December has started off cold, which isn’t unusual, but dry, which is. A little. No predictions of much snow in the week ahead, either. I remember a lot of early Decembers around here with heavy snow to kick things off, a few times on December 1 exactly.
The subject of the mint julep came up today. The drink’s mentioned in The Great Gatsby, which Lilly is reading, and she asked me what it was in it. Besides the mint, I forgot for a moment, but then I remembered: bourbon. At least that’s what I sampled at the Kentucky Derby those many years ago, as one does. I didn’t cotton to it particularly.
Naturally, that led me to various web sites, mainly because I didn’t know the origin of the word julep. Bon Appétit tells me – and I’ll assume they do their food and beverage word homework – that “in the beginning (and likely a very early beginning, at that), the word was gul-ab, and the drink was Persian rosewater (gul = rose, ab = water). Gul-ab then moved through the normal channels (Arabic>Italian>French), until finally ‘julep’ shows up in English, around 1400, in a surgical textbook called Lanfranc’s Chirurgie (the old-timey word for ‘surgery’).
“There, it’s described as a ‘sirup maad oonly of water & of sugre,’ mixed with more medicinal ingredients to make them easier to swallow. So by the 15th century, ‘julep’ had lost its floral notes, and had moved into meaning any kind of soothing, sweet drink.
“By the late 1700s, though, the Atlantic seems to have split the julep into two camps. In Europe, it was still a general term for a sweet drink, including something with medicinal properties, but hard-drinking Americans had codified it into a cold cocktail, served with sugar, ice, and some kind of aromatic herb. Speed up to 1804, when an American writer credited his love of whiskey to ‘mixing and tasting my young master’s juleps.’ So we know that whiskey was a major component, but in the 19th century, juleps were also made with brandy and (surprisingly) gin.”
One more thing about the julep, from Wiki. No footnote, but I believe it: “Since 2006, Churchill Downs has also served extra-premium custom-made mint juleps at a cost of $1000 each at the Kentucky Derby. These mint juleps were served in gold-plated cups with silver straws, and were made from Woodford Reserve bourbon, mint imported from Ireland, spring water ice cubes from the Bavarian Alps, and sugar from Australia. [Why Australia?] The proceeds were used to support charitable causes dedicated to retired race horses.”
