Drinks of the world / by James Mew and John Ashton.

  • Mew, James.
Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Drinks of the world / by James Mew and John Ashton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    168/390 (page 160)
    they say mass, nor preach,1 and they are for the most part ignorant. But they make a boast to be excellent distillers of eau de najfd3 and other waters, both in Verona and elsewhere. Monastical liqueurs are worthy ol a paragraph to themselves. So long as monks have existed, they seem to have manifested a taste for the concoction of these drinks. We can scarcely pass the shop window of a liqueur-seller without having our attention attracted by what the French call a Kyrielle or litany of flasks of diverse forms, decorated with tickets bearing such titles as the following :—Liqueur des Chartreux, Liqueur des Benedictins, Liqueur des Cannes, Liqueur des Trappistes, Liqueur des Peres de Garaison, Liqueur du P. Kermann, and so on. A large volume might well be composed on these liqueurs alone. About their supposed virtues,—aperient, digestive, antiapo- plectic, antispasmodic, anticholeric, tonic, etc., that book might be well supposed likely to stretch out as far as the list of Banquo’s issue to the diseased imagi- nation of Macbeth. The search for the philosopher’s stone and the powder of projection was by no means wholly fruitless. It strengthened the hands of chemistry. It was also the cradle of liqueurs. In the early part of the middle ages the learned inhabitants of the convents 1 According to their first institution the Jesuits were not priests. This was conceded to them afterwards by Paul V. Their primitive principal occupation was the assistance of the sick* and the distil- lation of salutiferous waters, whence they were known as “padri del! acquavite,” or Fathers of brandies. 2 A liqueur made with the flower of citron.