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Mulled Wine
To a bottle of wine add five ounces of loaf sugar, three cloves, and the sixth part of a nutmeg, grated. Place the wine in a bright tin pot with a lid. Keep it over a gentle heat till it is nearly boiling; then send to table in a hot silver jug with a lid.
A short, sweet recipe that depends almost entirely on temperature control: the wine must be hot but never boiled.
- The hinge: never let it boilThe recipe stops short of a boil deliberately. Modern practice usually aims somewhere around 160-170F, though "nearly boiling" suggests the Victorian cook went hotter. Once wine simmers, the alcohol and the volatile aromatics both go off in the steam and what is left tastes flat and stewed.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar broken from a cone; ordinary granulated or caster sugar is the direct substitute. Five ounces to a 750 ml bottle is about two-thirds of a cup, which is very sweet by current taste — half that quantity suits most drinkers, and less again if the wine is soft and fruity.
- A sixth of a nutmegWhole nutmegs vary, but a sixth of one grates out to roughly a third of a teaspoon. Grate it fresh at the last moment; pre-ground nutmeg fades noticeably over a few months.
- The bright tin potA bright tin pot means tinned metal, kept scoured; the tin surface is unreactive with acidic wine. Any stainless or enamelled saucepan does the same job; avoid bare aluminium or unlined cast iron, which react with acidic wine and can leave a metallic edge.
- Straining and servingLift out the cloves before serving or they will keep infusing and turn medicinal. The hot lidded jug is not decoration: mulled wine loses drinkable heat within a few minutes in a cold vessel, so warm the jug and the glasses with hot water first.
- YieldOne bottle gives four to six modest servings. Reheat leftovers gently, again without boiling.
Warmed, sweetened, spiced wine is one of the oldest continuously made drinks in Europe, descending from the Roman conditum and the medieval spiced wines — hippocras and piment — that were strained through a cloth bag and served at the close of a meal. By the time Cassell's was compiled in the late nineteenth century, mulling had become firmly domestic and seasonal: a drink for cold weather, travellers arriving off a coach, and the sickroom. The insistence on a bright tin pot and a lidded silver jug says as much about the Victorian household as about the drink.