Grasping At Straws

Twenty years before the Eiffel Tower was built, the city of Paris had another major tourist attraction. Beginning on the 1st of April and continuing through the seven months that followed was the fourth World Exhibition. Except it wasn’t called a World Exhibition. In France, this fair would be referred to as Exhibition Universelle. (I suppose it was the only Exhibition in the Universe but still, seems like a bold statement.) Being a tiny man with a clear appendage insecurity, France’s Emperor Napoleon III insisted this exhibition be the biggest and the best in history. The purpose was to demonstrate how France was unmistakably the best nation in the world. To accomplish this, the fair included over 50,226 participants from 42 countries, including Australia but that is for another post. The event covered an area of 119 acres with stands from every kind of industry, from railways to agriculture to fine arts.  But that wasn’t all, in Disney’s Epcot fashion (stereotypes and all) the event had its very own International Pavilion. This was a massive indoor space that featured cuisines, drinks and delicacies from various countries all over the world. If being the talk of the town was Napoleon’s goal, he certainly achieved it. In 1867, before the invention of the aeroplane, the fair still brought in around 15 million visitors.

It might be worth mentioning that America was not quite the global industry giant just yet.  (Although I do think they were probably taking a lot of notes from France’s colossal ego issue.) Regardless, the nation did have a booth at the International Pavilion, and it quickly became the rage of the fair. The stand, called the American Bar, was accumulating a queue on the daily. People were lining up in droves to have a sip of the drink that was considered synonymous with being American. That drink was the sherry cobbler. And according to reports, the cobbler was so popular that the booth was selling 500 bottles of sherry every single day. Which I thought was weird, because sherry, is from Spain.  It’s not like the Europeans couldn’t get their hands on some. So what exactly was it that made this drink so coveted that everyone wanted a taste? (aside from being delicious. Have you tried one?)

Anyway, with all the revolutionary industry that was being touted at this event, including a hydrochronometer (that’s a water clock), the one contraption tourists were intrigued with was a long hollow tubelike device that allowed them to reach down below the cramped shavings of ice and sip on the sweet syrup at the bottom of a cobbler glass. The selling point of the sherry cobbler was the straw. Except it wasn’t quite a straw as we know it just yet, likely this was just a long piece of macaroni. Still, this ‘invention’ was taking the world by storm. But it wasn’t the world’s first attempt at a straw.

Over a century prior to Exhibition Universalle, nautical navigators had developed a habit of drinking liquids through a long tube made of silver, one of which was found by archaeologists in the remains of Captain Cook’s quarters. But it wasn’t the Captain’s invention. For centuries tribes of South America used a bombilla, a silver cylinder with a filter at the end, to drink matcha tea. Years later, the American South also discovered an ideal way to drink the mint julep. That was to slurp the whiskey through a hollow blade of rye grass, hence the term, straw. All this considered, I guess macaroni seemed like a clever solution to icy beverage consumption. And it only took two decades for a piece of pasta to finally be replaced by a paper tube lined with Paraffin so it would keep its shape when immersed in liquid. By 1888 Marvin Stone patented this invention, although some people still preferred macaroni. That’s because although this now known carcinogen did help achieve a firmer structure, the bottom of the straw often disintegrated into a flaccid mess before anyone could finish their drink. It seems today, 135 years later, we can shoot satellites into space, engineer software that can actually think for itself, but we still can’t get our shit together when it comes to drinking through a tube.

Why is any of this important? It isn’t. Not really. But there is one reason it’s important to me.

When I first started researching the history of drinking in Melbourne, I was finding it a near impossible task to find clear evidence of cocktail drinking in the actual goldfields. I read journal after journal and only rarely encountered some unusual language that might have revealed cocktail consumption. After failing miserably with written archives, I started sifting through the artwork, most of which featured sly grog tents with tin cups and barrels of booze scattered around the area. Any drawings of drinking that took place in the regional hotels showed pictures of men tipping champagne glasses and handling brown bottles and beer mugs with relative uniformity. And then, I saw it. A small thin tube sticking out of a glass. That could only mean one thing. Some of those diggers were drinking from a straw. During this era, the straw, along with the spoon were a typical companion to juleps and sherry cobblers. One was used to drink through the ice, the other to scoop up the pieces of fruit that embellished the top of the glass. Once I noticed this detail, I began finding more and more of these in the pictures of the past. Verbal accounts aside, this small sipping apparatus was visual proof that during the Victorian gold rush, cocktails were everywhere. 

** What do you think?  Have we made any progress when it comes to the straw?  Do you prefer to drink your icy cocktails without one? I want to know!  Share your thoughts/comments in the chat below.

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