The Women Behind the Stills: Mary the Prophetess, Stillroom Wives and Helen Cumming

Most men who picture a stillhouse see some big-bearded fellow like myself, sleeves rolled, stinking of mash and pipe smoke, fighting with a copper pot. I mean in these pages to pay off a debt long overdue. Every woman in history who ever made a decent spirit had to stand behind some fool man who took the credit for it. In my own house that fool is me, and I mean to pay it back with interest.

Mary of Alexandria and Her Gentle Bath

This craft was not born with a beard. Around the year three hundred after Our Lord, Zosimos of Panopolis, a Greek alchemist of Egypt, wrote down the work of a woman who came before him. She was Mary the Prophetess of Alexandria, called by some Maria the Jewess. Zosimos credits her with the tribikos, a still with three copper arms that ran the vapour off into three separate flasks. He credits her also with the water bath, which is a pot of hot water with the working vessel set inside it, so that the vessel heats gently and never scorches. The French still call it the bain-marie, or Mary's bath, and every cook in Paris honours an alchemist over his custard without knowing it. I have met men in Barnstead who have not found the thing yet.

Let the natural philosopher at his apparatus mark why the bath matters. Water at our elevation will get no hotter than its own boiling, about two hundred and twelve degrees by Mr. Fahrenheit's scale, whatever you curse at it and however many logs you throw on. Set your flowers, herbs or tender mash in a vessel within that bath and you cannot burn them. A gentle, steady fire is the first secret of all good distilling, and a woman wrote it down before Rome had finished falling over.

The Stillroom, the Limbeck and the Brewster

Come forward to old England and the colonies in the sixteen and seventeen hundreds. Every proper house of any size had a stillroom, and the lady of the house or her maid kept it. She ran a small still called a limbeck. That word is only alembic worn down by country mouths, and alembic came to us from the Arabic al-anbiq, which came in turn from an older Greek word for a cup. In that room she made rose water for the face, mint water for the gut, cordial waters for the heart, and a good deal more for the long winter evenings. She wrote every method down in her own hand in a stillroom book, or receipt book. She could distil rose water, set a bone and keep the accounts, while her husband's chief skill was falling asleep with his boots on.

Mrs. Martha Washington, the General's own lady, owned such a book in manuscript. It had been handed down through the women of her family and was full of distilled waters and cordials, and in seventeen and ninety-nine she gave it to her granddaughter Nelly Custis. The Father of Our Country had a book of distilling in his house that women wrote and kept, and I am confident he wrote not a word of it.

Go back further, to England in the Middle Ages, and you find that women brewed the ale. They were called alewives, and brewsters, for brewster was the feminine of brewer in the way that spinster was a woman who spins. The good wives brewed it, and the men drank it and called it their own idea. That one sentence is the whole history of government.

Helen Cumming's Red Flag and the Widows of New England

In the Speyside country of Scotland, in the early years of this century, a farm wife named Helen Cumming and her husband John worked a farm called Cardow and made whisky there. The excisemen hunted Speyside the way a hound hunts a ham bone. The old tale goes that whenever Helen saw the officers come over the hill, she ran a red flag up over the farm, and every still in the glen went into the bracken, under the hay or down the well. When the officers knocked at her door she took them into her kitchen and fed them, and they sat full of scones and tea while the whole valley hid its copper. I believe it is the only time in history a tax collector was paid in pastry to look the other way, and it worked better than gold. The place was licensed in eighteen and twenty-four, and they say she lived a good long time. I raise my jar to her.

Here in New England the women never quit the trade. Many a widow took the tavern licence or the retailer's licence after her husband died, because the selectmen would sooner license a widow than feed her out of the town poor fund. Very often she ran the business better than he had, having the habit of being sober during business hours. My own Aunt Thankful, on my mother's side, kept a tavern near the Suncook. She could take out a man's tooth, put his shoulder back in and brandy his pride, all before breakfast. It was she who first showed me that the worm tub belongs in the shade, so that the water stays cold. Every trick I have that is worth anything I got from a woman, and every trick that is worth nothing I made up myself.

Hoop Skirts, a Sheriff's Lady, and Barnaby's Trophy

In the late Rebellion, women on both sides were caught carrying quinine, morphine and letters through the picket lines, sewn into false linings and stashed under hoop skirts, for no young private wished to be the man who lifted the hem of a colonel's widow. A hoop skirt in 1863 could hide two pints of whiskey, a ham, a Bible and a small Episcopalian. Closer to home, a certain Merrimack County lawman, whom I shall not name for the sake of my liver and his pistol, has arrested me twice, and his missus has bought cordial from me three times. She calls it tonic for her nerves. Having met her husband, I believe her.

My bear Barnaby keeps his own accounts with the government. Last October a revenue man came up Route 28 on a hired gray mare, wearing a brand-new wool frock coat with brass buttons and a face like a boiled parsnip, and he stepped over Barnaby's chain. Barnaby rose off the woodpile like a black thundercloud, took the man's trouser seat in his jaws, and gave one long, thoughtful pull. It made a sound like a wet shingle tearing off a barn roof in a nor'easter. The fellow ran a mile down the turnpike with his hindquarters shining like a harvest moon. The mare came home to me on her own. Barnaby chewed the government wool for three days and then threw up the buttons on my porch in the shape of a small eagle, and I have nailed them over the door for luck.

What the Women Taught a Coppersmith

Mr. Silas McAllister, called Hacksaw, hammers the pots and swan necks at the Fort Wilkins foundry. He says the first person who ever told him his work was no good was a woman, and that she was right. When he was a young apprentice the Widow Lovejoy of Gilmanton ordered a water-bath still for her rose water and peppermint water. She raised steam in it, laid her ear to the lid seam, and told him:

"It hums, Mr. McAllister. A tight seam is quiet. A humming seam is a seam thinking about leaking."

She sent the pot back twice. The third time Silas put his own ear to the lid and heard a thin whistle, like a mosquito at a church window, which came from one rivet not seated. He has trusted his ear over his eye ever since. His mother, a dressmaker, taught him to lay out the cone of a swan neck as if it were a bonnet brim: she worked from a centre point, swung two arcs with a string and marked off the length of the edge. Before that he had spoiled three good sheets of copper. He still keeps her shears for paper patterns only.

Mrs. Hepzibah Drowne of Northwood had her new pot filled with well water and hung overnight above her grandmother's braided rug. By noon there was one drip the size of a shilling, from a hurried bottom rivet, and she docked the rug cleaning from his pay. Every pot that leaves the foundry now hangs full overnight first, and the men call it the Drowne test. A Barnstead widow once brought her late husband's dented still down to the foundry. She had laid it in a pine cradle under a patchwork quilt with a knitted bonnet on its cap, and she sang "Hush, my dear" past every farmhouse on the road. When Silas had beaten out the dent, annealed it and planished it, she ran her palm over the shoulder and said:

"Now he'd not know it."

The Experiment at the Still, Done as the Ladies Did It

A plain caution comes first. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, and I set this down for history and instruction, so that you may understand what the old women knew. The first step is the wash. Grain is cooked and cooled, or fruit crushed, or honey mixed with water, and then yeast is added and the vessel left in a warm room until it has bubbled itself out into a weak beer or wine of a few parts in a hundred spirit. Keep that room aired, for the fermenting gives off a gas that will smother a man without warning. Keep the heat low and steady. Use the water bath for flower waters. Grain needs a direct fire, but keep it low and stir the mash so it does not scorch, because hot and fast makes bad spirit and bad funerals.

The copper earns its keep in the vapour path. The hot vapour carries up a sulphur stink, and bright metal in the helmet, neck and line arm takes it out. As Silas puts it, a copper pot with a cheap neck is a fine coat with no buttons. Allow no lead anywhere, neither lead solder nor old salvaged pipe. Use silver solder or a good tight mechanical joint. In the run itself, throw out the foreshots, which carry the methanol, or wood spirit, that blinds and kills. Set aside the heads, which are sharp and smell of varnish. Keep the hearts, which are sweet and clean. Save the tails, which are oily and smell of wet dog, to run again. The stillroom wives changed their receiving glasses by nose and by patience, with many small jars in a row, and never by greed. Alcohol vapour catches fire faster than gossip in a sewing circle, so keep your joints tight and your air fresh, never leave a running still unwatched, and keep open flame away from wherever vapour gathers. When the run is done, rinse, scrub and dry your copper.

Ashes, Oak Shavings and the Blue-Flame Humbug

Cletus "Rabbit" Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, asks whether his uncle was right that hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg clean out bad heads. He was not. Coopers build barrels of white oak, whose pores stop themselves up. Red oak is so open in the grain that a man can blow pipe smoke through a stick of it. Oak shavings lend colour, tannin and a woody taste, but that is flavour and not medicine. Hardwood ash is full of potash, and ash soaked in water makes lye, which my Aunt Thankful used for soap. Lye is caustic and has no business near anything a man drinks. Silas adds that a thump keg redistils the vapour and does not strain it, so the foreshots and heads come off first whatever you put in. The shavings belong in a barrel and the ashes in a soap kettle.

Lastly, I strike a coin on my anvil to knock down the blue flame. Methanol burns pale blue, near the same as good spirit, so a spoonful of foreshots burns as pretty as a sapphire and will blind you all the same. The old saying that lead shows itself in a red or yellow flame is just as unreliable. The only way to keep poison out of the jar is to keep lead out of the still and make honest cuts. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest and your fire low.