Page 29 - Taverns Stands in Woodstock - for Flipbook_Neat

Buying liquor at Ransom’s Store

“The deacons and the preachers needed stimulants and they bought them often. Winslow Phelps has these
items charged one day, 3 pints rum, ½ pint wine, ½ pint brandy, ¼ lb. loaf sugar and some of raisons. Deacon
Ransom gets a quart of rum. Joshua Bailey buys two gallons of rum. On the day they made these purchases
there are seventeen entries. Ten of the men bought quantities of liquor. The Rev. Elijah Norton buys salt, rum
and brandy, a few days before he bought rum, and the process is repeated again and again. Ensign Elisha Lord
on one day buys 3 quarts of rum, then 1 quart more, also ginger, allspice and pepper. He was going to prepare a
mess to burn up his internal arrangements. Elijah Harlow buys a large cheese, a comb and rum. And so the rec-
ord goes on day by day and year by year.” Valley of the Kedron

“The favorite beverage was sling, so called, a drink composed of equal parts of spirits and water sweetened: gin,
the liquor commonly used, but brandy almost as often, and the quantity one gill, as a rule. A glass of rum cost
3d.; a glass of brandy 4 ½ d., equal to six and a quarter cents; a gin sling cost 7 d., and a brandy sling 9d. For
th
brandy and biscuit a man paid one shilling. If you looked into the store the 27 day of March, 1796, plenty of
customers were there, and every man took a drink. Captain William Ellis enjoyed his two glasses of brandy
sling, Jabez Hammond his two drinks of brandy, David Mack his one glass of the same. Thirst is perennial in
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the human family, and this thing continued every day. March 29 Bial Farnsworth bought his pint of rum for
one shilling and four pence, and paid a shilling for a card of gingerbread, while Noah Winslow took only a pen-
nyworth, about one finger’s width, from another card. And so the appetite ran among the good people. Nathan
Avery took his glass of brandy and half card of gingerbread, dropped a ninepence on the counter, and still re-
mained in debt for his entertainment. In those times a man’s wages were from fifty cents to seventy-five cents a
day, and it did not take many drinks to sweep the day’s earnings all off. Yet these drinks of gin sling, brandy
sling, brandy smashes, rum toddy, etc. taken at the stores, shops, and shanties about the town, wherever goods
of any description were sold at retail, embraced but a small portion of the precious beverage the fathers were
accustomed to drink.” History of Woodstock
What They Drank at the early Tavern Stands

In 1815 and 1816, the drink of choice was Sling. A Sling was essentially a one-to-one blend of water and spirit
with a touch of sugar and citrus. There were gin and brandy Slings. Other drinks available were brandy, wine,
punch, rum, hard cider, bitters, gin, eggnog, and Flip.

It appears, according to a tavern account book from 1815, that Flip was generally drank around Christmas and
the New Year. Flip was a blend of beer; rum; a sweetener such as molasses, sugar or dried pumpkin; and occa-
sionally eggs and cream. It was often mixed in a pitcher, spiced with nutmeg and then heated and singed by
plunging a hot fire poker (often called a flip-dog) into the middle of the drink. The poker would whip the entire
thing into a froth—adding earthy, burnt flavors—and then the barkeep would decant portions into ceramic flip
mugs.
Traditional Flip
This recipe appeared in the meticulously researched Stage-Coach and Tavern Days, written by Al-
ice Morse Earle in the early 1900s:
Keep grated Ginger and Nutmeg with a fine dried Lemon Peel rubbed together in a Mortar. To
make a quart of Flip: Put the Ale on the Fire to warm, and beat up three or four Eggs with four
ounces of moist Sugar, a teaspoon of grated Nutmeg or Ginger, and a Quartern of good old Rum or
Brandy. When the ale is near to boil, put it into one pitcher, and the Rum and Eggs, etc., into an-
other: turn it from one Pitcher to another till it is as smooth as cream. To heat plunge in the red
hot Loggerhead or Poker. This quantity is styled One Yard of Flannel.
Forgotten Drinks of Colonial New England

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