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PURL (another way) (Take half a pint of ale)
Take half a pint of ale, and warm it gently; then add to it one wine-glassful of bitters, or a little spirit. Purl is a favourite early morning beverage with hard drinkers.
A two-ingredient hot beer drink from the age when ale was warmed rather than chilled. The only real difficulty is working out what the book means by "bitters".
- A wine-glassfulIn Victorian recipe books a wine-glass is reckoned at about 2 fl oz (60 ml). Against half a pint of ale that is a very stiff proportion, which is rather the point of the drink.
- "Bitters" is not AngosturaGiven that the recipe calls for a whole wine-glassful, Cassell's most likely means a bitter cordial or bitter-flavoured spirit of the wormwood or gentian type, taken in glassfuls, rather than the concentrated aromatic bitters sold today in dash bottles. Two ounces of a modern cocktail bitters would be undrinkable.
- "A little spirit"Gin is the spirit usually associated with purl in older accounts. The quantity is left to the maker; an ounce is a reasonable pour if the full wine-glass seems too much.
- Warm it gentlyThe instruction is doing real work. Ale that simmers or boils loses its condition and the hop bitterness can turn harsh. Warm it only until it is hot to the finger, well short of a simmer; the book gives no temperature.
- Which aleA soft, malty English mild, brown ale or bitter suits warming. Heavily hopped modern IPAs and anything sour become unpleasant when heated.
- YieldOne glass. Half a pint of ale plus the spirit gives a single generous serving.
Purl belongs to the long English habit of drinking beer warm and doctored, alongside possets, flip and mulled ale. The older sense of the word, current from the seventeenth century, was ale infused with wormwood or other bitter herbs, drunk as a morning stomachic; by the nineteenth century the herbs had largely given way to gin or a bought bitter cordial stirred into hot beer. Henry Mayhew, surveying London street trades in the 1850s, described purl-men rowing out to ships and barges on the Thames to sell hot purl to watermen at daybreak, and Dickens uses the drink as shorthand for riverside and tavern life. Cassell's closes tersely, noting only that it is "a favourite early morning beverage with hard drinkers".