I’m not a big fan of the spirit but many of Patricia’s adventures in books two and three of the Patricia MacPherson Nautical Adventure series are based on rum: Rhode Island rum made from French Caribbean sugar smuggled into the colony aboard trading schooners such as Andromeda..
Wayne Curtis’s And a Bottle of Rum; A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007) is an informative and delightful book, better in paperback format than electronic. This is a book meant to be flipped through. (Flip was the most famous early American rum drink, as described by Curtis. Concocted of strong beer, molasses, and rum, the mixture was then stirred with a red hot loggerhead to give it a steaming head and a
Arduous research
slightly burnt taste. ) My copy of Curtis’s brief history is dog-eared, underlined, self-annotated, creased, coffee stained (and soon to be singed if I can ever find a bartender’s loggerhead) – a fine addition to my growing collection of reference books.
Of course the danger for historical novelists is getting happily lost in a labyrinth of research, which is why it took seven years to write and publish Star-Crossed, and another four years to write and publish the sequel, Surgeon’s Mate; book two of the Patricia MacPherson Nautical Adventure Series.. I’m hoping this blog will help keep me on track, so that I can finish the manuscript for book three in a timely manner. That said, I better post this and get back to writing chapter one before its time for happy hour. How quickly time slides by…
Mojitos, anyone?