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Nightcap
Simmer half a pint of ale, and when on the point of boiling pour it out; grate one-eighth of a nutmeg into it, and add a tea-spoonful of moist sugar, and two table-spoonfuls of brandy. Drink the nightcap the last thing before getting into bed. Time, five minutes to heat the ale. Sufficient for one person.
A single-serving hot ale toddy of the sort Victorian households treated as a sleeping draught. Nothing here is difficult; the details that matter are the measures and the temperature.
- Half a pintCassell's uses imperial measure, so half a pint is 10 fl oz — about 1 1/4 US cups. That plus two tablespoons of brandy makes a generous mugful.
- Moist sugarVictorian "moist sugar" is unrefined or partly refined soft brown sugar, damp and sticky. Light brown sugar is the closest modern equivalent; demerara will not dissolve as readily.
- An eighth of a nutmegA whole nutmeg grates down to roughly two teaspoons, so an eighth is about a quarter teaspoon. Grate it fresh — pre-ground nutmeg loses most of its aroma within months.
- Do not let it boilThe instruction to pour it out at the point of boiling is the hinge of the recipe. Prolonged boiling drives off the aroma and can accentuate bitterness, and the head froths over the pan. Heat it to steaming, around 160-170F, and stop.
- Which aleThe ale most likely meant here is a mild, malty, lightly hopped domestic sort, closer to a modern English mild or brown ale than to a bitter or IPA (Victorian keeping and pale ales could be far more heavily hopped). A heavily hopped beer will taste unpleasantly sharp treated this way.
- Add the brandy off the heatThe recipe implies it, but it is worth being explicit: stir the brandy in after the ale leaves the pan, so the spirit is not driven off.
- StrengthTen ounces of ale plus two tablespoons of brandy is roughly two standard drinks. Whatever its reputation as a sleep aid, alcohol at this dose fragments sleep in the second half of the night.
Hot spiced ale was one of the oldest comforts in the English kitchen, running back through the caudles and possets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — warm ale or wine thickened, sweetened and spiced, given to invalids, new mothers and anyone coming in cold. By the time Cassell's was compiled in the later nineteenth century the elaborate versions had thinned out into simple bedtime drinks like this one, and "nightcap" had made the same journey the other way, from the literal linen cap worn in an unheated bedroom to the drink taken before putting it on. Its appearance in a general dictionary of cookery is a reminder that such books served as domestic medicine as much as cuisine: nutmeg in particular carried a long-standing reputation as a soporific, and sweetened warm ale was widely believed to settle the stomach and bring on sleep.