The colonial home: rather smoky, mostly smells bad...

One of my obsessions of the moment is the fragrant Bayberry (Myrica) plant and its applications, because last month for my birthday I took a trip through Virginia and stopped off at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello plantation there in Charlottesville surrounds.  In the museum shop they sell, among quite a few things, bars of 18th century style soaps and one variety of which is Bayberry scented.  And though it is more my style to purchase books for souvenirs than scented soaps, I found myself so recurrently drawn to the fragrance that I eventually dispensed with $1.75 for a three ounce bar.  Not a bad deal in the scheme of things.  And later when I made it to Williamsburg, I found the merchants there handily stocked in the old-style soaps as well.  But actually I don't want to write about soaps; I want to write about candles...

When you tour a place like Williamsburg, one thing they don't tell you is that interiors of the American Colonial period likely stank of rancid beef fat.  At least after dark anyway.  That's because the candles of the era were, overwhelmingly, made of wicks dipped in beef tallow, and not the (alternately inodorous or intentionally-scented) waxes to which we are accustomed today.  And the beef tallow candle not only smelled badly but was a rather smoky burn as well. "Early to bed, early to rise..." penned Benjamin Franklin, but frankly despite the tri-partite promise of health, wealth, and wisdom, it probably wasn't much of a pleasurable to stay up after dark otherwise...

Throughout the year each colonial household saved up their tallow in preparation of the annual candle making day, a chore apparently so onerous (or at least odious) that there was plenty of opportunity for professional candle makers, or chandlers, to either contract the work from individual households or set up shop and sell pre-made goods -  much to the irritation of neighbors since the manufacture was a smelly business.  Otherwise candle making, though now popular and charming as an educational Colonial reenactment, was actually again very smelly and generally took over the entirety of the smallish colonial house for its completion. Most households preferred to make all of their candles for the year in the course of a day, for a variety of reasons: as the aging of the tapers throughout the following year caused them to burn more slowly, no one wanted to run out of candles at an inopportune moment, and otherwise making them was generally considered a shitty thing best over and done with.

But at some point in our history, some Native Americans said to some colonists, more or less, "Here, smell this bush. It's fabulous..."  And so the European was irrevocably turned-on to the indigenous American Bayberry bush (probably Myrica pensylvanica, or perhaps Myrica gale, which also grows in the Northeast as well as Canada).  The smell of Bayberry I would describe as mildly spicy, perhaps with a faint note of mint, and the berries themselves are thickly coated with an aromatic natural wax.  Apparently few animals are metabolically equipped to digest the waxy berry - the Yellow Rumped Warbler (Dendroica coronata) being the notable exception, thus allowing the plant's seeds to be dispersed about the landscape in the Warbler's droppings - another of Nature's little arrangements.

The Bayberry wax can be boiled off the berries and colonists soon realized it could be effectively used for candle making, especially since the resulting product not only doesn't smoke and stink of old beef fat but actually burns clearly and pleasantly scents the air.  Unfortunately it takes quite a quantity of berries to make a candle - 15 lbs. of berries yields 1 lb. of wax - so while immediately popular, Bayberry candles were expensive and likely destined for select usage.  Still, a definite improvement to any upscale colonial home. 

I see today that though the marketplace is predominantly stocked with the economical "Bayberry-scented" candles, there are still available the occasional genuine Bayberry wax candles.  In fact there is something of a lore that has been cultivated in their marketing as a holiday tradition, that "Bayberry candles burned to the socket, puts luck in the home, food in the larder, and gold in the pocket"  (or variants on that theme; also note that this one is not even grammatically correct).  Specifically they are to be burned in-full on Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve.  This is attributed to Colonial era tradition, but I am not entirely convinced of the authenticity of the claim, since the world has generally been lousy with superstitions of questionable provenance and today particularly ones that facilitate holiday product consumption.  (Also, I think the twelfth day of Christmas, or Feast of Epiphany, would play a role in this sort of old tradition, though hand-dripped candles are generally sold in uncut pairs.)  However, I am quite interested in burning some genuine Bayberry wax candles, for the holidays if necessary, so if anyone feels inclined to forward a pair in the name of scientific and sociological inquiry, I will be pleased to accept them and duly report my findings...