Book description
Now revised, updated, and with new recipes, And a Bottle of Rum tells the raucously entertaining story of this most American of liquors
From the grog sailors drank on the high seas in the 1700s to the mojitos of Havana bar hoppers, spirits and cocktail columnist Wayne Curtis offers a…
Why read it?
2 authors picked And a Bottle of Rum as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Originally published with Broadway Books in 2006, it was revised and updated for publication with Penguin Random House in 2018. Curtis is a talented writer and storyteller, and I found his book fun to read. He creatively uses different rum-based cocktails to tell entertaining stories of America histories.
He addresses New England rum making, colonial taverns, the American Revolution, America’s nineteenth-century struggle with Demon Rum, American Prohibition, Ernest Hemingway, the emergence of tiki culture, temperance movements, the Spanish-American War, pirates and drunken sailors, and other popular topics. Curtis also introduces the reader to popular rum-based cocktail recipes.
From Frederick's list on Caribbean rum and the making of the modern world.
Curtis reaches to bestselling author Robert Lewis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) for the song identified with sailors and pirates:
Fifteen men on the dead man's chest—
...Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
Drink and the devil had done for the rest—
...Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
Whiskey and gin are sidelined as rum takes first prize in this chronicle of Caribbean and South Seas pirates and privateers, sugar barons, and rum drinks from grog to the daiquiri and Cuba Libre (my Key West favorite).
This ten-cocktail capsule of New World history reshuffles history classroom categories to join recent accounts…
From Cecelia's list on America’s cocktail culture.
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