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PURL (another way) (Warm a pint of ale)
Warm a pint of ale with a quarter of a pint of milk, and add some sugar and a wine-glassful of gin, brandy, or rum. This beverage is now little used, except amongst the lower classes in and about the metropolis.
A hot ale flip of the simplest sort. The whole difficulty lies in getting the milk in without curdling it.
- MeasuresCassell's pint is the imperial 20 fl oz, so a little under 2 1/2 cups of ale and about 2/3 cup of milk. A wine-glassful in this period is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, a generous modern shot.
- The hinge: do not boilAle is acidic and warm milk added to it will break if the mixture goes near a simmer. Heat the ale to about 150F, take it off the heat, then stir the warmed milk in slowly. Add the spirit last, off the heat, so that less of it is driven off.
- Which aleVictorian mild and brown ales were generally less hopped than pale or keeping ales, and often faintly sweet. A modern IPA turns aggressively bitter when heated; choose a mild, brown ale, or a soft English bitter.
- Sugar"Some sugar" means to taste — start with two teaspoons for the pint and adjust, since ales vary widely in residual sweetness. Demerara or a little dark brown sugar suits the drink better than white.
- SpicesSome nineteenth-century purl recipes call for nutmeg or ginger; this stripped-down version omits them, but a scrape of nutmeg over the top is in keeping.
- YieldAbout three cups, enough for two large mugs. Serve hot in something thick-walled, as it cools fast.
Purl began as a bitter, not a flip: ale infused with wormwood or other bitter herbs, drunk in the morning as a stomachic, which is how Pepys and later writers refer to it. By the nineteenth century the name had drifted to mean hot spiced ale laced with gin, sold in the early hours from boats and stalls to Thames watermen, porters and market men — purl is mentioned in Dickens, and the riverside purl-seller is often associated with him, though the scene is not securely placed. The addition of milk here makes it a near relation of the ale flip and posset, the whole family of warm ale-and-dairy drinks that served as breakfast, medicine and comfort before hot tea and coffee became cheap. Cassell's sniff at "the lower classes in and about the metropolis" is itself the historical point: by the later nineteenth century purl had become a class marker, printed in the dictionary as a curiosity rather than a recommendation.