Welcome to Criminalia, a production of Shondaland Audio in partnership with iHeartRadio. Hey, before the show starts today, we have a little bit of fun news to share.
We have had a secret.
We have been working very diligently for the past many months on creating something that a lot of you have been asking for, and that is a book of cocktails and cocktails that are told right alongside the stories that we talk about.
Plus additional ones that we have not talked about.
That's right. This book is about half stories you have heard, although they've been abridged, alongside their cocktails and brand news stories that we are telling, and brand new cocktails that we have never had before.
We are on pre order now so you can order up and wait for it to hit in October.
That's right. It is going to be out on October fifteenth, and you can order it now just about anywhere books are sold. Check out your local bookstores and see if they're going to have it. All right, let's jump into the episode.
They called themselves the United Society of True Believers in Christ's second appearing, a group commonly known to the rest of us as Shakers, founded in Manchester, England, in seventeen forty seven. They were and are a religious group resulting from the Protestant Reformation that led to new Christian denominations
outside of the Catholic Church during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Today, they're probably best known for their handmade furniture, but we're not here to talk about those clean lines, tapered legs, and minimalist designs. Welcome to Criminalia. I'm Maria Tromarchy and I'm Holly Fry.
The Shaker community has a faith that's a combination of belief systems that were part of the Society of Friends also known as Quakers and the French Commissards, with influence from other Protestant denominations. In seventeen seventy four, the Shakers emigrated from England to what was then Colonial America. Their arrival happened shortly before the American Revolutionary War began. Many initially settled in rural areas outside of Albany, New York.
Of note was their settlement in New Lebanon, known to them as Mount Lebanon. Mount Lebanon was their largest community and became the base or motherhouse of the sect. At its peak, that community had six hundred members and hundreds of buildings that spread out over six thousand acres. As people moved west on the American frontier, over the years,
more Shaker communities sprang up around the country. At their peak, considered to have been roughly between eighteen forty and eighteen ninety ish, there were twenty three, possibly twenty four villages in the United States. Today, there is only one active Shaker village remaining, near Sabbath Day Lake in central Maine, and as of twenty eighteen, there were just two members.
Shaker communities were founded in very rural areas. Those who lived inside these communities were known as believers, and those outside were called quote the world's people or people of the world. Shakers may have been far from the corruption of cities, as they would have called it, but they weren't out of touch with outsiders. They allowed those from the world to visit their communities and to observe their
religious practices. Let's talk a little bit more about the Shakers to get a better understanding of who they were and are before we get into why the heck we're talking about them.
To begin with, Shakers believed in communal living, and they believed in pacifism. They believed in the confession of one's sins. An important part of the Shaker community was the meeting house. It was the center of worship services, and Shaker ceremonies were known to include not just biblical readings, but they also had a physicality about them. There was spontaneous dancing, whirling, shaking, other ecstatic movements, all of which were expressions of spirituality.
Often described as a physical way to shake off one's sins. It is how they became known to the world as Shakers.
The Shaker faith was based on a belief of God and of living the best Christian life you could based on the Gospels of the Christian Bible. Part of the Shaker faith, too, was the idea that there was a duality of God, and this was represented as a masculine spirit embodied in Jesus Christ, along with a female element that manifested it in the spirit of Mother Anne. Mother Anne is important. She was a woman named Anne Lee who was the founder and leader of the Shaker religion.
Mother Anne is responsible for the Shaker pilgrimage to America. She had quote a special manifestation of divine light, and it was her vision of quote a heavenly kingdom to come that directly defined Shaker culture and faith. As a result of this belief of a dual personality in God, Shakers actively practiced equality of the sexes. Everyone within the society was allowed opportunities in intellectual and artistic development.
But talking about the Shakers does not mean just talking about their religion, because they were entrepreneurs. They were disciplined and hardworking, and they were also very innovative, a good combination of characteristics that helped them finance their communal lives in a few successful ways. So first, they were primarily an agricultural community and they sold their produce. Then as craftsmen,
they also sold small manufacturers. We mentioned their well known Shaker style furniture earlier, but they also invented a variety of things, including the clothes pin and an early version of the washing machine, the rotary harrow, the circular saw, the flat broom, the pocket stereoscope, the steel pen nib, and the rotary oven. You know how when you go to your gardening center or even some big box stores you can buy seeds in packets. You can thank the
Shakers for that packet advancement. Because if it hadn't been done, you would be buying seeds in bulk. Their most successful business didn't come from their tables and chairs or the clothes pin, though, it came from their knowledge of herbs and their practice of botanical medicine. And this is why we are talking about them.
Herbal medicines are those with active ingredients from plants or parts of plants, such as leaves, roots, seeds, flowers. But as we know from other stories during this snake oil season, being a and this is an air quote natural remedy doesn't necessarily mean it's a safe remedy. But there's nothing at all snake oily about Shaker remedies, only that they were unfortunately selling them. At the same time shady patent
medicines were in high demand. The medicinal herbs they sold to the people of the world turned them into respected healers.
They didn't start out as herbal healers, though at least not outside of their communities. Shaker medical practice was let's call it quite eclectic. Early Shakers relied on faith healing and would only consult a non Shaker doctor's advice if there was a case of severe injury or illness. They tried treating illnesses with what was known as electric medicine, which is it's what it sounds like, the application of electric shocks in an effort to relieve pain and hopefully
produce cures. They also became practitioners of a variety of treatments that were known as water cures, such as soaking in mineral springs. Mainly, their focus was on prevention, though, and that included maintaining good health through hard work, exercise, and rest, plus three meals a day and little to no use of alcohol or tobacco. They practiced calisthenic workouts
to improve their health. They built well ventilated homes, and they separated the sick from the healthy in infirmaries or sick rooms.
Shaker interest in herbalism started very simply because they didn't rely on imported teas or conventional medicines. They had to make their own. They became practitioners of what is now called naturopathic medicine, which emphasizes both disease prevention and the self healing process through the use of natural therapies such as preparations derived from you guessed it, herbs and other
natural plant materials. Galen Beal and Mary Rose Boswell in their book Earth Shall Blossom, Shaker Herbs and gardening declared, and we're paraphrasing here a bit, the sh Bakers were the first herbalists next to indigenous Americans, who held all the medicinal knowledge of our native plant species in America. Now that's a bold statement. So before we delve into that, we're going to take a break forward from our sponsors, and when we're back, we'll see if they can live up to it.
Welcome back to Criminalia. Let's talk a little about Shaker agriculture and how their botanical knowledge turned every person into their own physician.
To Shakers, gardening was spiritual work, and their gardening tenets included such things as, quote, keep learning, nurture the soil, know your plants, work faithfully, and care for your tools. Really, that's good advice for all gardeners. A Shaker garden was all so quote the index of the owner's mind, and herbs growing in a Shaker garden were planted in neat rows in square beds, usually delineated by some form of enclosure, such as a low stone wall or brick edging.
Shaker herbs were plentiful. Most were rarely used in food, though with the exception of five thyme, sweet marjoram, savory, sage, and parsley. They began selling surpluses of those five pantry friendly herbs, along with what they considered medicinal herbs like bee balm, sweet basil, lavender, fennel, dill, coriander, lemon balm, rosemary, belladonna, poppies, horehound, valerian. I'm gonna stop there because the list is really long
and it goes on for quite a while. Most of the herbs they produced had therapeutic properties, such as being a diuretic or a stimulant, narcotic, emetic, or astringent. In his well respected eighteen twenty eight manual Medical Flora, botanist and natural scientists Constantine Ruffanesque claimed the Shakers had the quote best medical gardens in the United States.
Shaker men, known as brothers, generally were in charge of cultivating the herbs. Shaker women known as sisters, along with children, gathered these herbs in addition to dozens of other species from the surrounding forests in what they referred to as the herb House. The brothers dried and pressed these herbs preparing them for oils, tinctures, extracts, and powders. First, they sold herbs to the general public, but they soon also sold the botanical medicines they made for their own communities
to nearby physicians and druggists. The Shaker products were becoming known as high quality, and from about eighteen twenty to the twentieth century, Shakers made and then sold dried herbs and their botanical medicines to the world.
Knowledge of the healae or poisonous properties of plants, mineral salts, and herbs is certainly far older than Shaker medical practices. Ancient Egyptians recorded their knowledge of illnesses and botanical cures, and the Ebers Papyrus, dating back to fifteen fifty BCE. Hippocrates, known as the father of medicine, classified herbs into essential qualities and categorized as many as three hundred to four
hundred plants. Aristotle also compiled a list of medicinal plants. Diascorides, a Roman army physician, wrote De Materia Medica, a five volume work describing the preparation of about one thousand simple remedies using about five hundred different plants. So herbal medicine is hardly.
New to many people. Botanicals seemed far less harmful than methods used by traditional doctors, like bleeding or ingesting mercury. Health problems that concerned Americans in the nineteenth century were for the most part different from those we have to deal with today, So things like burns or falls, or any accidental injuries were often crippling. You were vulnerable to colds and flu because they could develop into pneumonia, which
was a potential death sentence. Contagious diseases such as tuberculosis, smallpox, scarlet fever, yellow fever, and cholera were life threatening. Even a simple cut or food poisoning had the potential to become fatal. For those who lived in rural areas, the Shakers provided solutions that made quote every man his own physician.
By the eighteen twenties, many Shaker communities were also making herbal treatments that had been developed and promoted by a self trained doctor and entrepreneur named Samuel Thompson. Samuel was schooled in herbalism growing up in New Hampshire. His story is that he learned from a widow in his town who, it was said learned about healing herbs from the endigenous
people of the area. One of Thompson's biographers, John S. Holler Junior, wrote, quote, this itinerant people's doctor promised to release patients from the tyranny of regular physicians by offering cheap and kindly medicines from their own field and gardens. That seems very much in line with the work of the Shakers, except there's always a little problem, isn't there, And we're gonna get to that.
Two plants, lobilia, which was once known as Indian tobacco, and capsicum, which is cayenne pepper, were, according to Samuel, the building blocks of his Thomsonian system. So very simply explained, Thompson believed through his own observations that in life there is heat, and in death there is cold. He treated patients with lobilia, which is an emetic it induces vomiting, and then followed up with doses of capsicumb to restore
the body's natural heat. So an example of a Tomsonian cure read as quote cure with hot water and doses of number six. It sounds mysterious, but number six refers to a product called Thompson's compound tincture of myrrh and capsicum or rheumatic drops, which along with herbs, was prepared with wine or brandy. It was a really powerful antiseptic and was usually prescribed to relieve pain and prevent gangreen or necrosis.
The Shakers, being in the herbal medicine business themselves, could have easily formulated any of Thompson's six basic medicines, and there is evidence that they did produce at least two. Thompson, though, was not especially thrilled that the Shakers were using his remedies because now his dispensary in New York City was in direct competition with them and their excellent reputation, so he sued the Harvard Shaker's trustee, brother Joseah Winchester, for
ten thousand dollars. Here it could be argued that the Shakers did dip a toe into a little patent medicine chicanery. Basically, they just changed the labels. Shakers at Mount Lebanon had added his Thompson's Spice Bitters and Thompson's Hot Drops or number six to their product line, and to fix the confusion slash problem, they intentionally misspelled Thompson's name on the spice bitters after the lawsuit, when it came to the
hot drops, they just left his name off altogether. So if it sounds like Thompson had a solid case and like the Shakers were skirting the issue, surprised, they were not, and he did not. It turns out either he had forgotten, or he didn't realize, or maybe he hoped they had forgotten that on behalf of the Shakers, brother Hooseah, had legally purchased Thompson's patten a few years earlier, in eighteen seventeen.
The Shakers could make any of his basic medicines, and it was in their lead right to do so.
Thompson may have felt it was all about Thompson, but the Shaker medicine business was much bigger than him and his patented potions. His products were a very small part of their offerings. By eighteen fifty one, Mount Lebanon's product catalog listed three hundred and fifty six medicinal herbs, four culinary herbs, plus one hundred and eighty one fluid extracts. And that's just a sampling from just one catalog at that time, which was the peak of their botanical medicine business.
That community was producing one hundred thousand pounds of dried herbs and several thousand pounds of extracts each year. Thompson's spice bitters and hot drops were inconsequential.
In the Enfield, New Hampshire community. Shakers listed roughly one hundred and fifty different types of herbs for sale to the people of the world and focused on the production of their own medicines, and that production continued into the early twentieth century, even after the passage of the nineteen oh six Pure Food and Drug Act, which, as we've seen this season, was the end of many proprietary medicines. But if you weren't lying in your advertising and your
ingredients were legit, that act was not targeting you. Herbal medicine itself was not a crime. Shakers were not selling bottles of ethanol with labeling claiming that their products were cure alls.
The Shakers were astute and used their knowledge of herbs and botanical medicine to capitalize on the growing trend of patent medicine, and in a really refreshing change from our other stories this season, they weren't the bad guy and in doing so, became one of the leading names in the early history of pharmaceutical manufacturing. They weren't peddling quackery.
But on that note, we're going to take a break for a word from our sponsors, so when we return, we'll talk about how they maintained their enviable reputation and in the face of the inevitable counterfeiters.
Welcome back to Criminalia. Let's talk about how the Shaker patent medicine business worked and how it differed from the snake oil manufacturing that was happening concurrently.
The Shakers, to be clear on this, were running a cooperative operation and they were dependent upon relationships with commercial entities of the world. The Shakers grew plants and made medicines from the resulting plant extracts, but the packaging piece, like the bottles, the boxes, the paper inserts, those were commercially produced outside of Shaker communities. The Shakers then bottled their medicines, packaged their products, and sent batches to distributors.
Shaker communities also sold earth in bulk to drug wholesalers, some even internationally. For instance, in the eighteen forties, Shaker communities found themselves shipping thousands of pounds of dried plant material and thousands of bottles of prepared medicines, which men
They also found themselves needing bigger production facilities. They were leaders in patent medicines, selling compounds like Shaker Cherry Pectoral Syrup, Shaker Syrup Number One, Doctor Corbett's Renovating Bidders, Norwood's Tincture of Veritrim, Verdae, Mother, Siegal's Curative Syrup, and many other medicines branded with the Shaker name. Shaker tamer Laxative, which was a mix of tamarind, prunes, cassio, barque, henbane, and winter green, was one of Sabbath Day Lake Community's more
successful products. By the late nineteenth century, Shakers had a reputation as quote America's pharmacists.
And like other popular and successful patent medicine manufacturers, the Shakers found their products were the target of counterfeitters. It isn't clear when a product called Shaker's Blood Syrup was first produced or marketed, but the Shakers became aware of it, likely in the summer of eighteen eighty four. A poster printed in black and red shows an illustration of two Shaker's sisters standing on either side of a Shaker brother.
The text reads quote, Shaker's blood Syrup cures completely scrofula cancer, rheumatism, qatar ulcers, and skin and blood diseases of every description. The medicine, however, was not made by Shakers, and their society had not authorized the use of their name or image. The fake syrup bore, though an extraordinary resemblance to Mother Siegel's Curative Syrup, a product manufactured embottled by the Shakers and distributed by Andrew Judson White's company AJ White Limited.
It was intended to relieve indigestion, not to be a cure all, and it was one of the most popular herbal medicines in the United States and internationally. According to records kept by the Shakers, beginning around eighteen seventy nine or so, batches of it had begun shipping to then far flung locations, including India and Australia.
By October of eighteen eighty four, the matter started to gain national interest. On October second, a newspaper notice stated quote, A dispatch from Montreal says that the Shaker Society at New Lebanon is about to institute proceedings against Smith Brothers and Company, Montreal for fifty thousand dollars damages for infringement
of a patent. It is claimed that the defendants illegally manufactured and sold syrups bearing the name of Shaker Blood Syrups, the trademark of which they had patented at Ottawa on stating that they were the first to make use of it, while in truth it was the property of the United
Society of Shakers. A month later, on November fourteenth, the National Druggist, published in Saint Louis, stated quote, Smith Brothers and Company of Montreal, a concern of recent origin who started the manufacture of Shaker's blood syrup, have failed and one of the partners is reported missing. The Shaker community has recently issued an action against the firm to restrain it from using their name, etc. In connection with such preparations made in Montreal.
About two months later, on January twenty seventh, the Office of AJ White Limited, recall they were the distributor of Shaker medicines, announced quote as soon as the blood syrup came to the knowledge of the Shakers, proceedings at law were taken by the Shakers, charging the Smith Brothers firm with fraudulently using and stating without authorization in their pamphlets that this medicine was prepared by the Shakers. Shortly after this action was taken, the firm in question became solvent.
On the twenty fourth January eighteen eighty five, Smith Brothers signed an agreement in which was contained, among other things, the following and whereas the said Smith Brothers now admit that they have no right to the said trademark or to sell medicines as Shaker preparations, and that the said action of the Shaker Society as taken against us for the cancelation thereof is well founded. The Shakers, upon this agreement being signed, withdrew their action against Smith Brothers.
Although they won that action, the Shaker's herbal medicine business was already on the decline. They had rightfully avoided punitive measures from the Pure Food and Drug Act, but they couldn't escape the rise of the Industrial Revolution. After the American Civil War, dozens of new and large and largely funded corporations entered the medicine manufacturing market, and pharmaceutical production
began to move away from botanicals. Their products and production practices just could not compete with cheaper, factory made items. After nineteen hundred, many Shaker herb houses had been demolished.
Norwood's tincture, though, was produced continually from roughly the eighteen fifties until sometime in the nineteen thirties, making it one of, if not the last preparation sold by the Shakers, who may have been the most legitimate patent medicine manufacturers in a time that we have seen a lot of snake oil salesmanship.
It's amazing how long they were able to last during that patent medicine time frame.
I agree, and with that, are you ready for a little something that might cure what ails you?
Yes? But not Tomsnian.
Please, it's not Tomsnian, although we will say the name tom at one point to our recording this. Maria sent me a number of recipes for various Shaker beverages to peruse, things like ginger aid, which sounds amazing, But some of them included an ingredient that also came up in the episode that I love, and that is lemon balm. And it just so happens that I have been growing lemon
balm this year. My crop is doing very well, so I was ready for this, but I've been looking for a good reason to use it in a beverage for the show. A lot of these also use ginger ale, which is also a big favorite of mine. But I was also struck by this idea of making people their own physician, which came up in the episode. Although I will say I'm a big fan of going to the actual doctor myself because I don't trust my own judgment
in such things. But all of that inspired this recipe, and I thought it would be really fun to make it. Choose your own adventure cocktail. I love the slash mocktail where we make a base that can work with any number of spirits or without a spirit at all, and just find on its own and we don't have to do sub outs. So this one is a little bit like a Collins. It shares a lot in common with it.
You can have a Tom Collins which has gin, a Vodka Collins which has vodka, or a John Collins which has whiskey, but the rest of the drink remains the same version to version, and ours is very much like that recipe, although it does have some switch outs, and we are adding in the botanical element of lemon balm, and I will say this one also has an extra bonus option for people who really want to get extra with their botanicals and their presentation. We're going to talk
about that at the very end. So this starts with seven to ten lemon balm leaves, what you have on hand that looks good, or just if your leaves are bigger, you can have a few lesson. If you have tiny ones, get some more. So you're going to take your seven to ten lemon balm leaves, an ounce of lemon juice and an ounce of simple or vanilla syrup. But I'm really going to advocate for vanilla syrup on this one
because it just changes it and makes it beautiful. And you're gonna muddle that together in the bottom of your tin, and you know how I'm always like, don't go crazy muddling. You don't want it. You can go a little crazier with this one, because you really do want to infuse that lemon balm with everything else. Then, if you are making the alcoholic version, add two ounces of your spirit of choice, so Jin vodka, whiskey. You could even use
tequila here. The tequila version is very good if you are not using any alcohol at all, and you, like the Shakers, want to stick to a more alcohol free life. Add an ounce of water here because we are gonna shake it and you need a little more fluid to really get things going. So you're gonna put your ice in there, give it a really good shake because you want to also break up your leaves a little bit.
Strain it over fresh ice. This is one of those horror's choice because some people like to have little bits and flecks of stuff and they're drinking. Some do not, so that's up to how you strain it. And then you're gonna top it with ginger ale. It's so delicious. I love this one so much. It's simple, it's based on very basic bartending formulas, and it is foolproof in
my opinion. Here's the bonus. If you want to be a fancy pants you're gonna make ice cubes specific for this drink, which are very easy, but they have all a little extra work implanting ahead. Finally, chop four to five lemon balm leaves, and I mean finely chop you want teeny pieces, and then you're just gonna mix those with a cup of water and just a half a teaspoon of lemon juice, or just squeeze one half of
a lemon into your your thing and get that. I'll just stir it together and then pour it into an ice tray and freeze it. Pull it out when you're ready to make your drink. It looks so pretty. It makes the whole thing look like a botanical, magical thing, and you put it in everything. You can do this with any kind of ice cube for any kind of drink.
But because the Shakers were really proficient in their understanding of botanicals and appreciating all that the botanicals could do, I thought it would be nice to have a little visual representation of that as well. But I also know it's a little extra. Not everybody might want to do it. Do that once, listen. Once you start playing with pretty ice for drinks, it's over. You're in trouble and I'm calling this one. Be your own bartender. You're making it
however you want. You have gained the skills to make a base drink that you can riff on and improv with and play with. Like any drink recipe, if you don't like one ingredient, you can sub out. If you're like I don't like ginger ale, Okay cool. Put a lemon lineman in there, put soda in there, put something else in there. You got options. I love it again. I'm going to really make the push for the vanilla syrup because it makes it beautiful in a whole different
way than just a simple syrup would. So I hope that if you make this, maybe you play with it and start subbing things out and get real brave and become your own bartender. We will be right back here next week with another tail and another drink to go with it. Criminalia is a production of Shondaland Audio in partnership with iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from Shondaland Audio, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.