beer, made from beer seed. The seed multiplied several hundred fold monthly, is my recollection. I know that a seed the size of a grain of sugar grew to be as large as buckshot rose gradually from the bottom of the container to the top then burst into hundreds of little ones and sank to the bottom again. It was mighty good with ginger cake during the war and beat sassafras tea. As it is made of water and cheap molasses, it will beat ice tea without sugar… and it is a healthful drink much better than root beer. It never intoxicates.
That California beer concoction would certainly ferment and therefore will intoxicate if you follow this recipe and consumed enough of it. The sugar from the sorghum would result in fermentation if it was aged a while. You are to be excused if you do not find all of this as fascinating as I do. Any careful study of the material culture below Mason & Dixon’s line during the 1860s must take note of the many differences in the basic food served as well as preparation methods and how it was served.
There was a recent television series produced where a group of modern people were trying to live in a Victorian-era home with
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no modern conveniences. If the thrust of it is remembered correctly, the modern contestants all nearly starved to death for lack of necessary basic culinary skills needed to cook food given the uneven temperatures produced by wood burning stoves of the era.
Craig L. Barry was born in Charlottesville, Va. He holds his BA and Masters degrees from the University of North Carolina The (Charlotte). Craig served Watchdog Civil War Quarterly as Associate Editor and Editor from 2003–2017. The Watchdog published books and columns on 19th-century material and donated all funds from publications to battlefield preservation. He is the author of several books including The Civil War Musket: A Handbook for Historical Accuracy The Unfinished (2006, 2011), Fight: Essays on Confederate Material Culture Vol. I and II (2012, 2013) and three books (soon to be four) in the Suppliers to the Confederacy series on English Arms & Accoutrements, Quartermaster stores and other European imports.