| Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of...Huh? - Rum vs Rhum | | | | By: Jennifer Rosen |  Page 1 of 2 next >> |
We're going to veer off the wine path for a moment to address a phenomenon known as Rhum. The stuff has been showing up at my door a lot lately, equipped, like Barbie, with a host of cool accessories: flasks of pure-cane syrup, lime-squeezing gadgets, odd shaped glasses. It comes in the sort of exotic bottles that clog an industrial packing line, wrapped in raffia or leather and stoppered with glass or cork.
It practically screams "Important & Artisanal!" But beyond the art and the H, is Rhum any different from plain old rum? To find out, I set off on a research mission armed only with hot butter, a pair of coconut shells and a thousand tiny parasols.
The story starts with the sugar cane plant, native to Papua New Guinea. A restless vegetable, it managed to work its way through Asia, Africa, India and Spain before landing, along with Columbus in 1493, in the West Indies.
Sugar was not a cash cow at first for islanders. The process involved separating rough crystals from the industrial waste known as molasses, which was usually dumped in the sea. Then, one day, a Martinique priest by the name of Père Labat noticed that, if left alone, this sludge had a tendency to spontaneously ferment. He did what any man of God would do: he distilled it. And so rum was invented.
By the 1600s, the islands were carpeted with sugar plantations, most doubling as distilleries. Some molasses, though, was sent up north to New England where colonists fermented their own rum. This leg of the infamous triangle trade--molasses to rum to slaves--proved so successful that by the 1700s, Colonial America had become the largest producer of rum in the world.
It reigned as favorite Yankee quaff right up until Britain’s parliament passed the Molasses Act of 1774, which not only raised taxes on treacle, but also prohibited its import from non-British isles. This didn't just anger New Englanders. It pissed the hell out of French Caribbean planters, faced with losing their biggest export market. In fact, it riled them up so much they donned uniforms and helped win the Revolution.
Lot of good it did them. No sooner was the war over than newly-minted Americans turned their attention to home-grown products, namely whiskey. It looked like the end for Caribbean rum.
Two things saved it. One was a sudden hot fad for rum-punch among the fashionable set in Europe. The other was a long-standing contract as the exclusive booze provider to the unquenchable British Royal Navy.
Admiral Nelson was one of those stalwarts. When he simultaneously won the battle but lost his life at Trafalgar, his body was shipped home for burial preserved in a vat of rum. Thirsty seamen onboard, apparently not too fussy about decomposing-officer funk, sipped around him through straws of macaroni. This gave rise to a British expression “Tapping the Admiral.” In 1895, a bout of malaria sent Prince Henry of Battenberg home from Africa in the same sort of pickle.
Rum didn’t catch back on in the States till after Prohibition, chiefly when World War II restricted the supply of cognac and scotch. Rum's glamour days followed: playboys sipped Cuba Librés, Mojitos and Mai-Tais around the pool of the Tropicana and Nacional hotels of pre-commie Cuba. Generations of young women relied on rum and Diet Coke to get them simultaneously drunk, sober and thin. Or maybe that was just me.
Cocktails are usually made with white rum, bottled right after distilling. Darker rums get their oomph and copper hue from aging in small oak barrels.
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