6/2/2023 0 Comments Iain gately drinkLet’s chalk it up to the daze of mystery enshrouding so many quality drinking sessions that a gutter swill is now a respectable elixir. Iain Gately writes in Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol that by 1723, it was as if “every man, woman, and child in London knocked back more than a pint of gin per head per week.” The lower classes bore the brunt of a resultant moral panic, as a tract by the novelist Henry Fielding indicates: “A new kind of drunkenness, unknown to our ancestors, is lately sprung up amongst us, which, if not put a stop to, will infallibly destroy a great part of the inferior people.” (The “Dutch courage” we commonly enjoy here is-like genever, its full-bodied cousin-flavored with juniper, coriander, and other botanicals, but we can discuss its particulars another time, perhaps over a herring platter.) In the 1700s, a craze for “Madame Geneva” swept England with such force as to generate statistics that defy belief. Gin comes to us from Holland, where the physician Franciscus Silvius began treating the body with this spirit in the 1600s. The legend of the hoax reflects gin’s properties as a quickening zing on the palate, seriously mischievous.
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