Mother's Ruin? Gin is cleaner than water
A recipe for Gin-and-tonic jelly
My father took me to task when I was young enough still to be living at home but old enough for him to want to teach me how to tackle alcohol. For my safety’s sake, you understand. (I have been through some fierce debates on this subject with American friends who consider highly irresponsible the French approach of adding wine to the water glasses of children to imbue them with a respect for its pleasures, and so avoid drinking alcohol for its potency and associated dangers.) He accused me, quite rightly, of being a glugger not a sipper.
No longer the case. I’ve just been introduced to L’Ort, a French gin which cost me €47/$50 and a small outbreak of sweat. At that price, it is definitely not for glugging. At least it didn’t cost the same amount as Morus LXIV by Jam Jar Gin. That gin is distilled with the leaves from one single 100-year old Mulberry tree and costs £4000 a bottle, almost $5000. Bottoms up! If you’re feeling parsimonious, you can buy Ferdinand's Saar Goldcap Dry Gin from Germany, produced once a year only, which may explain why it costs £94/$117. Or may not.
I can write freely of just how wonderful L’Ort is because you can only buy it in Southwest France, so the company is not going to pay me for this useless mention.
Britain is batty for gin. These days, the number of distilleries taking up the production of Mother's Ruin in all its possible flavour profiles is staggering. The country’s national drink, there are now 821 gin distilleries in the UK with over 200 brands nationally available and almost three times more variants. If you add gins created to appeal to very local markets, there are around 1,722 of them all told - nearly one for every city. In the USA, almost 40 times bigger than the UK, there are a mere 706 brands nationwide to chose from.
And you thought gin boiled down to Beefeaters, Gordon’s, Seagrams, and Tanqueray? That last is America’s most popular brand, with 1.4 million 9-litre cases sold in 2022.
Gin came to the UK from the Netherlands, where it is known as ‘jenever’, with the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 that landed William of Orange on the English throne. The Dutch king was a jenever fan so lowered barriers to domestic production and raised taxes on imported spirits.
Black Friars is the UK’s oldest distillery still working, launched in 1793 in Plymouth, in a building constructed in 1431 as a monastery of the Dominican Order known as Black Friars. It began to standardise and improve production of the cheap, readily available drink that, being cheaper than wine or beer, had become by the 18th century a major contributor to the social problems among the poor of the day. The Royal Navy, Plymouth-based and globally deployed, carried it on their ships, introducing it to the wider reaches of the world.
If you wonder why I would be writing about gin, it’s because the news on other liquids we pour into ourselves is pretty dire. We may have to abandon water in favour of gin. In Britain, the level of water contamination in our rivers is so great that rowers in last month’s Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, the equivalent, perhaps, of the College Football Playoff National Championship in the US, were banned from the traditional dunking of the victors and losers in the River Thames for fear of them ingesting droplets of water. Even so, some of the team apparently suffered the effects of E.coli, present along stretches of the river’s course.
Now Nestlé, the world’s largest bottled water company and producer of Perrier, Vittel, Contrex, and Hépar bottled waters, was last week accused of bottling natural mineral water from sources contaminated with bacteria, including E. coli and intestinal enterococci (which can indicate possible faecal waste contamination), pesticides and so-called ‘forever chemicals’. The company attempted, against permitted processes, to make the water safe by using ultraviolet treatment and activated carbon filters.
Gin is known, of course, not just as Mother’s Ruin, but Mother’s Milk. So, skipping the Gin part, what’s up with milk? Its popularity is tumbling. In the UK, consumption of cow’s milk has fallen almost 50 percent since 1974. In the US, it has decreased every single one of the last seven decades, down in 2019 to 0.49 cups a person per day, barely enough for your cereal, from almost double that in 1970. The industry believes this is down to customer concern for the welfare of cows. 84 percent of Europeans, according to a recent survey, feel the welfare of all farm animals should be better protected. American consumers are concerned about the level of growth hormones fed to US cows and passed on in their milk. So until dairy milk drinkers are convinced improved conditions and regulations are in place, they’re moving over to plant-based dairy products. Which are also not a story with a happy ending but in fact turning into a bit of a nightmare.
Oat milk, the most popular alt-milk, has come under fire from nutritionists who point out that oats are a grain and grains are starch which, when processed into milk, become a liquid with an elevated quantity of glucose. One glass of cows’ milk provides 8g of carbohydrates, oat milk around 15-20g. Oat milk also lacks the protein provided by cows’ milk. A glass of cows’ milk contains 8-10g of protein per glass, oat milk 2.5g. And don’t even think about almond milk with its trees’ dependence on impossible quantities of water and the transportation by truck of millions of bees for almond flower pollination purposes.
I’m told gin is not bad on cornflakes. I leave it to you to experiment. I’m going back to milk from cows that are free to roam in open pasture until such time that governments address the critical issue of gas emissions from coal and stop developing mines, instead of blaming ozone depletion on cow farts.
Gin-and-tonic jellies make a light and witty end to a celebratory meal and take only minutes to create.
4 gelatine leaves
125g/ 4¼ oz caster sugar
125ml/ 4¼ fl oz gin (the better the gin, the better the jelly)
150ml/5 fl oz tonic water
light squeeze of lemon or lime juice
paper-thin slices of lemon or lime to decorate
Cover gelatine with cold water in a bowl and leave to soak for 15 minutes, until soft.
Melt the sugar over low heat in 225ml/generous 7½ fl oz water. Stir to dissolve then bring to the boil until syrupy.
Squeeze the water out of the gelatine and add to the sugar syrup stirring till melted. Stir in the gin, tonic water and small squeeze of lemon juice. If there’s any froth on the surface, skim it off then strain through a sieve into a jug.
Pour into eight 50ml/1 3/4 fl oz shot glasses and chill until set, 4 hours or overnight. Make a cut on each lemon slice from the skin to the centre and press a slice on to each glass edge then serve.
From Mother’s Milk to cow’s milk. The proliferation of gin distilleries has been, for gin drinkers like me, a delight. I kept expecting you to quote W. C. Fields: “I never drink water because of all the disgusting things fish do in it.”
I like that you pivoted from gin to milk. What an interesting train of thought! 😀 FWIW, I may have had gin once in my life. I think my husband ordered G&Ts on our 2nd date in a French restaurant in Adam’s-Morgan DC.