Hot chocolate and whipped cream is only the newest in a long line of drinks that originated in Central America. Since humans began using cacao to make chocolate drinks, they have whipped it up to form foamy heads that delighted the tastes. The Spanish adopted these drinks during Conquest. Many foamy drinks are still found in Mexico today, and include tejate, bu’pu, popo, and pozol.
In the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts, indigenous peoples have long used the fruit of various cactus species to make wine. The prickly pear cactus makes a wine called Colonche in the Mexican Altiplano. In the Sonoran desert, natives use saguaro cactus fruit and organ pipe cactus fruit to make nawait wine. The fruit is almost always peeled and crushed and then left to ferment. These wines are still made today in some communities, but have lost some of their traditional meanings.
Ancient Mayan enemas were real. Mayans used hollow tools to pour alcohol into their anuses. This has been an accepted fact in Mesoamerican scholarship since the 1970s. The Mayan may have done this for health reasons as the wine had probiotics. They also likely attributed religious significance to the act, considering that alcohol had spiritual importance to them. Finally, they have have performed alcoholic enemas simply to get drunk quicker.
Tequila’s predecessor, pulque, has been around for thousands of years. The Aztecs developed a method for tapping agave plants for their sap. The people who performed this task were known as tlachiqueros and were experts in collecting and fermenting agave into an alcoholic drink. This industry still exists today, but has been hurt by the tequila industry and modernization.
The Columbian biological exchange transformed the living world. Just as sicknesses were passed between Europeans and indigenous Amerindians, the grape vines of the New World passed diseases to the Old World. These diseases, including powdery mildew, downy mildew, and phylloxera vastatrix, would decimate European vineyards and change the future of viticulture forever.
The religious exception to the Volstead Act allowed for Jewish and Catholic Americans to continue using wine in their ceremonies. This exemption was abused by thousands of Americans who took advantage of the fact that rabbis were not officially selected. Irishmen and others formed new Jewish congregations and became fake rabbis to get their hands on wine during Prohibition.
From the 1880s until 1913, Americans were buying alcohol in the mail in states where the sale of alcohol was prohibited. Liquor dealers advertised in newspapers or sent around circulars advertising their wares. They shipped the out-of-state hooch on the rails. Students and others were recruited to work for commissions of 50¢ per gallon and $1.50 per case when they delivered the alcohol.
While New Englanders relied on their infamous cold to strengthen their applejack, the neighboring Mid Atlantic states, particularly New York and New Jersey, were famous for their distilled applejack. Unlike New England’s frozen drink which was homemade and home-consumed, New Yorkers made big business with their apple brandy. A 1903 newspaper reported that Orange County, New York paid more in excise tax on distilled fruit than any other state in the Union.
Tea, and eventually coffee, dominated the palate of American bibulous life and yaupon, quite frankly, was never in favor for Europeans or their descendants. The poor who lived in yaupon-growing regions were the only Europeans (and Africans as slaves were brought over and discovered the stimulating drink) to regularly consume the drink. For this reason, America has only ever acknowledged that it has tea literally growing in its back yard during times of caffeine scarcity.
Simple sugars from fruit juices can spontaneously ferment without the addition of anything thanks to natural yeasts in the air. Starchier foods that we produce in much larger quantities, however, will not ferment without some help. Before specific yeasts and bacteria were isolated and reproduced in fermentations that were able to break down starches into simple sugars, saliva was our only option.
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