again we note that the two nouns are remarkably similar, but Greek p does not correspond to Germanic b!  Was there a migratory word for “beestings” that formed late, spurious unions with native nouns, so that in trying to connect them, we fall victim to folk etymology?  Greek pyos has a seemingly safe Sanskrit cognate, but it may be another look-alike.  One more example will show how gingerly historical linguists should tread in dealing with milk.  The Russian for milk and beestings are moloko and molozivo respectively (the vowels given in bold are stressed).  Their affinity seems to be beyond any doubt, and yet they are probably not related, at least not in a direct way.

To make the confusion even more confounded, beestings is/are called briester in Early Modern German and ábrystyr in Old Icelandic.  Br- forms are ubiquitous in the German speaking dialectal area (but the Standard German form is Biestmilch).  We have already dealt with them in looking at the attempt to connect beer with brew.  How are Biest- and briest- related, if at all?  A chance tantalizing coincidence?  Or does briest- stand at the beginning of the story, a word presumably related to breast (German Brust), so that beost and its kin lost their second consonant?  Or did beost add r because lactation and breast feeding are inseparable (another exercise in folk etymology)?  Both hypotheses have been tried.  I once devoted a post to the origin of breast.  Its root refers to swelling, but so does the root of beost (foaming, producing froth).  Language is so accommodating.  In any case, beest(ings) seems to go back to the notion of foaming and swelling, and this is where booze and beer come in.

Last week we saw that booze looks like belonging with many words for becoming big, swelling, and growing.  It is gratifying to realize that milk and booze are kindred notions.  Now here is the time to add a short supplement to the story of beer (Old Engl. beor).  In the Germanic languages, r can be traced to either old r or old z.  That is why was and were, raise and rear are related pairwise.  If r in beer goes back to z, rather than r, then beer will emerge as a cognate of booze.  Etymologists try persistently to show that alcoholic beverages got their names from the process of fermentation and “growing” (see the post on ale).  Let us leave beer in limbo for the time being and see where we are with beest.  If it is a migratory word that originated millennia ago somewhere in the east, we know nothing about it.  But if its home is Germanic, it probably meant “a frothy liquid” or “laxative,” or something along such lines.  Then booze is its likely linguistic relative.  Does someone still remember what I said about milk and honey in my post on mead?  If mi- or me- is their common root, then at one time both meant “a flowing substance; liquid.”  Do I believe in this etymology?  No, I don’t.  Nor do I think that beer is related to booze.  But opinions do not matter in scholarship, even in such an approximate branch of scholarship as etymology.  Yet, though not without regret, I can offer no arguments against booze and beest being cognates, which shows that in everyday life we should be guided by the advice of nutritionists, not etymologists.  And this brings me to the end of this series, which has almost deteriorated into a serial.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

View more about this book on the

If you’re anything like me, then when a friend asks, “Hey, do you wanna go to Taco Tuesday at that new place over by–” you interrupt with, “Whoa whoa whoa. You had me at taco.” I was flipping through one of my favorite Oxford volumes, The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink edited by renowned food historian Andrew F. Smith, and came across the entries for both Taco and Taco Bell. After reading some surprising sections aloud to fascinated colleagues, I decided I couldn’t keep these morsels to myself. “Oh please,” you might say, “I already know all there is to know about tacos!” No, my good sir/lady, I don’t think you do. So in advance, you’re welcome.     –Lauren Appelwick, Blog Editor

Tacos

In Mexico the word “taco,” which means a bite or snack, came to refer to a particular genre of edibles – a tortilla wrapped or folded around a filling [...] (The traditional Mexican taco is made with a soft, fresh corn tortilla; “hard shell” tacos, made with tortillas fried in a basket to give them a sturdy “U” shape, are a creation of Mexican restaurants in the United States.) The first known English-language taco recipes appeared in California cookbooks beginning in 1914.

[...] Until the 1960s tacos were mainly served in California and the Southwest at small roadside taco stands run by Mexican Americans. This changed when Glen Bell launched the first Mexican American fast food franchise in 1962 in Downey, California. Taco Bell had to overcome vast distrust and prejudice among many American consumers against Mexican restaurants. The new chain’s advertising emphasized that these were American restaurants that just happened to server Mexican-style food. Taco Bell assured the public that it’s tacos and other offerings were no more spicy or “foreign” than hamburgers. [...]

Taco Bell

During the early 1950s, few Americans outside California and the Southwest knew what a taco was. In the early twenty-first century Mexican American food is one of America’s fastest-growing cuisines. Although there are many reasons for this change, one was the Taco Bell fast food chain launched by Glenn Bell.

Bell operated a one-man hamburger and hot dog stand in San Bernardino, California, but he liked eating Mexican take-out food. Taco stands dotted the southern California landscape, but none offered fast food. Bell developed ways to improve the efficiency of preparing Mexican food. At the time, taco shells were made by frying soft tortillas for a few minutes. Bell invented a prefabricated hard taco shell, which did not have to be fried, thus saving time on each order. Bell also developed procedures for accelerating service.

Bell decided to test his new ideas. Bell opened a Taco Tia restaurant in 1954 in San Bernardino, California, the same year and the same city in which Richard and Maurice McDonald opened their revolutionary fast food establishment. Like the McDonald brothers, Bell quickly opened more restaurants in the surrounding area. Bell sold his interest in Taco Tia, and with new partners launched another chain, El Taco. The first outlet was opened in 1958 in Long Beach, California.

In 1962 Bell sold his share in El Taco to his partners and opened the first Taco Bell, in Downey, California. The menu consisted mainly of tacos and burritos plus beverages. This small outlet was quickly followed by eight stores in the Long Beach, Paramount, and Los Angeles areas. These establishments generated fifty thousand dollars per year, and Bell decided to franchise the operation. The resulting Taco Bell chain used the symbol of a sleeping Mexican sitting under a sombrero, and the buildings had a California mission style.

By 1978 Taco Bell had 868 restaurants, which specialized in selling tacos, burritos, and a few other food items. Glen Bell sold the company to PepsiCo, and management was placed in the hands of John Martin, who had worked for several fast food companies. Martin made Taco Bell’s Mexican-style dishes popular throughout the United States by means of heavy discounting and value meals, which combined foods and drinks for cost savings. By 1980, Taco Bell had 1,333 outlets and was rapidly expanding. One reason for the expansion was the continuing introduction of new products, such as fajitas, wraps, gorditas, and chalupas.

Taco Bell has had both success and failure in its promotional efforts. The original symbol was a sleepy Mexican. This symbol was thought to be a negative stereotype, and it was immediately replaced by a mission bell when PepsiCo took over. On the success side were commercials that starred a talking Chihuahua, who squealed “Yo quiero Taco Bell!”

Taco Bell is the leading Mexican-style quick-service restaurant chain in the United States, with more than $4.9 billion in system-wide sales. Taco Bell serves more than 55 million consumers each week in 6,400 restaurants in the United States. In 1997, Taco Bell was spun off from PepsiCo and became a division of Yum! Brands Inc., which also owns KFC, Pizza Hut, Long John Silver’s, and A&W restaurants.

(GRAND FINALE BEFORE THE NEXT LIBATION)

By Anatoly Liberman

Toasting, a noble art, deserves the attention of all those (etymologists included) who drink for joy, rather than for getting drunk.  The origin of the verb to toast “parch,” which has been with us since the end of the 14^th century, poses no problems.  Old French had toster “roast, grill,” and Italian tostare seems to be an unaltered continuation of the Romance protoform.  Tost- is the root of the past participle of Latin torrere (the second conjugation) “parch.”  English has the same root in torrid and less obviously in torrent, from torrens “scorching, said of streams; roaring, rushing”).  A cognate of the root tor- can be seen in Engl. thirst, a most appropriate word in the present context.   Kemp Malone (1889-1971), an eminent American scholar, equally proficient in modern linguistics and medieval literature, once reclassified the senses of the verb toast “parch,” as given in the Oxford English Dictionary, and came to the following conclusion:

“…throughout, the verb means the same thing: ‘to heat thoroughly’.  This has always been the basic meaning of the word, but in modern times the process of toasting has come to be restricted to a beneficial application of heat.  The source of this heat in early times was either the sun or an open fire, but later uses of the word indicate that toasting may be effected by any source of heat found suitable for the purpose, as an electric current or blasts of hot air.”

This is probably true, but it tells us nothing about toasting occurring at banquets, and yet, from an etymological point of view, it must be the same word.

As usual, popular books and the Internet give lots of anecdotal information about the origin of toast “drinking a guest’s health,” without disclosing their sources, but etymologies unsupported by exact references should never be trusted, for authors tend to copy from one another and thus produce an illusion of consensus and solid knowledge, where a critic easily discerns a Ponzi scheme in historical linguistics.  One thing seems to be certain, however: from early on, people put a piece of charred bread at the bottom of a wine glass. Whether this ingredient added flavor, removed flavor, or disguised the presence of poison in the container is less clear.  I will quote part of a statement by a professor of chemistry, as given in the periodical Comments on Etymology (January 19, 1990):

“My understanding of the origin of toast is that the French had a custom of floating spiced bits of toast on various drinks (including coffee and tea) on festive occasions.  It is certainly possible that some spoiled wines were served this way, so that the spoilage could be hidden by the spices, and also so that the toast could absorb some of the odors….  While charcoal and probably toast can remove ethyl acetate, this is a short-term solution because they are not very effective at removing acetic acid.  The primary use of charcoal in the wine industry is the removal of unwanted color and some off-odors.”

It is thus safer to forget for the time being the antiquity and the Middle Ages and start with the 18^th century.  The main revision of Samuel Johnson’s famous 1755 dictionary was made by H. J. Todd, who expanded Johnson’s etymologies and added a good deal of new material to the great work.  He pointed to the now well-known passage from Tatler (June 4, 1709).  It has been reproduced many times, also in The Century Dictionary.  The OED, naturally, did not pass it by either.  There will be no harm if it appears here too in its original orthography:

“It happen’d that on a publick day a celebrated beauty of those times [of Charles II] was in the Cross-Bath [at Bath] and one of the crowd of her admirers took a glass of water in which the fair one stood, and drank her health to the company.  There was in the place a gay fellow, half fuddled, who offered to jump in, and swore, tho’ he liked not the liquor, he would have the toast (making an allusion to the usage of the times of drinking with a toast at the bottom of the glass).  Tho’ he was opposed in his resolution, this whim gave foundation to the present honour which is done to the lady we mention in our liquors, who has ever since been called a toast.”

Walter W. Skeat always warned people to stay away from pretty tales about the origin of words, for those are almost always invented in retrospect.  The story told in Tatler gives no date.  In the OED, the earliest citation of a woman being called “a toast” goes back to 1700.  There is no doubt that a piece of toast was put into wine glasses at that time and earlier, but why a woman, even a beautiful one, should have been compared to toast rather than a summer’s day or something else equally evocative, remains unclear.  Many unverifiable ideas come to mind.  For example, “a gay fellow” takes the lady out, drinks to her health, and eats up the toast, intimating that after the rendezvous an even more pleasant encounter may follow by way of dessert, or that the ravishing beauty is so desirable that he would gladly “eat” her, as he is eating the toast—prosaic and vulgar.  The event on that “publick day” only tells us that some witty man made a connection between a lady in the bath and a piece of toast in a wine glass (because she, by her very presence, turned water into wine).  It is even possible that the event became widely known, but it, most certainly, did not inaugurate the use of toast with the sense “charming woman.”  The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology summarizes the situation so: “…orig[inally] favourite lady whose health is drunk.  Said to have been so named as being supposed to flavour the bumper like a spiced toast in drink.”   I am afraid that even this cautious hypothesis may be too bold.  In any case, the English word acquired notoriety, became popular in the English speaking world, and made its way into several other languages, including German and Russian.

Finally, I would like to mention that there is a type of Afro-American narrative poetry called toast.  The origin of this name is debatable, but some connection with Engl. toast can be taken for granted.  Definitive etymologies are hard to come by.  So how do you discover or fail to discover them?  Here’s how…. Read this blog.

P.S.  I cannot finish my bout without reproducing the kind offer of Mr. Russell Cross:

“When you embark on your next book An Etymologist’s Guide to Drinking, let me offer to be a field agent.  I’m pretty sure I can help in the collection of words and I’m willing to visit as many bars as it takes to ensure you have an adequate corpus.  I ask nothing more than a mention in the Acknowledgments and a contribution to my extended sojourn at the ‘Charlie Memorial Rehab Clinic’.”

Thank you very much indeed.  This offer is especially useful because I can no longer consume alcohol with the ease that at one time was my hallmark.  After I got my BA, I taught English at a rural school for three years.  At the end of every day, we met in the teachers’ room for an hour or two of drinking homebrew (not participating would have looked like a terrible affront).  Its production was prohibited, but the police also enjoyed the swill, so that there was no danger.  The assistant principal, who presided at our feasts (a lot to drink on an empty stomach and very little, if anything, to eat), was an alcoholic.  Fortunately, I did not become one, and I never again in my life drank so much.  But during those “after hours,” I discovered the law, here being published for the first time.  Some people get drunk from the waist down, whereas others do so from their feet up.  The members of the first group do not realize they are drunk and cause a lot of mischief.  It was my good luck to belong to the second group, which means that I could no longer dance, while my head remained clear and I knew when to stop.  Also, I had a high threshold for alcohol and easily drank my colleagues under the table (a great advantage, but a poor spectacle).  The problem was returning home in the dark.  Of course, now I walk around cocktail parties with a glass of orange juice (which I detest), listen to banalities of the people I’ll never meet again, and spew memorable platitudes of my own.  So I do need a field agent.  Thank you again!  (Sorry for this digression, but those who have followed “The Oxford Etymologist” during the five years of its existence know that I have not lavished them with episodes from my autobiography.  Nor am I going to do it in the future.)

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

View more about this book on the

By Anatoly Liberman

Booze is an enigmatic word, but not the way ale, beer and mead are.  Those emerged centuries ago, and it does not come as a surprise that we have doubts about their ultimate origin.  The noun booze is different: it does not seem to predate the beginning or the 18^th century, with the verb booze “to tipple, guzzle” making its way into a written text as early as 1300 (which means that it turned up in everyday speech some time earlier).  The riddles connected with booze are two.

First, why did the noun appear so much later than the verb?  A parallel case will elucidate the problem. The verb meet is ancient, while the noun meet is recent, and we can immediately see the reason for the delay: sports journalists needed a word for a “meeting” of athletes and teams and coined a meet, whose popularity infuriated some lovers of English, but, once the purists died out, the word became commonplace (this is how language changes: if a novelty succeeds in surviving its critics, it stays and makes the impression of having been around forever).  But the noun booze is not a technical term and should not have waited four hundred years before it joined the vocabulary.  Second, the verb booze is a doublet of bouse (it rhymes with carouse, which is fair).  Strangely, bouse has all but disappeared, and booze (sorry for a miserable pun) is on everybody’s lips.  However, it is not so much the death of bouse that should bother us as the difference in vowels.   The vowel we have in cow or round was once “long u” (as in today’s coo).  Therefore, bouse has the pronunciation one expects, whereas booze looks Middle English.  In the northern dialects of English “long u” did not become a diphthong, and this is probably why uncouth still rhymes with youth instead of south.  Is booze a northern doublet of bouse?  One can sense Murray’s frustration with this hypothesis.  He wrote: “Perhaps really a dialectal form” (and cited a similar Scots word).  It is the most uncharacteristic insertion of really that gives away Murray’s dismay.  His style, while composing entries, was business-like and crisp; contrary to most people around us, he preferred not to strew his explanations with really, actually, definitely, certainly, and other fluffy adverbs: he was a scholar, not a preacher.

Whatever the causes of the modern pronunciation of booze, one etymology will cover both it and bouse.  So what is the origin of bouse?  This word is surrounded by numerous nouns and verbs, some of which must be and others may be related to it.  First of all, its Dutch and German synonyms buizen and bausen spring to mind.  Both are rare to the extent of not being known to most native speakers, but their use in the past has been recorded beyond any doubt.  Most other words refer to swelling, violent or erratic movement, and noise: for instance, Dutch buisen “strike, knock” and, on the other hand, beuzelen “dawdle, trifle,” Norwegian baus “arrogant; irascible” and bause “put on airs” (which partly explains the sense of Dutch boos and German böse “bad, wicked; angry”), and Engl. busy (Dutch bezig).  Busybody shows that busy did not always mean “occupied”: it rather referred to meddling and doing things in an irritating way.  We can see the pure root of such b-words in Engl. boo (compare it with bo- in Bo-peep ~ peek-a-boo), Dutch bui “gust, squall,” as well as Russian bystryi “quick” and boi-us’ “I am afraid.  When it comes to swelling and puffing up, German words ending in sch (from s) present themselves, such as bauschen “swell.”  I hope it will one day be possible to show that French bizarre (which has cognates elsewhere in the Romance languages), the etymon of Engl. bizarre, is of Germanic origin.  Italian bizarre means “angry” (thus, a rather close synonym of German böse), while Spanish and Portuguese bizarro means “handsome” and “brave” (what is repellent arrogance to one is admirable courage to another: compare Norwegian baus “arrogant; irascible,” mentioned above).  I also think that Engl. bustle “a frame or pad thrusting out a woman’s skirt,” an obscure 18^th-century word, must be related to German Bausch, which formerly meant “handful; armful” and now means only “ball” (of paper or wool),” puff” (on a sleeve), “pleat,” and so forth.

Curiously, scholars dealing with the oldest stages of language boldly reconstruct Indo-European roots to which they add numerous “extensions” (also called enlargements and determinatives) and obtain nests of seemingly related words.  But when it comes to later periods, which, one would think, pose fewer problems, they become much more cautious, even timid.  One can read in our best etymological dictionaries that German böse, Engl. busy (along with its Dutch cognate bezig), and English bustle (the noun, as above) are words of unknown origin.  The same holds for Engl. boast, which rather obviously belongs with swelling and puffing up (the Old English for “boast” was boi-an, a word like Dutch bui and Russian boi-us’, a mere root, as it were) and boost (a 19^th-century “Americanism,” that is, most likely, a word brought to the New World from some northern British dialect).  Old dictionaries were full of fanciful derivations.  The discovery of sound correspondences turned etymology into a semblance of an exact science, a praiseworthy development to be sure, but words tend to grow like mushrooms on stumps (huge rootless clusters) and do not always march like soldiers on parade.  German linguists coined the term sound gesture (Lautgebärde) for such vaguely symbolic groups as the one being discussed here.  In our case, the “gesture” is bo- ~ bu- for naming things and actions that refer to swelling and noise.  The consonant s appended itself to bo- ~ bu-, and as a result we have all the words mentioned above.  There is a temptation to co-opt more and more look-alikes into this group.  One wonders where to stop, but this is a perennial problem in the study of related words.  I don’t think that the “gesture” stops at bouse.

If this conclusion is right, bouse meant approximately “to revel noisily.”  What begins as a show of conviviality often ends in a brawl.  Judging by the way the verb was used by Browning and other poets, it meant “feast, carouse” and had no vulgar connotations.  The Century Dictionary quotes Keats: “As though bold Robin Hood / Would, with his Maid Marian, / sup and bowse [sic] from horn and can” (Lines on the Mermaid Tavern).  Later the noun was formed to match the verb.  One has to agree with Murray: booze probably reached the Standard (in his days the phrase was the literary language) from the North, retained its dialectal pronunciation, and stayed as “a low word” (perhaps also thanks to its pronunciation!) for liquor and all kinds of cheap swill.

A short postscript is due here.  Russian has the noun buza “an alcoholic drink” and the verb buzit’ “to brawl” (both stressed on the second syllable). Their origin need not delay us here, but the connection is instructive: from “liquor” to “brawl.”

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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By Anatoly Liberman

We may assume that people, wherever they lived, learned to use honey and even practiced apiculture before dairy products became part of their diet, for honey can be found and consumed in its natural state, while milk, cheese, butter, and the rest presuppose the existence of domesticated animals, be it horses, cows, sheep, or goats, and of a developed industry.  However, humans are mammals, so that the word for “milk” is probably contemporaneous with language, even though no Common Indo-European term for it existed (for example, the word lactation reminds us of Latin lac, and it is quite different from milk).  With time, “milk and honey” turned into a symbol of abundance.  While the god Othinn (see the previous post) was busy stealing the mead of poetry, mortals dreamed of catching a bee swarm.  From 10^th-century Christian Germany we have a rhyming charm, a pagan “genre” to be sure, but with Jesus Christ and Mary invoked, for it was the result that counted rather than the affiliation of the benefactors.  Its purpose was to let the flying bees stop at the speaker’s farm: “Christ, a swarm is here! / Now fly here, my ‘throng’, / to God’s protection, alight safe and sound. / Come, come down, bees;/ Command them to do so, Saint Mary. / Swarm, you may not fly to the woods, / To escape from me/ Or to get the better of me.”

Thousands of years before the recording of this incantation, the bee was glorified in the myths of the ancient Indo-Europeans.  Readers of old tales will remember that the bee was the sacred insect of the Greek goddess Artemis.  A cave painting of a human surrounded by bees while removing honeycombs and an old depiction of honeycombs have also come down to us. Whatever effect charms may once have had on German bees, honey was certainly in wide use.  In the phrase milk and honey, milk stands first, but in its Russian analog med-pivo (literally, “mead-beer”) and in its Baltic (Lithuanian and Latvian) equivalent medu-alus (note alus, a cognate of Engl. ale!) “mead” precedes “beer.”  The story teller of Russian folklore tends to finish his tale with the begging formula to the effect that he drank med-pivo at the wedding feast and that it flowed over his moustache, but not a drop got into his mouth (so this is the time to quench his thirst and reward his labors).

Naturally, med in the compound med-pivo referred to an intoxicating drink, but in Modern Russian the word med means “honey.”  Although in recorded texts mead “beverage” occurs earlier than mead “honey,” common sense tells us that before people began to drink “mead” after they got acquainted with honey.   The fermentation of wild honey did not remain a secret either, and this is a likely reason the two senses of mead merged.  The word wine came to the European languages from Latin, and the Romans seem to have borrowed it from their neighbors.  Perhaps in the lending language it also meant “mead,” for Persian may (a form derived from Indo-European medu- or medhu-) means “wine.”

As noted in the previous post, the Indo-Europeans used two words for “honey”: one was the ancestor of Engl. mead, the other the ancestor of Greek méli (genitive mélitos, so that the stem was mélit-).  Every time we confront a pair of such synonyms the question arises what distinguished the objects they designated.  For instance, loaf is a descendant of a word that meant “bread.”  What then was the difference between hlaifs- (the ancient form of loaf) and bread?  Presumably bread was the product’s generic name, while hlaifs- referred to the shape of bread baked in one piece.  An additional trouble with mélit-, as opposed to medhu- (or perhaps medu-), is that they resemble each other phonetically, as though the real carrier of meaning was me-, with the rest functioning as a kind of “extension.”  Or could mélit- be an alteration of med(h)u-?  In all early cultures, words for religious concepts were liable to be replaced or altered out of fear or because a sacral name did not have to be pronounced “in vain” (this is what is called taboo; it is responsible for the fact that Engl. bear and its Germanic cognates substituted for the ancient animal name: bear means “brown”; the same happened in Slavic: Russian medved’, that is, medv-ed’ “bear” means “honey eater,” literally, “mead-eater”).  Except for Greek, the two names for “honey” do not occur in the same language (Classical Greek had both).  Yet it is not inconceivable that the story of mead / honey resembled that of loaf / bread.  One form could designate honey obtained directly from bees, whereas the other, a slightly altered variant of the first, referred to the drink made from honey.

The origin of mélit is unknown, and more or less the same can be said about mead. Attempts to explain medu- or medhu- as a native Indo-European word (rather than a borrowing from Semitic) do not go beyond vague conjectures.  One of them connects mead with Latin madeo “to drip,” with reference to the bubbling of fermented honey.  It will be remembered that a plausible etymology of ale also refers to “growing,” though in the process of brewing (so not for natural causes).  It is anybody’s guess whether the syllable me- awoke in the earliest speakers the idea of flowing or sweetness.  Tracing words outside the creak-crack-croak series to sound imitating or sound symbolic complexes is always risky business.

Someone may wonder where the word honey came from.  Most probably, it means “golden colored.”  Honey has cognates everywhere in Germanic.  Its existence shows how an old Indo-European word can be ousted by a local upstart.  Engl. mead hangs on, but its sphere of application is restricted, and its connection with honey is forgotten.  The same, to an even greater extent, holds for German Honig and Met.  Lovers of old poetry may have seen the archaic noun meed “reward.”  Rewards are sweet, but meed and mead are unrelated words.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

By Anatoly Liberman

Tales that explain the origin of things are called etiological.  All etymologies are etiological tales by definition.  It seems that one of the main features of Homo sapiens has always been his unquenchable desire to get drunk.  Sapiens indeed!  The most ancient intoxicating drink of the Indo-Europeans was mead.  Moreover, it seems that several neighboring tribes borrowed the name of this drink from them (and undoubtedly the drink itself:  otherwise, what would have been the point of taking over the word?), for we have Finnish mesi, Proto-Chinese mit, and Japanese mitsu, allegedly modifications of Indo-European medu- or medhu-.  Being inebriated allowed one to converse with the gods; intoxication and inspiration were synonyms from early on.  We now have a different view of alcoholism and have reduced the sublime state to the dull legal formula “under the influence.”  But things were different in the spring of civilization.  One of the most memorable myths of the medieval Scandinavians is about a deadly fight for the mead of wisdom and poetry.

After a truce was made between two warring clans of gods (the cause of the war has not been discovered), they met to make peace, took a crock, and spat into it.  Saliva causes fermentation and has been used widely in old days for processes like the one being described here.  From the contents of the crock the gods created a homunculus called Kvasir, who turned out to be sober (!) and extremely wise: there was no question he could not answer.  He traveled far and wide and taught men wisdom.  The name Kvasir happens to be an almost full homonym of Slavic kvas (usually spelled, for no legitimate reason, kvass in English), a malt-based drink, one of whose indispensable ingredients is bread.  However, despite what some books state in a rather dogmatic way, the coincidence between Kvasir and kvas may be fortuitous.  Although not directly, kvas is related to Slavic words for “sour.”  Closer cognates mean “froth” and “cook; boil”; one of them is Latin caseus, the etymon of Engl. cheese.  In Germanic, Kvasir resembles verbs like Engl. quash and squash.  Both are usually traced to Old French, but similar-sounding and partly synonymous verbs, for instance, English squeeze and quench, are native, while Modern German quetschen, corresponding to Engl. quash, is a word of disputable etymology (perhaps native, perhaps from French).  Whatever product the gods obtained through fermentation, its base was first “crushed” or “squashed.”  Kvasir appears unexpectedly in a later myth connected with the capture of Loki; however, his life must have been short, because two dwarfs killed him.

In the world of Scandinavian myths we encounter gods, dwarfs, and giants.  Despite the associations these words carry to us, “an average giant” did not tower over “an average god,” whereas the dwarfs were not tiny.  Giants and dwarfs became huge and small in later folklore.  In Scandinavian myths, they were distinguished by their functions: the gods maintained order in the universe, the giants tried to disrupt it, and the dwarfs were artisans and produced all the valuable objects that allowed the gods to stay in power.  Most unfortunately, the myths of the Germans and the Anglo-Saxons have not come down to us, and only some traces of them can be reconstructed from popular beliefs, the evidence of place names, and the like.  But to continue with Kvasir.  Two malicious dwarfs called him aside for a word in private and killed him, after which they let his blood run into two vats and a kettle.  They mixed the blood with honey, the main sweetener then known, and it became the mead that turns anyone who partakes of it into a poet or a scholar.  The same two dwarfs, who were rather uncharacteristically evil, killed a giant and his wife and incurred the wrath of the couple’s son Suttung.  To save their lives, they forfeited the mead, and it became Suttung’s property.  Still later, Othinn, the greatest god of the Scandinavian pantheon (we can see part of his name in Wednesday, literally “Wodan’s day”) stole it from Suttung with the help of Suttung’s daughter and almost perished while carrying it home in eagle form.  The mead is now in the possession of the gods, but with their permission mortals can occasionally get the taste of it.

Several things stand out in this myth.  Since the drink was the result of fermentation, it must have been alcoholic.  Its base is not mentioned, but we are told that honey was added to it.  Everybody wanted to possess it: the dwarfs did not stop at murdering Kvasir to get  the treasure, a giant considered it to be sufficient compensation for the death of his parents, and Othinn went great lengths to obtain it, though the feat might have cost him his life.  Drinking the mead resulted in inspiration and wisdom.  In the story, the drink is called mead, but the only etymological link to it comes from Kvasir’s name.  If the name is Slavic, it was the inhabitants of the lands to the east who taught the medieval Scandinavians to make kvas.  If, however, the name has a Germanic root, it carries the connotations of squeezing or perhaps crushing to a pulp.  Regardless of the technology and the origin of Kvasir, the myth tells us that everybody valued the beverage but sheds no light on the origin of the word mead.

Here are some of the cognates of mead in the languages of the world, all of which mean “honey”: German Met, Old Icelandic mjöðr (ð has the value of th in Engl. this), Old Irish mid, Russian med (pronounce it approximately, as though it were written myod), Latvian medu, Classical Greek méthu, Sanskrit mádhu, and Tocharian B mit (Tocharian is an ancient Indo-European language of Central Asia; the letter B refers to its Western variety).  The word’s spread is truly impressive, and there are two theories of its origin.  Most researchers believe that it is genuinely Indo-European, while others derive it from a similar-sounding Semitic root meaning “sweet.”  Several parts of this story are particularly intriguing.  First, medu-~medhu- bears some resemblance to mel (Latin mel means “honey,” with the Greek and Gothic words being close cognates; to remember mel better, think of mellifluous “flowing with honey”).  Second, mel- resembles the root of milk.  Our story begins to flow not only with honey but also with milk.  Engl. honey, along with Dutch honig and German Honig, stand apart from the med- ~ mel- words.  Obviously, the etymology of mead resolves itself into a search for the origin of an ancient Indo-European word for “honey.”  We have to concern ourselves not with the drink but with the produce of bees and its application to human life.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”