Camper English's Blog, page 20
March 8, 2023
Women in Distilling, 1500s-1700s
This is a quick post on some books I've read on women distilling in olden times.
Distillation of spirits came out of medical alchemy (which is to say medical proto-science), and early alchemy books included lots of recipes for distilled medicines with stuff like gold and silver included in them. Some of these alchemy books were written by and for women, such as the best known Secrets of Isabella Cortese.
A very scholarly look from an alchemy/scientific practice perspective is found in Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy. It mentions distilled medicines that often resemble pure alchemical preparations.
Those women alchemists were noblewomen, who could afford the stills and other equipment and often a staff to operate them. But as we move into the 1600s and look at other noblewomen in Germany, we find the distilled medicines looking more like medicine (nonsensical as much of it was) rather than alchemy.
Noblewomen (as well as monks and nuns) in the Later Middle Ages/Early Modern Period made beneficial medicines to give as charity to surrounding villagers. Keep in mind that the nobles and monks were landowners, so keeping their tenants alive longer increased their own wealth. The book to read about this time period is Panaceia's Daughters: Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Germany.
As we move into the 1700s we find women authoring household books aka recipe books. These books always had a practical aspect to them for running a household (as opposed to books solely on distillation, all written by men, which were solely distilled herbal medicine recipes). The women's books would include information like food preservation techniques along with distilled medicines.
These books have fun names, like:
• The Country Housewife and Lady's Director in the Management of a House, and the Delights and Profits of a Farm Containing Instructions for managing the Brew-House, and Malt-Liquors in the Cellar; the making of Wines of all sorts (1728)
• The Ladies Directory in Choice Experiments and Curiosities of Preserving (1662)
• The Accomlisht Ladys Delight (1684)
• The Queene-Like Closet (1681)
• The Compleat Housewife (1727)
There are some books about these recipe books, but looking more closely at distillation we find Every Home a Distillery: Alcohol, Gender, and Technology in the Colonial Chesapeake. This book is a bit more accessible than the previous two. The author shows that in young America in the Chesapeake area people were more isolated and their technology and social structures closer to those of the previous century. So in the 1600s and 1700s we find more women distilling in the home (or rather, estate) and look at what they used distilled alcohol for and how they made or bought it.
I touch on some of this in Doctors and Distillers, and if you want to go down this rabbit hole I'd recommend reading it first to put a lot of this stuff in context.
March 7, 2023
"Designer Ice" in the New York Times
I'm quoted in this article about fancy ice cubes in the New York Times.
The Height of Domestic Luxury? Designer Ice.
Join me in my obsession, preorder The Ice Book today!
March 6, 2023
How Instagram Sparked the Clear-Ice Trend
In the February issue of Wine Enthusiast magazine, I was quoted on one page about the medicinal history of sparkling water and my book Doctors and Distillers was cited.
On the next page, my forthcoming The Ice Book was cited and I provided quotes for a story on ice. That story just went up online and you can read it here.
That's pretty awesome, IMO!
March 3, 2023
March 2, 2023
March 1, 2023
New Booze February 2023 Edition
Looks like it's been a few months since I did a New Booze post, gathering together new products hitting the market from my Instagram page. Well then, with no further ado, here they are:
February 27, 2023
Book Review: Crushed: How a Changing Climate Is Altering the Way We Drink
Over at AlcoholProfessor.com I reviewed Brian Freedman's book Crushed: How a Changing Climate Is Altering the Way We Drink.
Read the review here.
buy it on Amazon here or Bookshop here.
February 24, 2023
A Quick Review of Of Ice and Men by Fred Hogge
I recently read Of Ice and Men: How We've Used Cold to Transform Humanity by Fred Hogge. I just wanted to note that I think the chapter on the "Ice King" Frederic Tudor was very well done. I've read a lot of books on Tudor and this was probably the most engaging version.
Overall, I wasn't interested in all the chapters but enjoyed several of them. Pick it up if you want to learn more about Tudor in particular.
You can buy it here on Amazon or on Bookshop here.
Making Huge Clear Cubes to Prep for Ice Diamonds and Spheres
I've been working on methods to more easily produce huge 3" or so cubes that I can then use to carve into ice diamonds or put into an ice ball press to make spheres.
Previously I was trying out inserting dividers into the cooler to make the ice blocks and this works pretty well. But recently I've returned to one of the earliest clear ice hacks that I first tried in 2010! I purchased plastic boxes that are sold both at The Container Store and TAP Plastics and used them as ice cube trays. The original post is here.
For these new experiments, I purchased larger square boxes, and drilled holes in the bottom of them. This maximized the clarity of the ice made in the boxes.
In this round, I set the boxes atop a riser, so that the cloudy part of the ice that forms would be below the plastic boxes. In the picture below, the gray thing is the riser (a silverware drawer organizer) and the cubes were set atop it. This is the whole block after dumping it out of the cooler.
You can see a finished giant cube in this picture below.
I think that one may even be a four-inch cube, which is bigger than I need it. But the three-inch ones made for easy ice spheres in the press and I'm getting better at carving ice diamonds too.
There's a fun slow-motion video of this ice diamond here.
Going forward, I may use these boxes but I'm going to try to fill the whole cooler with them or make them more efficient somehow.
Update: I bought more boxes and it turns out that 6 boxes fit exactly into my cooler.
The boxes measure 3 7/16" x 3 7/16" x 6 5/16" tall (box M103 here)
I drilled holes in the bottom and set them on a riser in my cooler. The ice came out cloudier than I want it. I don't think I jostled the cooler too much while it was freezing so I'm not sure if I just need more holes in the bottom or if maybe my riser is too fine a mesh.
Really what I should try is cutting the bottoms off these boxes entirely, but they're hard to cut.
In any case, here is what it looks like:
