Mint Juleps Of Venerable And Mellow Bourbon

It is said that author John Davis first mentioned the mint julep in 1803 and its origins in the South are in the eighteenth century. Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky introduced this unique beverage to Washington City’s Round Robin Bar in the Willard Hotel.

Bernhard Thuersam, Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute
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Mint Juleps of Venerable and Mellow Bourbon:

“Aunt Lina,” said Mama, “you know the ladies didn’t drink in your day.”

“Drink?” said Aunt Lina, who had been born and brought up before the war (Civil War, of course) and even before the Victorian era, “I should say they did drink. Why, every evening at the Springs the gentlemen used to sent a tray of mint juleps up to the ladies in their rooms before supper.”

As a matter of fact, Aunt Lina was drinking a mint julep at that instant in her room at home. It was in the early afternoon, but there was no need for hurry. Her dinners (they were not lunches) rarely started before three o’clock in the afternoon – to give the diners time to let breakfast settle – and it would be two-thirty anyway before the turkey would be done properly. Violet, the colored cook, would see to that, and after she had finished her julep Aunt Lina would go in the kitchen and give the meal the finishing touches.

The gentlemen were having mint juleps in the parlor. These juleps had the confident simplicity of great works of art. Violet had picked a dozen handfuls of the mint from the mint bed between the woodhouse and the backhouse while the dew was still on it and kept it in the icebox. She had cracked the ice and got out the big silver goblets rimmed with the Greek key design. But nobody but Aunt Lina had made the juleps. She had put a lump of loaf sugar in the bottom of each goblet, dissolved it in a mite of spring water, pressed the mint with the back of a silver spoon against the goblet until it had yielded up its flavor, and then filled the goblet with cracked ice.

The next step was to pour from a bottle of venerable and mellow bourbon until the amber liquor reached a hair’s breadth of the top, then garnish with sprigs of mint until one was reminded of Coleridge’s words – “and ice mast-high came floating be as green as emerald.” The result was a drink which was smooth and sharp, sweet and biting, cold to the fingers and hot to the stomach, delicate but authoritative, and “annihilating all that’s made to a green thought in a green shade.”

“Gentlemen,” said Uncle John to Papa and me, “that is reverend stuff.”

(Southern Accent, From Uncle Remus to Oak Ridge, William T. Polk, William Morrow and Company, 1953, pp. 125-126)
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Mint Juleps Of Venerable And Mellow Bourbon