Newly discovered evidence suggests that rum
production predates the Caribbean by at least 1,000 years and may began in
South East Asia. Dave Wondrich’s article
says that rum may have conceived years before the Caribbean even got its first
sugarcane.
Which brings us to rum. The start line for the spirit's History has
traditionally been drawn on the Caribbean island of Barbados in 1645, give or
take a year, with English colonists responsible for its invention. A few modern
historians take a somewhat wider view. Frederick H. Smith, in his
groundbreaking 2005 study Caribbean Rum, observes that cane distillation was
recorded in Martinique in 1640, and that it may have been brought to both that
island and Barbados by Dutch colonists fleeing the Portuguese reconquest of
northern Brazil, occupied by the Dutch since 1630. The Dutch may have started
the practice there or picked it up from the Portuguese colonists.
This doesn’t really surprise me, considering that sugarcane had its
beginning in different locations in Southeast Asia. Sugarcane originated in tropical South Asia and Southeast Asia. Different
species likely originated in different
locations with S. barberi originating in India and S. edule and S. officinarum
coming from New Guinea. Originally,
people chewed sugarcane raw to
extract its sweetness.
Reaching yet further into that murk,
and further by quite a bit, and highlight a few documents that have not been
generally included in the History of rum. They come not from the Caribbean, or
the New World at all, but from Asia. In the absence of a comprehensive history
of distillation in that vast, and vastly diverse, continent, they are widely
scattered and lacking in context, but that does not mean they should be left
out of the History of rum, as thus far most have been.
The first is a section of the Ain-i-Akbari, the "Constitution of
Akbar," a work (in Persian) compiled around 1590 by Abu'l Fazl ibn
Mubarak, Grand Vizier to Akbar, the Moghul Emperor of India, whose realm,
encompassing northern India, parts of Afghanistan and the eastern parts of
Iran, held a fifth of the world's population. In a survey of all the useful
plants to be found in that empire, Abu'l Fazl includes a section on sugar cane.
After briefly discussing the types of cane and their cultivation, he adds (in
H. Blochmann's 1873 translation) that "sugarcane is also used for the
preparation of intoxicating liquor."
First, he explains, the cane is pounded together with acacia bark (here,
I believe, as preservative) and then the juice is fermented for a week or
longer. Sometimes unrefined sugar is added, or other aromatics, or even pieces
of meat. Then the liquid is strained and sometimes drunk as is. However, as
Abu'l Fazl adds, "it is mostly employed for the preparation of
arrack."
Like "salsa,"
"arrack," also written as "rack," is one of those words
that, though they have perfectly clear equivalents in English, are rarely
translated, thus making the things they designate sound exotic. In this case,
the word means simply "distilled spirit" and is applied to local
spirits from the Eastern Mediterranean all the way to the Indonesian
archipelago, encompassing a variety of liquors as different from each other as
mezcal and Cherry Heering. In India alone, in the 1500s, it could be made from,
among other things, palm sap, cashew fruit, mahua-tree leaves or, as in this
case, sugar cane.
Abu'l Fazl then goes on to describe
precisely how this cane arrack is made, detailing-and quite accurately-the
three different kinds of still used (to modern students of the history of
distillation these are known as the "Gandharan," for which see below,
the "Mongolian" and the "Chinese") and adding that "some
distil the arrack twice, when it is called Duátasha, or twice burned; it is
very strong." The geography part,
at least, is easy: although cane was grown in various parts of the Indian
subcontinent, its historical heartland was a broad swath of territory running
along the Himalayas from Kandahar, in what is now Afghanistan, all the way
through Lahore and Delhi and Calcutta to the Bay of Bengal. By the 1500s, the
industry was centered in the province of Bengal-modern Bangladesh. As for its consumption, we know one thing:
its use need not have been confined to the empire's non-Muslim subjects. The
Moghuls were imperfect Muslims in this respect, and alcohol was frequently
consumed at all levels of Moghul society, right up to the very Emperors
themselves, all of whom were topers, and some of them to notorious excess.
This is only a short synopsis of the article, that if you are interested
in can be read in its entirety at
https://www.thedailybeast.com/forget-the-caribbean-was-rum-invented-in-india
https://www.thedailybeast.com/forget-the-caribbean-was-rum-invented-in-india
