Every Home a Distillery: Alcohol, Gender, and Technology in the Colonial Chesapeake (Early America: History, Context, Culture)

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Description

In this original examination of alcohol production in early The usa, Sarah Hand Meacham uncovers the a very powerful role women played in cidering and distilling in the colonial Chesapeake. Her fascinating story is one defined by gender, class, technology, and changing patterns of production.

Alcohol used to be essential to colonial life; the region’s water used to be foul, milk used to be normally unavailable, and tea and coffee were far too expensive for all but the very rich. Colonists used alcohol to drink, in cooking, as a cleaning agent, in beauty products, and as medicine. Meacham finds that the distillation and brewing of alcohol for these purposes traditionally fell to women. Advice and recipes in such guidebooks as The Accomplisht Ladys Delight demonstrate that women were the main producers of alcohol until the middle of the 18th century. Men, mostly small planters, then supplanted women, the use of new and less expensive technologies to make the region’s cider, ale, and whiskey.

Meacham compares alcohol production in the Chesapeake with that in New England, the middle colonies, and Europe, finding the Chesapeake to be far more isolated than even the other American colonies. She explains how home brewers used new technologies, such as small alembic stills and reasonably priced cider pressing machines, in their alcoholic enterprises. She links the importation of coffee and tea in The usa to the temperance movement, showing how the rich became concerned with alcohol consumption only after they found something less inebriating to drink.

Taking a couple of pages from recent guidebooks, Every Home a Distillery includes samples of historic recipes and instructions on how to make alcoholic beverages. American historians will find this study both enlightening and surprising.

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