De Factoid the Twelfth: Ginspiration

This De Factoid strays from food to once again address the social history of drink, and since De Factoid the Fifth discussed the origin(s) of the word cocktail, this De Factoid shall look at the hidden history of one of the oldest, and best: the Martini.

For those who don’t know, a Martini Cocktail is traditionally made with a good, neat (i.e. no ice or mixers) English gin and a small wash of French or Italian vermouth (another spirit), stirred in an ice shaker and strained into a chilled martini glass over a couple of olives. It has become popular in recent years for vodka to replace gin (as a vodka martini) as the main spirit, but the gin-based drink is the original. One can usually tell the age of a cocktail (i.e. the time of its invention) by the contents from which it is made. Purely spirit based drinks are the oldest (of which brandy, gin and whisky are the oldest set – circa 1800’s – with vodka coming across from Russia much later: after the October Revolution in 1917, when Smirnoff moved outside the country and licensed production to America in 1933) with mixers i.e. non-alcoholic fruit-juices to mix with, coming much later. The martini glass (shaped like the letter ‘Y’) is likely to have been named after the drink (in a fashion that named the short glass as an ‘old fashioned’ – after the venerable whisky cocktail of the same name), and the drink is likely to have been named after the vermouth produced by Martini & Rossi in Italy. To order a ‘dry’ martini at a bar is a throw-back from an older tradition when the only martini spirit produced – martini rosso, ‘red martini’ – was very sweet. To request a ‘dry’ martini was to ask for less sweet vermouth, but was no longer required after the introduction of the less-sweet martini bianco, ‘white martini’ in 1910 (with similar products subsiquently becoming available in France). It is said that Winston Churchill – British Prime Minister during the Second World War – enjoyed his Martini Cocktails so dry that it was enough to pour his gin while looking towards France (where a popular Vermouth was produced). James Bond’s martini (the famous “shaken not stirred/shhterd”) was a mixture – according to Flemming, the author – of three measures Gordon’s gin, one measure of vodka and half a measure of Kina Lillet (a bitter, quinine filled wine-based drink) shaken until cold and served with a slice of lemon – but this seems to have been forgotten in recent films. Quinine (from the Peruvian word kina, ‘tree bark’ – first brought back to Europe by the Jesuits) is very useful for keeping the disease malaria at bay, and was dissolved in water to make ‘tonic’ water. Gin was added to the tonic water to make it more palatable for colonial Brits and the G&T was born.

Gin as a word derives from the Dutch drink jenever/ genever, a grain spirit flavoured with juniper berries (from where the Dutch drink gets its name: the French for juniper is genévrier) which was thought to have been first introduced to the mouths (and livers) of Englishmen during wars with Holland when soldiers were given Dutch courage before battle. The popularity of the drink in England (and a large stock of grain too poor in quality for brewing into beer) led to the government approval for unlicensed gin production and the establishment of gin bars when the spirit became cheaper than beer. William Hogarth’s famous engraving Gin Lane provides a (somewhat over the top) look at how this affected the working classes and what led to the drink’s nickname Mother’s Ruin (though I think it probably ruined the mothers and children in equal measure).

Vermouth – the other ingredient in the martini – comes from the French name for the drink, vermout, which in all likelihood from the German word wermut, seen earlier in German as wermuth (remember the German ‘v’ is pronounced ‘w’) – related to the English (and Germanic) name for the proverbially bitter plant wormwood (‘proverbially’ i.e. ‘widely known or spoken of, from Latin proverbium: pro, ‘for’ – think ‘pros and cons’ + verbum, ‘word’ – hence ‘a set of words put forth’). Though the origin of wormwood’s Germanic name is ultimately of unknown origin, one can assume that the second ‘w’ in wormwood is a corruption of the ‘m’ in the Old German wermuth. If that is true, then the traditional use of the extract as a means of removing worms (causing stomach irritation and vomiting) may suggest it to be a kenning of ‘something that expels worms from the mouth’ (mouth from Old English mūþ = muth). A kenning is the Anglo-Saxon poetic version of a metaphor (see De Factoid the Eleventh), and describes something unknown by combining two known elements (e.g. whalepath, ‘sea’; skycandle, ‘sun’) so could quite easily have been applied to describe the proverbial vomit-inducer. Vomit is ultimately a Latin word (though is linked to Greek, emeîn: hence something vomit-inducing having emetic properties). A good northern-English equivalent is the word spew (from Anglo-Saxon), where the southern equivalent chunder (spreading northward, if you will, through the Universities) is thought to come from the practice of shouting the warning “watch under!” when vomiting over the side of a ship. Nice…

Letter interchanges (that is, the swapping over of letters) such as wermut becoming vermout are common, especially when the letters are pronounced differently in one country to how they sound across a border. Another such example is the change between p/v/f that gives us Latin pater, German, vater and English, father as we go from the Mediterranean to northern Europe. The Romans would not have to worry about a w/v interchange though, as the letter ‘W’ was an English invention (albeit with a lot of help). The letter ‘V’ in the Roman alphabet (that is, the alphabet you are now reading – give or take a few letters – though the word alphabet come from the first two letters in the Greek alphabet: A/α ‘alpha’ + B/ β ‘beta’) derived ultimately from the letter ‘Y’ (with the bottom chopped off), a Phoenician symbol from the Semitic alphabet (Semitic i.e. Jewish, is a cultural term which derives from ‘the descendents of Shem’ in the Bible) and could stand as either the vowel ‘u’ or the consonant ‘v’ for a Roman writer (hence why one might sometimes see ‘v’s written in the place of ‘u’s in words written in capital letters on classically styled BVILDINGS and why in a Latin manuscript describing a baby, the child cried ‘va va va’). ‘W’ was first written down in the 7th century (601-700 AD) by Anglo-Saxon scribes to represent the longer ‘oo’ sound of putting two U’s together which the standard Roman alphabet did not provide: hence ‘double-u’. This was not immediately accepted across Britain though, but gained in popularity after the Norman Conquest (post-1066) when it began to more formally replace the letter Ƿ (the runic letter ‘wynn’), which had been brought over from Germanic northern Europe when the Saxons first landed on the island. Other runic letters (rune from Old Norse rún, ‘secret’, due to the mystical use of the language) that have fallen out of the language, include two(/four) other ways of writing ‘th’ – lower-case: ð; capital: Ð called ‘eth’ (representing the un-aspirated/ ‘voiceless’ ‘th’ in the word ‘Eth’) and lower case: þ; capital: Þ called ‘thorn’ (the aspirated ‘th’ of the word the), from where we get (through the progressive corruption of Þe, ‘the’) the ‘ye’ word that often turns up on black and white tourist trinket shop signs as ‘Ye Olde etc’.

Aspiration, for those interested, is the technical term for the sharp burst of air given out with certain words (hold your hand near your mouth and say ‘eth’ and ‘the’: the second aspirated word should hit you with a sharper air burst), but little of this would have matter to a Roman or a Saxon had they enough of the drink which derives its name from wormwood’s Latin botanical label (Artemisia absinthium): the emetic, mind-corrupting, Absinthe.

Absinthe (Absinth in central Europe) is a type of pastis – a clear, aniseed flavoured spirit (traditionally beetroot alcohol in France, now more often grape) that goes cloudy in water. The word derives from this idea of ‘mixture’ and is linked to the Italian word pasticcio, ‘pie’ and Old French pastiz from where we get ‘pastry’ and ‘pasty’ (see De Factoid the Ninth for further explanation) and the ‘mixture’ word pastiche. Other examples of pastis include Ouzo from Greece, Raki from Turkey, Italian Sambuca, Arak from Lebanon and Mastika from Bulgaria – to name a few. Absinthe gets its name from the infusion of wormwood as one of its ingredients which can, if ingested in large enough amounts, lead to wild hallucinations (a popular one being a vision of a beautiful green fairy which, one imagines, was part of the appeal) and eventual poisoning (which led to its banning in most European countries by 1915). The main French manufacturer continued to produce absinthe without the wormwood under his own name, creating the famous French pastis Pernod. Britain never banned Absinthe as it was never really popular, but then again we were probably too drunk on gin to try…

De Factoid the Thirteenth: coming soon.

De Factoid the Fifth: Moo-vers and Shakers

In this De Factoid ones usual subject matter is shaken up slightly by finding its measure in liquid – as opposed to chewable matter. Indeed we are going from Cockneys and male-chickens to the latter’s (somewhat confusing) namesake: cocktails.

The liquid-lunch mainstay of swiller and sophisticrat alike; opinions on the origin of the word ‘cocktail’ are as mixed as the drinks themselves, with several clearly the product of knocking back a few strong ones. Everything from drinks served in French-eggcups (coquetier) to the glasses of American Revolutionaries being furnished with chicken feathers (cock – male chicken – tails) from Royalist coops, have been cited. The claim that the drink name comes from the occasional late-medieval English practice of flavouring a gallon of beer with a herbed chicken-carcass may fall a little foul of its true origins; and ‘Cocket-Ale’: (cocket – from an Anglo-Latin corruption of the signing-off of documents: quo quietus est on the King’s Seal of the Custom House) is an attractive, if unlikely explanation for the modern drink. Another less taxing suggestion is easily visible when watching anyone making a cocktail at a student party – usually involving the combination of lethal looking concoctions in plastic containers / funnels / teacups to be rapidly consumed to prove one’s worth (if not one’s sense). To make up a drink by taking the last dregs (tail) from a barrel via the tap/peg (originally the cock) is a fair claim to making a glass of cock-tail. To take a man ‘down a peg or two’ comes either from the tradition of outdoing your opponent at drinking pegged-measures from large tankards; or reducing someone’s erroneous croquet score by lowering their peg (the game that also gives us ‘pipped at the post’ when one knocks an opponent’s ball off track). As much as the modern Pimms-drinker may favour the latter explanation, I’m pretty sure it involved booze. Booze as a word comes from Middle Dutch busen (Mod. Du. buizen): ‘to drink to excess’; and dregs as a word is likely to come from Old Norse dreggjar describing the alcoholic sediments in the bottom of barrels. If nothing else the origins of the average drinker’s vocabulary suggests that the Northern stretches of Europe (where we also find the birthplace of the word drunk) certainly knew (and know) how to get the best from their barrels.

But while chicken-flavoured Cosmopolitans and feather-tipped Tequilas read distinctly more tall-tale than cocktail, a good ‘cock-and-bull’ story does at least claim to share some bar space with our dubiously named drink. Two neighbouring pubs in Stony Stratford, Buckinghamshire: ‘The Famous Cock Hotel’ and the (pun-flinging) ‘Inn-famous Bull’ claim the phrase ‘cock-and-bull’ came into being to describe the coachmen’s stories poured (and thoroughly embellished) between them. While a nice story, the phrase is probably more likely to refer to the medieval fancy for the ‘bestiary’ tale – stories akin to Aesop’s Fables where anthropomorphic (i.e. ‘people like’) animals take centre stage – than cross-pub banter. Banter as a word seems to be of unknown origin. First recorded in writing in the play Madam Fickle by Thomas D’Urfey (1676), it may well be something analogous to the low-talk of a bantling – a term (possibly introduced corruptly through German bänkling) formerly with the implication of the born-out-of-wedlock ‘bastard’. That the phrase cock-and-bull became negatively associated with made up stories may be a reaction to the rejection of the fable for more serious works in later centuries (combined with more than a little retrospective association with the more modern phrase ‘bullshit’); and that Burton uses the phrase ‘cock and bull’ (though not in a negative sense) in his The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621): “Some men’s whole delight is to talk of a Cock and Bull over a pot” also suggests that the coachmen of the two pubs probably didn’t coin the phrase in the 18th century as claimed.

But these tall-taled taverns aren’t the only ones to claim such linguistic lineage. The phrase ‘by hook or by crook’ is staked by Hook Head and the nearby village of Crook, in Waterford, Ireland. That hook and crook are synonyms (the latter from the French influenced Middle English croc or the older Norse krókr meaning a ‘curve’) and combine in the phrase to become a metaphor meaning ‘by one means or another’ seems lost on the little Irish village. The metaphor itself most probably arose from the shifting of stubborn sheep with a shepherd’s staff – the crook; or (failing that) tripping them with the ‘hook’ at the other end (though 'hook' could quite simply have been included for no more reason that it’s rhyming quality with 'crook'). It is worth noting that a Bishop's staff is also called a 'crook' (continuing the 'Lord is my Shepherd' motif), though does not tend to feature the lower tripping facility. The Cock Hotel also claims to be the originator of the nursery rhyme line “ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross” due to the proximity of the coach-house to Banbury. But while this cock-and-bull tale may well fall limp (one finds that a ‘cock-horse’ is generally recognised as one in which the horse’s tail-hair has been cropped short so as to stick up straight as akin cockerel’s tail feathers, not a horse hired from the Cock Hotel) it does provide us with a very sensible suggestion for the origin of our original word. To ‘cock one’s tail’ with a stiff drink presents us with the ancestral action akin to the modern day publican drinking a vodka-Red Bull as a ‘pick-me-up’!

De Factoid the Sixth: coming soon