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Oxford Grace Cup
Take the peel of a lemon, extract the juice of the fruit, and cut the peel into thin slices. Put it in a bowl or jug, pour over it a pint and a half of strong home-brewed ale, and a bottle of sherry; grate a nutmeg into the cup; sweeten to taste; stir till the sugar is dissolved, and then add three or four slices of bread, toasted brown. Set it on one side for two hours before straining off.
A cold spiced ale-and-sherry cup, closer to a medieval wassail than to a modern punch. It needs no cooking, but the ingredients have shifted enough that a straight reading will give you something harsher than intended.
- Quantities in modern measureA pint and a half imperial is 30 fl oz, about 850 ml; a bottle of sherry is 750 ml. Together that is roughly 1.6 litres, enough for eight to twelve small glasses passed round.
- What the juice is forThe instruction to extract the juice never says to add it, and the wording is genuinely ambiguous. Some versions of the drink use both peel and juice; if you want a leaner cup, hold the juice back and use the peel alone.
- Home-brewed aleThis means a strong, malty household- or brewhouse-made ale rather than a bitter or an IPA. A barley wine, old ale or English strong mild is the nearest thing on a shop shelf; a heavily hopped modern beer will fight the sherry.
- The sherryAn oloroso or amontillado suits the spice and the malt. A dry fino is thin here, and a cream sherry will push the cup past drinkable sweetness before you add any sugar at all.
- NutmegA whole nutmeg grated into 1.6 litres is a great deal by current taste, and nutmeg in quantity is genuinely acrid. Start with half and grate in more after the first hour of steeping.
- Sweeten to tasteWork up from about 2 tablespoons of caster or demerara sugar, stirring until it is fully dissolved before judging. Cold liquid takes sugar slowly, so give it time rather than adding more.
- The toast is an ingredientToast browned hard, not pale, is generally held to give the cup its characteristic roasted note; it also clouds the drink, and the recipe directs that it be strained off. Do not let it sit much beyond the stated two hours or the liquid turns bready and slack.
- ServingStrain through a fine sieve or muslin and serve cool but not iced, in small glasses or a shared cup. It does not keep well past a day, as the ale goes flat and the lemon peel turns bitter.
A grace cup is the cup passed round after grace has been said at the end of a formal meal, a custom kept up in the Oxford and Cambridge colleges and in the London livery companies, where the shared loving cup is still handled with some ceremony. The drink itself belongs to an older English family of spiced ale cups — wassail, lamb's wool, and the various "ale-berries" — in which strong ale is fortified with wine, spiced, sweetened and set to steep with floating toast; the practice of putting toast in the cup is generally traced as the origin of drinking a "toast" to someone's health. Its survival as a curiosity of collegiate hospitality rather than an everyday drink shows how far these old ceremonial mixtures had drifted from common practice by the late Victorian period: the recipe still assumes a reader with access to home-brewed ale.