Sugar daddy

Rum is a relatively young drink – 15th century – and still under-appreciated, but at its best can match any whisky or brandy for complexity and sophistication. Peter Grogan enters the darkness

A long time ago a knuckle-dragging ancestor of mine left a gourd-ful of palm sugar out in the rain. Trolling along, the right little speck of yeast eventually came to rest in it, causing the sugar to spontaneously ferment. The result probably didn’t taste too good but it had something that helped the day pass in a pleasant blur.

Fast-forward 10,000 years — at a guess — and that same something can apparently be had from mixing some mashed-up tinned fruit with water, bread (for the yeast), sugar and a dollop of ketchup (to improve the taste) in a zip-loc bag. Of course, you’ll need to stick it up your jumper during the day and sleep on it at night to keep it warm enough to ferment (although in the winter you could pop it behind a radiator). Despite tasting of vomit — with which it has a lot in common — it’s surprisingly popular in US jails, where it’s known as ‘pruno’.

We will climb any mountain, ford any stream to get our hands on some booze. Of all the sources of our sauce, sugar cane must be one of the most unpromising. But, if you can somehow squeeze the juice out of the damn stuff, boil it down — usually to the point of turning to molasses — and then ferment that into some sort of undrinkable beer the result can then be distilled into something that, at its best, can shake its booty with the finest whiskies and brandies.

Rum is a young drink and, uniquely, it is possible to trace its origins precisely: to 1493, when Columbus took sugar cane cuttings to Hispaniola (what is now Haiti and the Dominican Republic).