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Negus
This popular beverage derives its name from its originator, Colonel Negus. The ingredients of which it is composed are either port or sherry and hot water, the quantity of the water being double that of the wine. Sweeten with lump sugar, and flavour with a little lemon-juice, and grated nutmeg, and a morsel only of the yellow rind of the lemon. It is an improvement to add one drop of essence of ambergris, or eight or ten drops of essence of vanilla to every twelve glasses or so of negus.
A hot wine punch built on a single ratio, with almost nothing to go wrong except overheating and one flavouring you cannot legally buy.
- The ratioOne part wine to two parts hot water. For a single serving that is roughly 1/3 cup (80 ml) port or sherry to 2/3 cup (160 ml) water; scale as needed.
- Heat, not boilThe recipe specifies only hot water, and gives no temperature. Water well off the boil is the safer reading: ethanol boils around 78C (172F), so very hot water will drive off alcohol and aromatics.
- Which wineThe recipe says only port or sherry. A ruby port or a medium (amontillado-style) sherry suits it; a modern dry fino will give a thinner drink and want more sugar.
- Lump sugarVictorian lump sugar was a cut loaf-sugar cube, close to a modern sugar cube. Two cubes or about 2 teaspoons per glass suits port; taste and adjust, as fortified wines vary widely in sweetness.
- The lemon rind"A morsel only" is meant literally. Pare a thin strip of yellow zest with no white pith; it can be lifted out before serving.
- NutmegGrate it over the surface at the moment of serving. Pre-ground nutmeg stirred in early goes dusty and muddies the wine.
- Essence of ambergrisAmbergris is a sperm whale product, and trade in it is restricted or prohibited in many countries, including the United States under the Marine Mammal Protection Act and Endangered Species Act. Use the vanilla alternative the recipe itself offers: eight to ten drops of extract per twelve glasses is a whisper, not a flavour.
- Yield and glassA Victorian "glass" of negus is a small stemmed wine glass, about 2 to 3 fl oz of finished drink.
The name is generally traced to Colonel Francis Negus, an English courtier who served as one of the commissioners executing the office of Master of the Horse and who died in 1732; the story, repeated in cookery books throughout the nineteenth century and here taken as settled fact, is that he proposed diluting the company's port to keep a political argument civil. Whatever its origin, negus became one of the standard warm drinks of the English supper room: it appears in Dickens and in countless household manuals, poured at balls, at children's parties in weakened form, and for invalids, because hot diluted wine was thought both restorative and less intoxicating than the neat article. Its presence in a general dictionary of cookery reflects how routine such compounded wine drinks were in a period when a decanter of port was a kitchen ingredient as much as a dinner-table one, and the suggested drop of ambergris marks the survival of a much older taste, inherited from the perfumed cordials of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for scenting drinks with animal aromatics.