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Julep, Pineapple
Put a sliced ripe pineapple in a glass bowl, add the juice of two oranges, a gill of raspberry syrup, the same of maraschino and old gin, a bottle of sparkling Moselle, and about a pound of ice in shaves. When mixed, serve in flat glasses.
A Victorian wine cup rather than a mint julep: a bowl drink built on sparkling wine and shaved ice, meant to be ladled out and drunk cold and fast. The proportions are generous but the technique is trivial, so the details are all in the measures and the bottles.
- A gillRead as imperial, a gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, 5 fl oz or about 140 ml, giving 5 oz each of raspberry syrup, maraschino and gin. If the book is American the gill is a quarter of a US pint, 4 fl oz, which is closer to modern drinking anyway. Against that goes one bottle of wine (a modern bottle is 75 cl; period bottle sizes varied).
- "Old gin"Not London dry. Nineteenth-century bar books use the phrase loosely for the sweeter, aged styles then current, meaning Old Tom or a malty Hollands genever. Either suits the raspberry and maraschino better than a modern juniper-forward dry gin; the original is genuinely ambiguous as to which.
- MaraschinoThe clear, dry cherry-stone liqueur (Luxardo and the like), not the red syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. Five ounces of it is a lot by current taste; half that is more drinkable alongside the raspberry syrup.
- Sparkling MoselleA cheap, low-alcohol, faintly sweet German sparkler that was everywhere in Edwardian Britain and is now scarce. A dry-to-off-dry Riesling Sekt is the direct descendant; any crisp, high-acid sparkling wine works.
- Raspberry syrupPeriod syrup was a sugar-heavy fruit syrup, sweeter and thinner than modern raspberry coulis or purée. If you use a thick purée the drink turns cloying and heavy; a plain 1:1 raspberry sugar syrup is the right texture.
- Ice in shavesShaved or finely cracked ice, not cubes. A pound is roughly 450 g, and it is there to chill and dilute at the same time, which is what keeps the drink from tasting like sweetened spirit. Add it last, just before serving, or the wine goes flat and watery.
- The pineappleSlice it thin; the fruit is a flavouring, not a garnish. The original gives no maceration step, though letting the slices sit in the orange juice and syrup before the wine goes in is a reasonable modern addition. Fresh only b pushes the sugar past the point of balance if you use tinned pineapple in syrup.
- Yield and glassesWith the wine, spirits and melt this makes something over a litre and a half, enough for eight or so of the shallow "flat" glasses the original means (a coupe or small wine glass). It is stronger than it tastes and should be drunk while the ice still holds.
The word julep reaches English through Arabic and Persian gulab, rosewater, and for centuries it meant a sweet medicinal draught rather than a drink for pleasure; the American mint julep narrowed the sense in the nineteenth century, and English writers then borrowed it back as a loose label for any iced, spirituous fruit cup served from a bowl. This recipe seems to belong to the vogue for wine cups at garden parties and suppers, where a single bottle of cheap German sparkling wine could apparently be stretched with liqueurs, syrup and a mass of ice. That a whole ripe pineapple can be treated as an ordinary bowl ingredient says a good deal about the period: the Azores and West Indian trade had turned the fruit from a hothouse status symbol y the day as a centrepiece, into something a well-off household could simply slice up and drown in Moselle.