My 85-Year-Old Grandmother Ate 8 of These Every Day

When I think about some of the most formative moments of my childhood, they take place in my grandmother’s kitchen. I spent hours with her, huddled around the cozy and slightly eccentric picnic table she used inside her home. Every inch of the kitchen walls was covered in burnished copper cooking molds—from cod fish and lobsters to chickens brilliantly lit up the galley kitchen, bathing the whole thing in a warm glow.

My grandmother loved to cook, but she loved reading about cooking even more. I have boxes and boxes of her handwritten recipes in my kitchen, along with hundreds of clippings from The Boston Globe food section that she collected over the years.

We used to thumb through old issues of Gourmet magazine while we ate warm grilled cheese sandwiches straight off the ancient cast iron skillet that lived on top of her stove. 

As you can hopefully tell, her kitchen was incredibly warm and welcoming. She was exceedingly generous with her home cooking and even more unsparing with her snacks.

In fact, there was only one thing off-limits in her kitchen: her gin-soaked golden raisins. Every day, right before bed, she would treat herself to eight plump golden raisins that had been soaked in Beefeater Gin. She claimed it helped with her arthritis, but my hunch is she just liked the taste and the ritual. It was no doubt a tip she picked up from one of the countless food periodicals she read weekly during her 85 years on this earth. 

I always thought this tradition was just an odd quirk of my grandmother’s, but as it turns out, she was right on trend in the culinary world. Since she passed her love of all things food on to me, I recently read that one of my culinary idols, Jacques Pépin, who is 88 years old, also enjoys this nightly habit. He’s been eating seven gin-soaked raisins daily for years “for good health and longevity.”

As it turns out, this boozy experiment has been widely practiced for centuries, and while the method is more or less the same—soak golden raisins in gin—it seems everyone who practices this tradition has a different dose—eight for my grandmother, seven for Jacques.

In 2021, during the height of the pandemic, “Drunken Raisins” received some good press thanks to a New York Times profile of then 105-year-old Lucia DeClerck who credited her daily dose of nine boozy golden raisins as the secret to her longevity and ability to beat one of the early strains of Covid. 

Whether you enjoy seven, eight, or nine boozy raisins nightly, there isn’t proven scientific evidence that imbibing on gin-soaked raisins has a measurable benefit. Still, I can’t help but believe in the magic of it.

I know that food can be incredibly healing. Speaking from experience, chicken soup can heal both a sore throat and a broken heart. You can’t tell me chocolate doesn’t instantly improve your mood, and coffee has been performing daily miracles in my life for over 20 years—no easy feat for a drink that vacillates from superfood to toxic vice in the span of a news cycle.

Nearing 40, with all the achy and creaky joints to prove it, I might just join in on the long-honored tradition I learned from my grandmother. Maybe I’ll even work in her nightly gin martini fix, too. I’ve heard juniper berries can work wonders.