I Like This - A Personal View

15th-century European portrait of "Geber", Codici Ashburnhamiani 1166, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence

Medieval Alembic Still

It was way back in the 800s that the alchemist, astronomer, astrologer, chemist, engineer, geologist, mathematician, philosopher, physicist, pharmacist and physician Abu Musa Jābir ibn Hayyān al azdi (that's a nice long name to go with the list of professions but everyone knew him as Geber), invented the still and discovered that distilling wine produced a liquid that burned. Didn't think much of it though - "of little use, but of great importance to science" - he wrote. Thankfully others played around with the stuff and came to a different conclusion.

At first this new liquid that looked like rain water but burned like a firebrand when swallowed was adopted by the medical profession. The fact that all manner of substances could be desolved in this aqua vitae (“water of life”) was helpful in the production of medications. To boot, in a large enough dose, it inevitably produced a uplifting, if short term, result, which in turn had a positive effect on the bottom line.

St. Benedict and his Monks Eating in the Refectory Il Sodoma (Giovanni Antonio Bazzi)

Brother John, can you pass me the kidney remedy?

By the 12th century the secrets of producing alcohol reached Europe. And, it was a secret heavily guarded by the alchemists, physicians and monks who used the process to concoct all manner of "medicinal" elixirs. I can picture the holy brothers now: sitting at the heavy, old oak table in the vacuous dinning room of some damp, cold, thick walled, North European abby dinning on chewy mutton and barley.

"Brother John, can you pass me the kidney remedy?"
"Yes brother Bartholomew, I think the gentle hint of Angelica goes well with the gruel but I prefer the the stomach remedy where the bitterness of the Artemisia cuts through the grease.
"Brothers, brothers" exalted the Abbot "you must try the panaceum friar Tuck brought over. It is fat and sweet but succulent, the harmonious acids give it a penetrating quality, the powerful flavors of Juniper and Arnica leave quite the firm aftertaste, AND it cures, just about, everything."
"Yeah, yeah" moaned old brother James "it can also give you a hell-of-a, oops sorry brothers, heck-of-a headache in the morning."
"Ha, ha, ha" all the, by now, merry brothers laugh. The kind of deep down, belly laugh attributed to Santa Clause these days. A laugh people have only when they know they have it better than most of the rest of the world.

This kind of secrecy didn't last very long - only about 3 to 4 hundred years. By the 1400s seems like almost everybody was getting in on the act. The Irish and Scots already had whiskey (uisge beatha - water of life), Western Europeans had their brandy (brandewijn—"burnt wine") and in 1405 the word wódka was first used in the court documents from the Palatinate of Sandomierz in Poland. The word wódka, both in Russian and Polish, is the diminutive for the word woda - meaning water. It's like when you, on those good days, call your spouse dearest, sweetie or darling. Slavic languages, unlike English, are big into the endearing diminutives. So the diminutive of wódka is wódeczka which, I guess, is like sweetie-darling - and that's what I like to call my vodka.

Hold on we are almost at the Nalewka (pronounced - nah-lef-kah) part - well in a way we've been there all along.

The distilled spirits, they are called spirits because they were thought to possess a soul, were not officially used for getting plastered. As with the afore mentioned monks, medicine, and later, in less lofty circles, the preservation of food, especially fruit, was the stated function. In a good year, at harvest, you would be inundated with, say, sour cherries. Ok, so you eat a lot, you make wine from some, you pickle some and than what is left over you soak in vodka, rakia, grappa or what ever is your preferred hard liquor. I can hear everybody yelling "What about jam, what about jelly?". Well, sugar based preservation of fruit didn't really take off till the late 1700s when refined sugar started to become available. Honey, especially wild honey, was the "sugar" before that. You can ask any bear, getting your hands on a lot of honey ain't easy.

Soaking herbs, fruit, roots in hard liquor is what a Nalewka is all about.