Our colonial-era ancestors worked hard. They had to. And after a hard days work, they liked to relax in the company of their friends & neighbors. If they indulged too much, then they had dozens of words to describe drunkenness. Benjamin Franklin collected more than 200 such terms, including addled, afflicted, biggy, boozy, busky, buzzey, cherubimical, cracked, and “halfway to Concord.”

It was also tough being on the road in those days. Travelling meant walking, riding, and if you were lucky a teeth-rattling ride in a coach full of strangers. Before television, the internet, and decent hotels, taverns provided a place to catch up on gossip and news, to debate politics, and to find bed & board for human and horse while journeying. The quality of food, drink and service varied greatly though, and an honest inn-keeper was valued. (For an amusing look at tavern life check out this page from the historical Blanchard Tavern in Avon, MA.)

In the 18th century, distilled spirits like rum, whiskey and gin were still fairly new to the public, but much in demand. A skilled inn-keeper knew what his (and sometimes her) patrons wanted and kept the bar stocked with drink-fixings and barware. One very popular mixed drink was flip, a concoction of beer, liquor and other ingredients, heated with a red hot poker called a loggerhead. The loggerhead was as much a part of the chimney furniture of an old-time New England tavern and farm-house as the bellows or andirons. In all taverns and many hospitable homes it was constantly kept warm in the ashes, ready for speedy heating in a bed of hot coals, to burn a mug of fresh flip for every visitor or passer by. Customized recipes for flip abound, with each inn and private host having a specialty.

“Keep grated Ginger and Nutmeg with a fine dried Lemon Peel rubbed together in a Mortar. To make a quart of Flip: Put the Ale on the Fire to warm, and beat up three or four Eggs with four ounces of moist Sugar, a teaspoonful of grated Nutmeg or Ginger, and a Quartern (1/4 of a gill) of good old Rum or Brandy. When the Ale is near to boil, put it into one pitcher, and the Rum and Eggs, etc., into another: turn it from one Pitcher to another till it is as smooth as cream. To heat plunge in the red hot Loggerhead or Poker. This quantity is styled One Yard of Flannel.”

A modern recipe for flip:

American Colonial Flip

Ingredients

• 2 bottles beer
• 1/2 cup gin, rum, or brandy
• 3 eggs
• 1/4 cup sugar
• grated nutmeg

Method

Heat beer and gin, if desired, but do not boil. Pour into a large pitcher. Beat eggs with sugar until thick and pour into a second pitcher. Gradually add beer mixture to eggs, stirring constantly. Froth by carefully and quickly pouring back and forth between the two pitchers. Pour into mugs. Makes 3-4 (modern) servings.

John Adams said if you spent the evening in a tavern, you found it full of people drinking drams of flip, carousing, and swearing. The old taprooms were certainly cheerful and inviting gathering-places; where mine host sat behind his cagelike counter surrounded by cans and bottles and glasses, jars of whole spices and whole loaves of sugar; where an inspiring row of barrels of New England rum, hard cider, and beer ranged in rivalry at an end of the room, and

“Where dozed a fire of beechen logs that bred
Strange fancies in its embers golden-red,
And nursed the loggerhead, whose hissing dip,
Timed by wise instinct, creamed the bowl of flip.”

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Since February is full of presidential birthdays, lets bounce to another popular historical drink – bounce!

Most bounce references and recipes mention Martha Washington’s cherry bounce, which is concocted in household-sized portions:

“Extract the Juice of 20 pounds of well ripend Morrella Cherrys Add to this 10 quarts of Old French brandy and sweeten it with White Sugar to your taste—To 5 Gallons of this mixture add one ounce of Spice Such as Cinnamon, Cloves and Nutmegs of each an Equal quantity Slightly bruis’d and a pint and half of Cherry kernels that have been gently broken in a mortar—After the liquor has fermented let it Stand Close-Stoped for a month or Six weeks—then bottle it remembering to put a lump of Loaf Sugar into each bottle.”

Although cherry bounce is the most popular recipe to come down to us through the years, bounce could be made from any number of fruits such as blackberry, plum. It’s basically what we make as a cordial, using what fruits are at hand, and what liquor you prefer – rum and brandy being the most historically accurate.

Which leads us to our next Colonial beverage – shrub.

To modern eyes it seems almost indistinguishable from bounce, but most shrub recipes add some complexity to the booze + fruit + sugar mixture in the form of vinegar. Sounds kind of gross, but sources both historical and modern claim that the acid/sweet combination is tasty and refreshing. Here is a recipe for a booze-optional shrub, which would be a nice summertime drink mixed with club soda or maybe even tonic water.

Ingredients

Preparation

Shrub or Bounce

• 2 quarts of brandy
• juice of 5 lemons
• peels of 2 lemons
• 1/2 whole nutmeg
• 3 pints white wine
• 1-1/2 lb. sugar

Place brandy, lemon juice, peels, and nutmeg into a large bottle. Let stand for 3 days. Add wine and sugar. Mix well and strain twice, then rebottle. Definately an officer’s drink, the ingredients are too costly for the enlisted man.

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Our ancestors may not have enjoyed the long lifespans that we do now, but they defintely spent their days in a state of perpetual buzz. Seven Trees Farm is always researching the daily life of our forbearers, so stay tuned for more information on topics like syllabub, posset, beverige, and punch. Not only do those ancestral beverages help us get in touch with times past, we can recreate that era in modern times with antique and reproduction glassware.

For more reading about Colonial-American drinking habits and taverns, check out these links -

The Howe Tavern

The Jersey Taverns

Stagecoach and Tavern Days, published 1900

Drinking in Colonial America ~ Colonial Williamsburg

Some Colonial-era music courtesy of the Colonial Minstrels

And more historical drink recipes – Missing Drinks

A sales listing for the Sawyer Tavern in Keene, NH, once owned by an ancestor of one of the Seven Trees humans.

This Saturday we attended an all-day conference at the WSU extension in Mount Vernon, WA geared toward women in agriculture. It was one of 16 locations in the state hosting this event, with both local and webcast speakers. It was very eye-opening and inspiring to realize that there were over 500 women taking part in this conference. That’s a lot of people interested and working in agriculture in all its varied forms. From large-scale commercial dairy operators to backyard flock keepers, and much in between.

There were also plenty of opportunities to make connections with other women farmers, and everyone took full advantage.

One important fact we took away from this day is that size doesn’t matter when it comes to farming. Nearly every farm, of every size, depends on off-farm income to make ends meet, whether that be government subsidies for commodity growers, or a day job in town for the people of Seven Trees.

Another interesting fact is that while most Americans think of a farm as a giant swathe of mono-cropped acreage, planted, cultivated & harvested by expensive machinery, in most of the world the average farm is well under 5 acres and depends on hand tools and family labor.

In the past, the US census of agriculture only allowed one person to be reported as the main farm operator. That was usually a man. Now that the form has room for more than one farmer, women are being counted, not as ‘farm wives’, but as the honest-to-goodness farmers they are.

From the Grow Northwest article on the conference, quoting Margaret A. Viebrock, Director of the Washington State University Extension in Douglas County:

 “According to the Washington State agriculture census, female principal farm operators increased 44 percent from 5,632 in 2002 to 8,090 in 2007,” she said. “Women manage 881,612 acres of farmland and sell $184,307,000 annually in farm products.”

Ninety-eight percent of women-owned farms, she added, are small farms with total sales less than $250,000. While numbers are increasing, “women farmers continue to be underserved in agriculture education and technical assistance,” she said.

For more information about women farmers, check  out this amazing site – Women’s Agricultural Community Web Resource 

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The conference really inspired us to take Seven Trees Farm to the next level. This spring & summer we will be upgrading the hen coop, setting up and seeding high-quality grazing paddocks for the hens, and with Katie’s help, planting (and fertilizing) fodder crops especially for the flock. It takes more work and planning to grow your own feed, but someday we’d like to sell eggs from hens fed on homegrown chow.  What we decide not to grow here, we’ll buy from Scratch & Peck Feeds. They source their feed ingredients as locally as possible, which keeps our food fresh and our economy strong.

A longer-term idea we’re exploring is to raise our own replacement hens on-site. The big boys call the practice of controlling every aspect of production, from feed to hen to eggs, vertical integration.  We’ve come to rely on Barred Plymouth Rocks as our go-to laying ladies, and they are also an old-fashioned heritage breed that we would like to help preserve. It might also be nice to offer homegrown chicks for sale as well.

In the meantime, we’re starting seeds for spring greens, and anxiously peeking at the chard, spinach & lettuce plants that somehow managed to weather the cold & wind since last fall. It’s that time of year again – spring fever is upon us!

The humans at Seven Trees Farm are enthusiastic users of modern technology. Email, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Wikipedia, WordPress….the whole ‘web’ of information access online.

Need a recipe for nettle braggot?

What the heck is a plantiecrub?

How do you measure a horse for working harness?

A few clicks and the answers appear, usually free of charge, with pretty pictures, up to date and linked to relevant information elsewhere.

And why not succumb to the luxury of ebooks? Download them from the purveyor right into the reader of your choice, thousands of titles, old and new. A small price to pay for the convenience of a pocket library at your fingertips, right?

So why are books, the old fashioned bulky paper things that take up precious shelf space, so important to us?

The main reason for us is – if you don’t own it, own your very own hard copy, then it isn’t yours. The recent internet protest against SOPA was an eye-opening lesson in just how much we depend on the internet for basic reference material. When major information portals like Google and Wikipedia staged a blackout or made their sites more difficult to access, the pitfalls of depending on others to store knowledge became evident.

Also, rights to ebooks can be revoked in a copyright/publishing dispute(remember when Amazon erased George Orwell titles from users’ readers?), a favorite recipe site can change from free to subscription, privately-owned websites can just disappear completely, and so on.

Another reason to keep your personal reference shelves full is that you may need that information during a crisis. Power outages, earthquakes, windstorms, zombie attacks can all get in the way of internet access. What if your prize heifer decides to calve in the middle of a storm and you need to know how to help, immediately. How reassuring to reach for your copy of Handyma’ams Guide to Everything that resides on your living room bookshelf!

But even if you can’t run out and spend your paycheck on books, libraries will always have books won’t they?

That depends. Libraries, especially cash-strapped academic libraries, are going through a time of massive upheaval right now. Most books don’t circulate. They cost money to purchase and shelve, never mind maintain (the demise of books also means the demise of an ancient craft - book mending). And they take up space that is increasingly in demand for a new library concept – the learning commons. Library-as-book-warehouse is becoming library-as-information-portal. Study spaces, laptop checkout, ebooks, and online databases are winning out over the nostalgia-value of paper. As the Once-ler said to the Lorax: “Business is business, and business must grow!”

Next time you hunt down that 1897 treatise on market gardening, it may not be there.

So while we make the most of the convenient digital virtual world, we also make it a regular practice to buy books that support our endeavors at Seven Trees (buying local/used also supports our economy). Book-learning is no substitute for experience, but someday that book might be all you have to learn from.