table talk / By Joseph Byrd

The Mint Julep

American Culinary History, Part V

(May 8, 2008)  The Kentucky Derby is a hard luck race in a hard luck town. It was settled by people who tried to beat life with a pair of treys. The pickpockets are the only ones who go home winners on Derby Day. Unless you count the concessionaires, who put a nickel’s worth of bourbon in a cheap plastic glass with some weeds and a lump of sugar and charge ten dollars for it.

—Jim Murray, former sports columnist for the Los Angeles Times

My personal choices for mint julep are either Maker’s Mark (Kentucky) or George Dickel (Tennessee), both distinguished “sipping whiskeys,” as Mama would say. Photo by Bob Doran.

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Mama was born and raised on a small farm in Calhoun, Clay County, Ky. Among bits of acquired knowledge she passed along was the following injunction: “Never drink whiskey made in a town on the Ohio River. The water’s awful. It spoils the taste.”

This is interesting advice considering that my father, at the time I was born, owned Byrd’s Distillery, in Louisville. However, it was not a bourbon distillery; it seems to have specialized in the mint-flavored gin and apricot-brandy line of products popular in the early years after prohibition.

My mother also taught me how to make a mint julep. Her basic instructions, as I recall them, were: “There are two things that can spoil a mint julep. One is too much sugar, the other is too little whiskey.”

In Colonial America, weary travelers might have stopped at Goody Caldwell’s Ipswich, Mass. inn (“Victualing and Lodging”). There they would be served a room-temperature supper of boiled beef, tongue, head cheese, fish, suet-and-injun pudding (cornbread) and a variety of pies. Beer, cider and “Hollands” (gin) would be available with the meal, the whole served at a large public table. The price would be four shillings, sixpence, including a bed in the common sleeping chamber (about $35 in today’s money). Should the guest want his food heated, it would cost an extra 1 1/2 shillings. “A bowl of Flipp with Indian ruhm” was another sixpence. Rum from the Indies was the universal cheap liquor in the Colonies, just as gin, in Mother England, was becoming the solace of the lower classes.

South of Baltimore, public houses were rare, but the respectable traveler might have letters of introduction to plantations, where visitors were a welcome respite from humid boredom, and where the tradition of “Southern hospitality” was born. In Virginia of the early 18th century — as in England — a great variety of alcoholic concoctions were popular, including punch, toddy, shrub, negus, panada, fruit cordials, eggnog, caudle, bounce and syllabub.

Serious drinking was a fact of life for white plantation dwellers in Virginia and Carolina. Easter, Christmas, the New Year, christenings, birthdays and weddings were occasions for further alcohol-enhanced festivity. The Williamsburg Art of Cookery observes that “Rum and Funeral Wines are as necessary a Part of the Funeral as the Corpse.”

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