Home › The Principles of Cookery › SANGAREE (Danish)
SANGAREE (Danish)
The following is a Danish method of making sangaree. Take three bottles of red wine, and mix with them a pint and a half of water; add a whole nutmeg, grated, and cinnamon and sugar to taste. Set the preparation on the fire, and let it boil up; then take it off, and let it stand with the cover on till cold. Strain and bottle.
A mulled wine that is meant to be drunk cold, not hot. The method is simple, but the quantities are large and two of the seasonings are left entirely to the cook.
- Scale and yieldThree bottles plus an imperial pint and a half of water (30 fl oz, about 850 ml) gives roughly 3.1 litres. It halves and quarters without trouble.
- The nutmeg is the pointA whole grated nutmeg across three bottles is roughly 2 to 3 teaspoons of ground spice, a large quantity for the volume. Nutmeg is the spice period writers associate most closely with sangaree.
- Cinnamon is unmeasuredNothing in the original indicates how much. Two or three sticks for the full three bottles is in keeping with the nutmeg; ground cinnamon will cloud the finished bottle and is harder to strain out.
- Sugar to tasteStart at about 50 g per bottle of wine and add more once the mixture has boiled up, since sweetness reads lower when the drink is cold than when it is warm. Dissolve it before the liquid reaches a boil.
- "Let it boil up"This means bring it just to the boil and pull it off at once, not simmer it. Sustained boiling drives off a good deal of the alcohol and leaves the wine flat and stewed.
- Cover while coolingThe lid is doing real work here: it condenses the aromatic vapour back into the liquid instead of letting the nutmeg and cinnamon escape into the kitchen. Cool at room temperature, then refrigerate.
- StrainingGrated nutmeg leaves a fine silt. Pass the cold liquid through a muslin-lined sieve, or through a coffee filter if you want it clear in the glass.
- Wine and keepingAn inexpensive, fruit-forward red with modest tannin suits it; a heavily oaked wine turns bitter with the spice. Bottled and refrigerated it should keep a week or so.
Sangaree is the anglicised form of the Spanish sangría, from sangre, blood, for the colour of the wine. English speakers picked the word up in the West Indies in the eighteenth century, where it usually meant wine cut with water, sweetened, and dusted with nutmeg — the nutmeg being so consistent a feature of period recipes that it reads almost as a defining mark, though the sources nowhere say so outright. By the time Cassell's was compiled in the later nineteenth century, sangaree had become a general household term for a diluted, spiced, sweetened wine drink, and the dictionary format made room for variants. The Danish attribution here is plausible enough in spirit: Scandinavia has a long tradition of spiced red wine in the gløgg line, and what distinguishes this version from that one is the instruction to cool, strain and bottle it rather than serve it steaming.