It's 1630, and the survivors from the Mayflower's voyage are trying to endure- a decade on - in this harsh new world. In this depiction of the colony, Ms. Nesbit upends the usual telling and focuses much of her narrative on the firsthand experiences of the women in New Plymouth. Bitter jealousies and clashes between the Puritans on one side and the hired hands and indentured servants on the other blend a potent brew.
Thanks to alcohol historians consulting the journals and diaries of our forebears, we not only know that the colonists drank - a lot - we know what they drank. Beer, ale, rum and whiskey were all high on the list, so I started there because I wanted to pay homage with a drink that would have been coeval with the events in Beheld - something like the magnificently named Rattle Skull, which may have rattled many a patron at many a tavern within the colonies. But there are more than a handful of ingredients in that drink. Colonial Spirits, by Steven Grasse, describes it this way:
RATTLE SKULL:
1.25 cups brown ale
1 oz. gold rum
1 oz. brandy
1 oz. lime juice
.5 oz. brown sugar syrup
.5 oz. nutmeg syrup
Pinch of pepper
Pinch of salt
Freshly grated nutmeg for garnish
And while that sounds beautiful we need to remember that in New Plymouth, in 1630, Alice Bradford, the wife of the Governor of the Colony, will tell us in Beheld that "beauty is a vanity," and I wouldn't want to offend her sensibilities, so I sought something a little less ostentatious and settled on the Flip. A Hot Flip would probably be more true to the time, but I wasn't about to let Alice direct me too strongly from her grave, so I played around with a cold Flip.
Besides, there's a moment when Alice, at the instigation of her husband, is being particularly odious to her neighbor, Eleanor Billington, and has the arrogance to toss a precious egg to the floor inside Eleanor's home. So for that, Alice, I wanted to make sure that I'd be throwing an egg into your drink, and Flips call for eggs.
The main part of the drink had to be ale, because there's a lot of ale-drinking going on in these pages. Instead of rum, which is usual in a Flip, I decided to use pear brandy. Before she would travel to Plymouth, Alice and her best friend, Dorothy, would go searching for a boy, a particular boy that Dorothy wanted, and they would finally find him while Dorothy's mother stood in the market nearby, testing pears for ripeness. So that moment gave me my brandy.
Maple trees are abundant on the Colony's land, so I'd sweeten things up with a maple simple syrup. I'd finish up with a bit of salt, a bit of pepper, and a drop sassafras, sassafras being one of the things the Colony sent to London to pay off their debt.
For the name of the drink, I'd borrow a phrase from the Wampanoag, the indigenous people who showed the colonists how to grow the three sisters - corn, squash and beans (though they would receive little credit for the knowledge they shared) - but for our purposes, the Sisters would be ale, brandy, and syrup.
All that, then, is what goes into your glass. So take a sip, get through the winter, and come Spring, you'll be ready to behold what Ms. Nesbit has created.THREE SISTERS:
1 cup brown ale
2 oz. pear brandy
.5 oz. maple simple syrup
1 raw egg
Pinch of salt
Pinch of pepper
2 dashes sassafras bitters
Dry shake all the ingredients - except the ale - until emulsified. Shake some more. Add ice and shake even harder, even longer. Strain into a chilled pint glass already holding the ale. It helps to have a glass from the 1700s, but any pint glass will do.
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