· Falmouth Gazette and Weekly Advertiser
Vinegar and Water sweetened with sugar or molasses
4. Vinegar and Water sweetened with sugar or molasses, is the best drink that can be contrived in warm weather. I beg leave to recommend this wholesome drink to reapers in a particular manner. It is pleasant and cooling.
Vinegar and water consti…tuted the only drink of the soldiers of the Roman republic, and it is well known that they marched, and fought in a warm climate, and beneath a load of arms that weighed sixty pounds. Boaz a wealthy farmer in Palestine, we find treated his reapers with nothing but bread dipped into vinegar.
Palestine here is the Book of Ruth, not a place anyone lives in: Boaz and his reapers, cited by an American agricultural writer as a precedent for giving farm labourers vinegar instead of rum. The whole contemporary country is absent from the sentence that names it.