The Perfect (Gin and) Tonic for 2022...a recipe and blog by Bethany Groff Dorau

I am a high school drop-out. Around about 1990, convinced that I had nothing left to learn in high school, and possessed of an insatiable urge to hang out with my friends and haunt the smoky doorways of clubs like The Channel and Man Ray, I gave the remainder of my secondary education a hard pass. It didn’t last. Three years and a whole lot of waitressing later, I arrived at UMass Amherst clutching my GED and fell completely in love with history.

Professor Neal R. Shipley was not the first professor who I passionately adored, but he was the one who fostered my love for the subversive side of history, my belief that as much can be learned by studying those who broke the rules as those who made them. I remember his description of the autopsy of a famous nicotine poisoning victim in France, the smell of the Thames River in the middle of the 19th century, so foul that it knocked men unconscious. He recited the lyrics to a naughty song from the trenches of World War I with obvious delight and draped the history of gin around the slums of London and the khakied empire builders of India like a tatty feather boa.

I came from a dry house. My great-aunt Emily hid the elderly bottle of cooking wine in the cellar stairway, behind ancient cans of SPAM, and I can say, hand on my heart, that I was a complete novice when I had my first sip of foamy beer from a keg hidden in the woods near March’s Hill.

I was never much of a drinker, though I had my moments. Thank goodness I came of age at a time when any picture taken of us had to pass the scrutiny of the guy in the booth at Fotomat, and so these moments remain blessedly undocumented.

But I digress. At the end of my undergraduate years at UMass, Neal Shipley gave me an extraordinary gift. He sent me to Oxford. Or to be precise, he helped to find ways to fund a few months abroad and gave me a research project that could only be completed at Oxford.

I was shoehorned into an existing study program, so I had room and board at Trinity College, and off I went. And in the stone halls and paneled rooms of Oxford, I found myself in possession of one sublime gin and tonic after another.

Up to that point, everything I knew about gin I had learned from Neal Shipley. Most scholars agree that we have the Netherlands, and William of Orange in particular, to thank for gin.

As our Newbury brethren were soberly (ha!) establishing this community, British soldiers fighting in the Netherlands were drinking a local elixir made with juniper (“jenever” in Dutch), thought to cure the plague (sadly, untrue).

When William of Orange ascended to the English throne in 1689, one of his first acts was to encourage British production “of brandy and spirits from corn (grain)…” to alleviate a shortage caused by hostilities with France. The British drinking public was happy to consume their domestic elixir in quantity, and gin consumption skyrocketed. By 1743, cheap spirits were consumed at a rate of 2.2 gallons per capita per year, a ten-fold increase from 1700.

I remember staring, slack-jawed at the 1751 Hogarth print “Gin Lane,” projected onto the walls of Shipley’s classroom as he explained that by the mid-18th century, the regulatory tide had turned firmly against domestic distilling. There was a real social cost to all this imbibing, for sure, but the crackdown on gin was helped along by a strong pro-beer lobby, painting beer drinkers as orderly and respectable next to the pie-eyed, slatternly gin-soak.

Gin itself became a symbol of social issues, with Dickens, a century, later opining, “gin-drinking is a great vice in England, but wretchedness and dirt are a greater (vice).”

But it is malaria, and the British empire in India that we must thank for the gin and tonic. As the British arrived in India in droves in the 19th century, they discovered that quinine, contained in the bark of the chinchona tree, was the key to combating ubiquitous malaria. Some genius convinced his fellow squatters that the best way to get the bitter quinine down the hatch was to combine it with gin, water, sugar and lemon.

None of what I learned of gin in Neal Shipley’s class rendered the substance particularly attractive. It seemed that drinking gin was a straight path to becoming an insane wastrel, sharing scraps in the gutter with the rats. Nor did I wish to choke down a medicinal concoction known primarily for its bitterness.

But, since the first time I read C.S. Lewis and Tolkien, I have believed that the good dons of Oxford hold the secrets of the world, and so this is how, another century after the death of Queen Victoria and British India, I nodded and smiled when handed a G&T in the office of one of my professors.

That first sip was one of the great surprises of my life. Far from the syrupy medicinal slug I was expecting, it was light, dry, sparkly, endlessly lovely. Perfect. I did not morph into a Victorian guttersnipe. I came to love an afternoon G&T with my soggy cheese and pickle sandwich.

This year, I have moved into the previously unexplored realm of mulled gin, fingered as a prime contributor to a notorious Christmas Day shooting in Newburyport in 1883.

To make a long story short, one Lena Barrett West, under the influence of “hot gin,” shot Arthur Currier twice for “insulting her” at the Bay State House, a hotel on Merrimac Street. “I drank four or five times on Tuesday,” she said, “always hot gin.” She had been ill, she explained, and had imbibed Christmas morning on her way to the Bay State House, “had three hot gins before going,” and again Christmas night, when “I had trouble in the bar room.”

Hot, or mulled gin has its own fascinating history. It first became wildly popular in the 18th century winter markets along (and on) the Thames, known as Frost Fairs. The cheap, rot-gut spirit was made palatable with the addition of citrus, honey and spices, and warmed imbibers both inside and out.

I like a hot gin on a cold day, though it is not so much a staple of my drink rotation as the G&T. My favorite hot gin has a splash of amaro for depth, but you should experiment with what makes your toes tingle.

Mix 3/4 cup of water in a pan with the rest of the ingredients and heat on low until steaming. Strain the mixture and pour over gin. Garnish with lemon slice. If no cardamom is available, a light grate of nutmeg is a nice addition.

Try not to shoot anyone at the Bay State House after drinking this.

And so, my fellow history lovers, I raise my glass to you at the end of another wild year. I wish you safety and health, and a lovely sip of whatever warms your spirit.

And Professor Shipley, wherever you are, thank you for everything, even the drink in my hand.