Mahogany

William Hogarth's Gin Lane

In 1781, Boswell and Johnson were in Devon, visiting their friend Joshua Reynolds. It was ‘a most agreeable day’ and many acquaintances were present, among them the Cornishman Edward Craggs-Eliot, who would become the first Baron Eliot of Port-Eliot three years later. Of the few details recounted of this meeting by Boswell in his Life of Johnson, the following caught my attention:

Mr. Eliot mentioned a curious liquor peculiar to his country, which the Cornish fishermen drink. They call it Mahogany; and it is made of two parts gin, and one part treacle, well beaten together. I begged to have some of it made, which was done with proper skill by Mr. Eliot. I thought it very good liquor.

That’s what we’re about here: Mahogany. It sounded curious so I thought I'd make my own. To mix the treacle effectively with the gin, at least one of the ingredients has to be warmed. Treacle would be more difficult to clean off, so I’m warming the gin instead. As it gently warms, I thought I might consider the drink's history.

In Cornwall, it is mentioned several times, including once in 1865 by Robert Hunt in his Popular Romances of the West of England, where it is mentioned in passing with other 'Peculiar Words and Phrases'. Fred Jago, who lived in Bodmin and wrote The Ancient Language and the Dialect of Cornwall in 1882, included Mahogany in his glossary, describing it simply as ‘Gin sweetened with treacle’. In both sources, Mahogany is placed in Cornwall.

A variation of the drink is mentioned in nineteenth century American literature too. Mark Twain, for example, in an 1863 article for The Golden Era passingly references gin and molasses as a sort of tonic, one of several brews the writer uses to cure his cold. Similarly, in the 1851 Moby Dick, a young sea-hand also suffering from a cold is given ‘a pitch-like potion of gin and molasses’ at The Spouter Inn, by the old man Jonah, ‘which he swore was a sovereign cure for all colds and catarrhs whatsoever, never mind of how long standing, or whether caught off the coast of Labrador, or on the weather side of an ice-island.’

Eliot did not mention it as a medicine – or, at least, Boswell did not mention Eliot mentioning it – though given the histories of the ingredients it might have cured almost anything one could pick up at sea.

The history of treacle seems to start with the Greek word theria, meaning ‘wild animals’. The word is present not only in the modern word treacle but also in zoology, the Theria being a subclass of mammals that includes all mammals that give birth to live young – so everything other than the monotremes/prototheria. From theria came the word theriac, a type of medicine used to counteract bites from these ‘wild animals’. In the early seventeenth century Edward Topsell, compiler of some fantastic bestiaries, suggested that the word came to be used as much for its inclusion of these wild animals in its list of ingredients as for its use counteracting their poison. In antiquity, the theriac developed out of its role as a curative for venomous bites and became almost a panacea, appropriate for treating ailments diverse as asthma and the plague.

Pliny refers to a complicated ‘Mithridatic’ recipe for theriac containing fifty-four ingredients. Galen’s brew went further, with more than seventy components, including viper flesh, opium and honey. Honey was used partly for its own healing properties, but also to make the medicine more palatable. Here we have the sweet element of the cure-all treacle, but the treacle we now know is a by-product of sugar rather than honey. The story of sugar in Europe started in India, where it was grown and from where it spread. Medieval Arab traders took it to Islamic countries and then European crusaders in the twelfth century brought it back with them and the Venetians in particular started developing and trading. The by-product of raw cane sugar is molasses, and the by-products of refining sugar are the various grades of treacle.

In the eighteenth century, when theriac had become discredited as a cure-all, it retained a shadow of its curative glory as a vague tonic, a sweet, syrupy salve. Johnson and Boswell were naturally aware of both meanings (though the only mention of treacle in Johnson's dictionary, I believe, is in a medicinal context, under the entry for ‘Salve’), but Boswell is using ‘treacle’ in its more common and modern form, as a by-product of sugar refinement.

Gin too had transformed into something more palatable, though its history was recent. It is said to be Dutch in origin, developed through the seventeenth century when it was sold as a medicine and introduced to England. Relaxed rules on household distilleries meant that homemade gin became cheap, readily available, copiously drunk and a bit of a problem. This was the ‘gin craze’ reflected in Hogarth’s 1751 engraving, Gin Lane. The craze led to a 1736 ‘Gin Act’, intended to make it prohibitively expensive to produce and so to buy. Samuel Johnson opposed the law, as did the poor, leading to the ‘gin riots’. The 1736 Act was repealed and replaced in 1751 with a more plausible version that led to gin production and drinking becoming respectable and the booze better quality. It was following this gentrification of gin (gintrification?) that brands such as Gordon’s began with their thrice-distilled method. Bombay Sapphire also claim that their recipe dates back to the period. It seems unlikely that all of the private stills disappeared, so probably the cheaper, murkier sugar-sweetened forms were available at the same time. The original fishermen’s Mahogany would likely have been made with the rougher stuff, and although Eliot’s gin of choice is not known, it would have been a finer, drier drink. (It would not have been a ‘Plymouth gin’, the first firm across the river being founded the following decade, in 1793.) For my own brew, I’ve followed the Boswell-Eliot model, using Gordon’s, though if I were to serve it in a bar I might insist on one of the new Cornish brands like Tarquin’s or Elemental. Two parts Gordon’s to one part Lyle’s Black Treacle.

The red treacle tin is a lovely design, with its iconic dead lion and swarming bees. It is meant to remind us of the lion Samson killed near the vineyards of Timnah. The lion came bowling up to Samson roaring, so Samson killed the lion and tore it to bits before going down into Timnah to speak to a woman. He went on to marry this woman, and on his way to the wedding came across the lion again, which now had bees nesting in the carcass. Naturally, Samson stuck his hand in and ate the dead lion honey, sharing it with his parents. Later, he would infuriate guests at a feast by turning the occasion into an unfairly impossible riddle and betting that the revelers would not get it. They did not, until they bullied Samson’s (unnamed) new wife to betray him. She did, a blood bath ensued and Samson left his first wife.

I’m unsure what to take from the metaphor. Lyle took: ‘Out of the strong came forth sweetness’.

The drink is ready, and even the colour is medicinal, a bog-murk brown-black with jaundiced iodine viscosity. The smell is like molasses. On first sip, it is not as bad as expected. Sweet as tonic wine from the treacle but with a lingeringly sharp acid and juniper. I wonder how other styles of gin would improve it – the orange blossom, pine and cardamom of Tarquin’s, or the coriander and citrus of Elemental. 

It becomes less pleasurable the more one drinks. The longer aftertaste is of golden sugar, and while you might say the overall impression is ‘medicinal’, the sense I get is that I’m doing something rather bad to myself.

There was, incidentally, a footnote to the story of Boswell and Johnson and Mahogany, when in 1805 a piece of writing appeared entitled Dialogues of the Dead. Boz and Poz in The Shades. It was tacked onto the end of a critical work written by William Mudford about Samuel Johnson, though apparently it was not written by Mudford. Boz, of course, is Boswell, and Poz is Johnson. Both men are dead, in the play as in life, with Boswell having died from ‘Mahogany’, drinking himself to death, for which he is mocked. Boswell explains to Johnson that he had been introduced to the drink by ‘several of my friends, and I could not refuse them the pleasure they seemed to derive from seeing me drink it.’ When questioned further, he says:

Why, sir, I thought that as each ingredient was good in a separate state, they could not be bad in union. Gin, they told me, was at least wholesome, if not palatable; and what schoolboy, they asked, has not licked his lips over a roll and treacle?

As I persist, I wonder how I could have made the drink better. A drier gin? Or molasses? Maybe a different ratio? But I can’t imagine the proportions of treacle to gin ever being what I’d consider ‘right’, and now I’m looking at the last drop in the bottom of the flask with a little apprehension. I know I shall finish it, but following the Boswell story there’s a sense of mutuality, a sickly feeling that the Mahogany might finish me too.