Taste of history
SOLOMON SERVES UP FOOD AND DRINK FROM AGE OF SAIL
The romantic age of sail returned to Boston Harbor this week with the arrival of the Tall Ships. The food and drink of the era, however, was anything but romantic. “Sailors lived a rough life. A really (expletive) rough life,” said chef and food historian Jim Solomon. “And they were drinking all the time.”
Solomon, the chef-owner of The Fireplace in Brookline, hosted a period dinner Tuesday night at Boston Public Market in partnership with the Old North Church to celebrate the food and drink found aboard ship in the age of sail.
Rank and file sailors suffered through a primitive sustenance of beer, porridge and dried fish or beef; captains enjoyed the luxury of fine wine, vegetables and even fresh meat from a ship's small colony of livestock.
Guests Tuesday night dined on Solomon's modernized versions of shipboard fare: hard tack, cornmeal porridge with carrots and bacon, cod cakes with “limey” mayo and mutton braised in madeira with
turnips, carrots, bacon hash and currant-infused rice.
They drank like sailors of the era, too, enjoying rum tea punch and sangaree, a ruby-colored 18th-century version of the wine punch we now know as sangria.
“Both terms come from `sangre,' the Spanish word for blood,” said Solomon.
Heavy drinking was a big part of life at sea. Solomon's research revealed that Colonial sailors were allotted 10 pints of beer per day. But when their voyages entered the hot climate of the Caribbean and beer would spoil, they turned to heartier spirits-based drinks, typically mixing rum with fruit juices.
“Between the hazards of the job, the poor quality of the food, the syphilis and all the drinking, the survival rate for sailors was not very good,” said Solomon.
Heavy drinking in the day was a fact of life on land, too, even for the most prominent members of society.
Solomon found that New York's Gov. George Clinton welcomed the ambassador of France in 1783, to celebrate the Colonial victory in the American Revolution. The party of 120 consumed 30 bowls of rum punch, 135 bottles of madeira, 36 bottles of port and 60 bottles of beer.
The Founding Fathers hosted a similar bacchanalian boozefest at City Tavern in Philadelphia to mark the passage of the Constitution. Fifty-five revelers and 16 musicians powered through 14 bowls of punch and “mass quantities” of wine, spirits and beer. They were hit with a 2 percent upcharge to pay for damages.