Jonathan Yardley

The history of the Americas through the foggy lens of alcohol.

(Getty Images)

AND A BOTTLE OF RUM

A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails

By Wayne Curtis

Crown. 294 pp. $24

Not quite as ambitious as William Faulkner, who once said he aspired "to put the whole history of the human heart on the head of a pin," Wayne Curtis has tried in this book "to run to ground the story of America" by telling the histories of 10 drinks in which the chief ingredient is rum. The idea is not quite as far-fetched as it sounds, though at times Curtis strains pretty hard to make a point. Still, his argument is original and interesting. The history of rum, he says, is "the great American story: the ne'er-do-well who overcame the unfortunate circumstances of its birth to be accepted in the more rarified world of the gentry." He continues:

"Rum has always had a distinctly American swagger. It is untutored and proud of it, raffish, often unkempt, and a little bit out of control. The history of rum tends toward the ignoble, many times pleasingly so. . . . Rum, in short, has been one of those rare objects in which America has invested its own image. Like moonglow, the life of America is reflected back in each incarnation of rum."

This may seem a strange claim for a nation with as strong a history of militant temperance and Prohibition as ours, yet there's more than a little truth to it. Rum was invented in the Americas -- probably, though not certainly, in Barbados -- and quickly became an important part of the diet in the American colonies, where consumption of alcoholic beverages was very high. Rum and slavery were intertwined, both in the slave trade and on plantations where rum was made. "Demon Rum" became a shibboleth of the temperance movement, and rum itself became one of the most widely consumed alcoholic drinks once Prohibition forced drinkers into speakeasies or onto ships bound for Cuba. During World War II, rum and Coca-Cola "became the de facto national drink of many of the troops," and now the mojito is one of the most popular drinks among the fashionable young people who are bringing new life into the country's old cities.

Rum is essentially an accident. On 17th-century sugar plantations in the Caribbean, "sugar wastes were considerable," chief among them molasses. Eventually, someone figured out that molasses combined with other ingredients could produce a potent if rather vile alcoholic drink that came to be called rum, perhaps as "a truncated version of rumbullion or rumbustion ," both of which "were British slang for 'tumult' or 'uproar,' " which, as Curtis puts it, conjures up images of "fractious islanders cracking one another over the head in rumbustious entanglements at island tippling houses." Its most common name, though, was "Kill-devil," the precise origins of which are unclear, but a name that suggests its potency and its power to make trouble.

The first of the "cocktails" that Curtis describes is "Kill-devil" itself, which almost certainly was "cloying, greasy, nasty-smelling stuff" but had plenty of kick. The British navy re-interpreted it as "grog," diluting it with four parts water to one part rum and thus ensuring that the ordinary crewman was at least somewhat more sober than when he'd had his rum straight. In the colonies a drink called "flip" was popular, a mixture of rum, beer and other ingredients; the possibility that Paul Revere knocked back a flip or two before his famous ride is explored by Curtis with inconclusive results. There is no doubt, though, that "the rise of strong liquors in colonial America" was very real, or that there was more to the phenomenon than booze itself:

"Rum was the gin of the New World. But it was more than a quick ticket to a fast drunk. Rum's rise marked a rite of passage for the struggling colonists. Merely by drinking it, they effectively announced a change in their role on the global stage. They were no longer a people who made do with crude and rustic beverages concocted in their own kitchens. They could now pay for valued goods with the sweat of their labor."

Rum was "one of the first mass-market products manufactured in America," and in the 18th century rum manufactured in the Massachusetts town of Medford "became known for its superior quality." Mixed with water and molasses, sprinkled with nutmeg, Medford Rum became a drink in and of itself, called the "Bombo," and a far tastier one than the rummy swill to which colonists were accustomed. It was during the heyday of Medford Rum that Parliament imposed the Sugar Act on the colonies, and "it's no coincidence that distillers and rum merchants were in the forefront of the political and armed resistance." Taverns "had become de facto community centers, virtual petri dishes for the breeding of a discontent that taverners learned to channel." Certainly, it would be an exaggeration to say that rum was the beverage of revolution, but people who drank and profited from it were among the most vigorous and committed rebels.

Curtis devotes a chapter to planter's punch, the famous drink that was so popular before and after the Revolution, but oddly enough he skips lightly past the Civil War. He does discuss the slave trade and its connection to rum -- not, he insists, as strong a connection as is usually thought, because "the value of the rum-for-slaves trade was minimal" -- but it seems a little strange to ignore the Civil War completely. Instead, Curtis jumps right ahead to the temperance movement, Demon Rum and a repellent concoction called "prune water," a prohibitionist's idea of fun at the bar. It's been said many times before but is worth saying again that Prohibition managed, in virtually every respect, to accomplish the precise opposite of what its adherents claimed to want, serving, as Curtis says, "mostly to prove the law of unintended consequences."

Mainly, Prohibition made alcohol more popular than ever and gave organized crime a foothold in the United States that it has never relinquished. It sent people by the thousands to Cuba, where they discovered the pleasures of the daiquiri and started Bacardi on its road to preeminence in rum sales. "No spirit benefited from the long national drought as much as rum," Curtis writes. "With ample supplies in the islands and a newly developed taste for the stuff among everyday Americans, this three-hundred-year-old spirit emerged from its century-long slumber into a bright new day." With rum and Coke, though, a trend began toward blander rum, "from the distinctive toward the unexceptional, from full-flavored to light."

Interestingly, and contrarily, Curtis argues that the trend toward the bland was slowed, if not halted, by the tiki bars of the 1950s and '60s. We may think of Trader Vic's and other such establishments as nothing more than the South Seas Disneyfied, but Curtis points out that many of the rum drinks invented and sold there -- most famously, the mai tai -- were excellent concoctions that profited from being made with distinctive rums; the mai tai, he says, is "an exceptionally fine drink when made well," which is to say (among others things) when made with fresh ingredients rather than those poured out of a package.

Now, with the mojito, rum seems to have reached an apogee of sorts. It's a crisp, refreshing drink, not so alcoholic as to send the imbiber into spasms but alcoholic enough to supply the warm buzz that makes a hard day at the office seem distant and irrelevant. It's really "a simple drink -- it's basically a rum collins with the addition of mint," but when it comes to bellying up to the bar, the simpler the better.

Speaking of which, Curtis provides at the end a number of recipes for rum drinks both classic and obscure. It's interesting and useful. But since he's spent so much time exploring rum and since he clearly knows a good deal about it, it's a pity that he doesn't provide a guide to the best of the many premium and super-premium rums now available. It's a regrettable omission in what is otherwise a good book. ·

Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardleyj@washpost.com.