Heart to Hearth Cookery

, exp Cask to hold Water

In the Colonies there was water, water everywhere, but many Colonists urban experiences with water would make them very wary to drink it.  In 1771, Tobias Smollet wrote:  If I would drink water, I must quaff the mawkish contents of an open aqueduct exposed to all manner of defilement or swallow that which comes from the River Thames, impregnated with all the filth of London and Westminster. Even good water stored on casks on board the ships was hard to keep good as it spawned organic growth, interacted with the wood or previous cask contents, or just simply went stale as it lost oxygen.

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