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Purl
Take ten pounds of wormwood, six pounds of gentian, two pounds of dried rind of orange, half a pound of bruised ginger, two ounces of cloves, and eight ounces of cardamoms. Put these ingredients in six gallons of water, boil the mixture, then digest for fourteen or fifteen days, and decant into wine-bottles. Add this to warm beer, according to taste.
This is a bittering concentrate for warm ale rather than a drink in itself, and the two things that make it dangerous are the sheer weight of wormwood and the fact that the finished liquid is water, not spirit. The notes below explain the terms and why the method fails today.
- Wormwood at ten poundsArtemisia absinthium contains thujone, a neurotoxin that in quantity causes vomiting, convulsions and kidney damage. Ten pounds of it steeped into six gallons gives a concentrate far outside any modern food or beverage limit, and the recipe offers no dose beyond "according to taste."
- Gentian in bulkGentian root is a legitimate bitter, used in vermouths and aperitifs at trace levels. Six pounds to six gallons is a medicinal decoction, not a flavouring, and heavy gentian is a reliable emetic.
- "Digest" means stand warmIn older cookery and pharmacy, to digest is to let a mixture stand at gentle heat for days so the solids give up their extractives. Fourteen or fifteen days of warm holding in an un-acidified, un-alcoholic water infusion is an incubation, not a preservation.
- Bottled without preservationThe decanted liquid is a plain aqueous herb extract sealed in wine bottles at room temperature with no alcohol, no sugar concentration and no acid. The initial boil is followed by a fortnight of warm standing and an open decanting, so it confers no lasting protection. Nothing here controls spoilage organisms, and the fact that it is later stirred into warm rather than boiling beer does not correct it.
- Cardamoms and bruised ginger'cardamoms' probably means whole pods, though the recipe does not say; 'bruised' ginger is root crushed rather than sliced, to open the fibres, with the recipe again silent as to fresh or dried. Both are harmless, and along with the orange rind and cloves they are the part of the formula a modern drinker would recognise as flavouring.
- If you want the drinkPurl in its later, milder sense is simply warmed ale with bitters and spice. Use a current recipe with a commercial aromatic bitters rather than any home wormwood extraction.
Purl was a working man's warmer, and for most of its life a riverside one: through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries London had purl-men who rowed out to shipping and along the Thames wharves with cans of hot ale, and the drink turns up repeatedly in Dickens, notably in the waterside pubs of Our Mutual Friend. The origin of the name is uncertain; early purl was ale infused with wormwood, and by the time Cassell's was compiled the word covered warmed beer flavoured with almost anything bitter and aromatic, and often fortified with gin. The formula printed here is really an apothecary's bitters rather than a cook's, which is why it reads in pounds of dried herb and speaks of digesting and decanting: wormwood and gentian were stock tonic drugs, and the line between a stomachic and a beer flavouring was thinner in the period than it is now.