On food and cooking the science and lore of the kitchen ( PDFDrive ) 1428

life,” a term that lives on in Scandinavia (aquavit), in France (eau de vie), and in English: whisky is the anglicized version of the Gaelic for “water of life,” uisge beatha or usquebaugh, which is what Irish and Scots monks called their distilled barley beer Throughout the Old World, alchemists thought of distilled alcohol as a uniquely powerful substance, the quintessence or fifth element that was as fundamental as earth, water, air, and fire The first printed book devoted to distillation, Hieronymus Brunschwygk’s Liber de arte distillandi (1500), explained that the process achieves the separation of the gross from the subtle and the subtle from the gross, the breakable and destructible from the indestructible, the material from the immaterial, so as to make the body more spiritual, the unlovely lovely, to make the spiritual lighter by its subtlety, to penetrate with its concealed virtues and force into the human body to do its healing duty It’s this connection between distillation and the pure and ethereal that gives us our synonym for distilled alcohol, spirits From Medicine to Pleasure and Drug of Oblivion For several centuries after its discovery, aqua vitae was produced in apothecaries and monasteries and prescribed as a cordial, a medicine to stimulate the circulation (the word comes from the Latin for “heart”) It seems to have been liberated from the pharmacy and drunk for pleasure in the 15th century, when the terms Bernewyn a n d brannten Wein, ancestors of our word brandy that meant “burning” or “burnt” wine, appear in German laws about public drunkenness This is also when winemakers in the Armagnac region of southwest France began to distill their wine into spoilageresistant brandy for shipping to northern ...with its concealed virtues and force into the human body to do its healing duty It’s this connection between distillation and the pure and ethereal that gives us our synonym for distilled alcohol, spirits... and Drug of Oblivion For several centuries after its discovery, aqua vitae was produced in apothecaries and monasteries and prescribed as a cordial, a medicine to stimulate the circulation (the. .. from the Latin for “heart”) It seems to have been liberated from the pharmacy and drunk for pleasure in the 15th century, when the terms Bernewyn a n d brannten Wein, ancestors of our word brandy that meant “burning” or “burnt” wine,