Absinthe Used to Be Malaria Medicine: The Secret Medical History of Cocktails

Créme de menthe settled rebellious stomachs and absinthe fended off malaria. This is the secret medical history of the speakeasy cocktails we've come to know and love.
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Peden & Munk

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"We don't create cocktails now to cure venereal diseases or to relieve gout, but there's that history there," says Matthew Rowley, author of Lost Recipes of Prohibition: Notes from a Bootlegger’s Manual. Créme de menthe settled rebellious stomachs, the Corpse Reviver brought heavy drinkers back from wicked hangovers, and absinthe fended off malaria. Whether we know it or not, many of our favorite fancy cocktails and spirits have their roots in alchemy and medicine. We just forgot all about it.

Absinthe formulas from 100+ years ago. Photo: John Schulz and Daniel Fishel

Take Your Medicine

According to Rowley, the lineage of modern cocktails may actually date at least as far back as 77 A.D., when a physician under the Roman Emperor Nero penned a treatise on preparing compounded medicines that included wines, bitters, and various alcohols.

Over the years, that tradition held strong. "Ginger syrup and ginger brandy were apothecary things; a Rock and Rye had horehound, an herb used to soothe a sore throat," Rowley says. Absinthe, for example, we drink now for its taste, mystique, and aesthetics. But, originally, it was an anti-malarial prescribed for French and Swiss troops in the 1800s.

Those traditions influenced Jerry Thomas, an American bartender from the 19th century whom today's big-name mixologists revere as the father of modern bartending. "Not to take away any glory, but he didn't write that first Bartender's Guide in a vacuum." Rowley says. "The recipes spring from pharmacopeia, or druggists' handbooks." In other words, what we know now as cocktails started out as medicine.

The compound formula for Ginger Brandy from Lyon's notebook. Photo: John Schulz and Daniel Fishel

From Ancient Rome to 20th-Century New York

In the early 1900s, those medicinal traditions informed the bootlegger physician whose diary found its way into Rowley's care and inspired his book. Though he went to pains to hide his German roots, diarist Victor Alfred Lyon gives himself away with his obvious fondness for a German-Russian-Jewish liqueur called kümmel. An unsweetened brandy flavored with caraway seeds, kümmel was as ubiquitous as Chartreuse and Benedictine at the time, and thought to be carminative. “It was served at the end of a meal because it relieves bloating and gas, "Rowley says. "If you’ve eaten a big meal, and you’re gassy and farty, have some caraway-heavy kümmel.”

But once World War I came, Rowley explains, “the umlaut in its name was just a middle finger to America.” So, by the 1960s, the only people who drank it had died off—as had the taste for it.

Liquor-based remedies may have been casualties of the rise of modern medicine, but cocktails found new life as something admired for their flavor, that could make its drinkers feel good without a health-related endgame in sight. As far as Rowley's concerned, thinking of spirits in terms of taste is a modern luxury: “We don’t have to focus on alcohol as medicine anymore; we can focus on the taste of it, even if that means drinking Fireball. We don’t drink it for the anti-choleric effects of cinnamon.”

Cinnamon, peppermint, cinnamon, and anise cordial recipes from Lyon's notebook. Photo: John Schulz and Daniel Fishel

Bringing It Back

We can still see some evidence of medicinal booze, but only when we know where to look. Rowley found a Kümmel Fizz served at Expatriate in Portland, Oregon: old-school kümmel mixed with blackberry liqueur and fresh lime juice. But he'd like to see today's bartenders go even further, resurrecting techniques such as the ice kümmel—an old method of serving caraway-flavored kümmel by frosting the inside of a clear bottle with supersaturated sugar crystals. Sure, it’s not being used to treat gastrointestinal distress, but it’s keeping a legacy alive and expanding the canon.

"Let's look at what pharmacists were doing, or at what was happening in German, Italian, Latin, and Spanish," he notes, with hopes of broadening the scope of alcohol's history to include medicine and beyond. "I think we can scour these things and other disciplines that seem 'new' to us, and bring back what's long been forgotten."

Lost Recipes from Prohibition: Notes from a Bootlegger's Manual by Matthew Rowley comes out on October 28, 2015.

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