SC - Re: sca-cooks V1 #371

[L Herr-Gelatt and J R Gelatt]

At 2:57 PM -0700 10/16/97, Marisa Herzog wrote:

>...Are there any "period" "sodas"?  Gingerbeer?  Birchbeer?  ale... etc?

I think that depends on what you mean by "soda." There are slightly
alcoholic fizzy drinks, such as Kenelm Digby's "Weak Honey Drink," which we
generally refer to as small mead and which is flavored with ginger (the
recipe was published mid 17th century; I know of no reason to believe that
it was a novelty then). My guess is that our sodas evolved from such
drinks. You start with a drink that is fizzy due to CO2 from fermentation,
and at some point (I would guess 19th century) you start putting the CO2 in
directly, which saves the trouble of fermenting and gives you a drink which
is non-alcoholic instead of 1% or so alcohol.

For non-fizzy non-alcoholic drinks, you have sekanjabin and its relatives
(_Manuscrito Anonimo_, a 13th c. Andalusian cookbook, has a whole chapter
of them), possibly Platina's Oxymel (it isn't clear if he drank it, or was
merely showing off his classical erudition), and I suspect other things of
the same sort.

But I doubt that there were any completely non-alcoholic fizzy drinks,
because I can't think of any plausible way they could have made them. But
perhaps someone else can.

David/Cariadoc
http://www.best.com/~ddfr/


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