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Ale Flip
Put into a saucepan three pints of ale, a table-spoonful of sugar, a blade of mace, a clove, and a small piece of butter, and bring the liquid to a boil. Beat the white of one egg and the yolks of two thoroughly, mixing with them a table-spoonful of cold ale. Mix all together, and then pour the whole rapidly from one large jug to another from a good height, for some minutes, to froth it thoroughly, but do not allow it to get cool. Probable cost, 1s. 4d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A hot spiced ale thickened with egg and aerated by pouring between two jugs. It comes together in ten minutes, and nearly everything that can go wrong goes wrong at the moment the egg meets the hot liquid.
- Temper the egg, alwaysDo not tip the beaten egg into the pan of boiling ale. Take the pan off the heat, then trickle a ladleful of hot ale into the eggs while whisking hard, and only then return the lot to the pan. Poured in cold and all at once, the egg sets into threads and the drink is spoiled.
- Off the boil after the egg goes inOnce combined the mixture must not boil again; hold it below a simmer, around 170-180F, or it will curdle. Three pints of near-boiling ale against one white and two yolks should be more than enough heat to cook the egg, so the finished flip is not really a raw-egg drink.
- QuantitiesThree pints is 60 fl oz, about 1.7 litres. A "small piece of butter" is probably about a tablespoon, a half-ounce; it adds body and shine rather than flavour, and more will slick the surface.
- A blade of maceOne whole blade is a single dried strip of the aril of the nutmeg, not a spoonful of ground mace. If you only have ground, a scant quarter-teaspoon is the equivalent, though it will cloud the drink. Fish out the mace and clove before serving.
- Which aleHousehold ale of the period would generally have been milder and maltier, and often weaker, than a modern hoppy pale ale or IPA, which turns aggressively bitter when boiled; a mild, a brown ale or an English bitter suits it far better.
- The frothingThe pouring between jugs is what raises the froth, and it needs height and speed to work. Use two heatproof jugs comfortably larger than three pints, keep them well clear of anything you mind splashing, and stop while the liquid is still steaming hot.
- Yield and costFive or six servings of about half a pint each, which is generous by modern glass sizes; eight small mugs is more realistic. The "1s. 4d." is sixteen old pence, a shopping note for a nineteenth-century cook and no guide to present prices.
The flip belongs to the era when a drink was heated by plunging a red-hot iron into it: the loggerhead or "flip-dog", kept in the tavern fire, hissed into a tankard of ale sweetened with sugar or molasses and thickened with egg, giving the burnt-caramel note that drinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries associated with the name. The word is generally traced to that violent frothing-up, though the pouring from jug to jug at height, as the recipe directs here, does the same job on a kitchen range. By the time this dictionary appeared the flip had come indoors, from the tavern to the sickroom and the winter nightcap, sitting alongside caudle, posset and egg-hot as one of the warm, eggy, restorative drinks a Victorian household kept in its repertoire.