FRESH fruit is a glorious thing. But what do you do when the markets are overflowing with it and you bring home more fruit than you can possibly eat? Force it on your neighbors? Learn how to can? Turn it into compost?
In Europe, berries, stone fruits and apples are often distilled into elegant fruit brandies called eaux de vie. There's also a tradition of home-distilled spirits in this country, but here we might call them by a more poetic-sounding name: moonshine.
Unfortunately for anybody with too many peaches or plums, you can't legally operate a still in this country without jumping through a lot of regulatory hoops. In fact, if your kid wanted to distill alcohol for a science project, the school would have to get licensed as an Alcohol Fuel Plant. (Remember to submit application 5110.74 to the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau.)
Nevertheless, Matthew B. Rowley wrote "Moonshine!" just to encourage us to jump through all those hoops and try our hands at distilling.
Making small-batch spirits has the potential to be a connoisseur's pursuit parallel to home brewing. And as we know, the home brew movement of the '80s led directly to the wide variety of microbrews and craft beers available to us today.
Rowley, a food writer and a former board member of the Southern Foodways Alliance, points out that home distilling isn't inherently an outlaw thing. At the time of the American Revolution, most families distilled all sorts of things for their own use, and the lady of the house was the one in charge of the stillroom.
Still, the cover of his book is a bit misleading -- it shows a stereotypical hillbilly and his dog and promises "drinking songs, knee-slappers and tall tales." Rowley does include that sort of country corn, but this book isn't the liquid cousin of the white trash cookbooks that had a vogue in the '80s -- it's about the world of home distillation, legal as well as illegal, urban and rural, past, present and possibly future.
Much of the story he tells is familiar: the frontier farmers who took to selling corn whiskey because they couldn't transport their corn crop on the bad roads of the time; the wars with revenue agents; Prohibition; the daredevil moonshine haulers who later became some of the top NASCAR drivers.
It will come as a surprise to some people to learn that moonshine is not dead -- far from it. There's big money in supplying disreputable bars with cheap, headachy 'splo (short for "explosion") distilled from sugar and cattle feed.
