What sort of potion would you be concocting if you put into a pot or other container the following: two ounces of liquorice, bruised and cut into small pieces; aniseed, cleaned and bruised, five or six spoonfuls of molasses; finally, dates and raisins. The answer is Irish whiskey as recommended in 1602. A reader who noticed a mention of Scotch versus Irish here recently recommended looking up Brid Mahon's absorbing, indeed astonishing book, Land of Milk and Honey for today's readers (drinkers or not) on our national aqua vitae. For it was whiskey into which the above substances were added in early days. "To every gallon of good aqua composita add. . ." The recommendation ends by noting that the grounds which remain when the liquid is strained off can be redistilled "and make more aqua composita of them and out of that you may make more usquebaugh." Fynes Morison, who came to Ireland in 1600 as Lord Mountjoy's secretary, recommended Irish whiskey as the best drink in the world, as quoted in the book. He claimed, in the language of the old herbalists, that it rendered various services to the bowels and belly without inflaming any parts. In today's idiom: just what the doctor ordered.
Not that whiskey, by the way, was the only alcoholic liquid around. Brandy and wine had long been imported from France. And mead was made at home from honey. Even when Giraldus Cambrensis came here in the 12th century, he commented on the abundance of wine imported from Poitou in France. Brid Mahon has searched far and wide in her book. She quotes a traveller who visited Ireland in 1579 and noted a shortage of inns; but, he wrote, "any traveller is welcome to put up in any house he meets and is fed and served drink without payment. Eight sorts of draught: beer made of barley and water, milk, whey, wines, broth, mead, usquebaugh and spring water." Encouraging is a note from a book on travel in Fermanagh in 1760 which tells us that local people will drink whiskey ("greatly esteemed by the inhabitants as a diuretic . . . They will drink it to intoxication and are never sick after it.") Ahem.
We owe a lot to the preservers of so much lore on every topic in Irish life, the Department of Folklore, now at University College Dublin, formerly the Irish Folklore Commission, and its dedicated workers. A jewel of a book. This edition is published by Mercier Press. £7.99. Y