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Tankard Cup
Make a slice of toast, put it in a large goblet, and grate over it the eighth of a nutmeg. Add two inches of thin lemon-rind, and squeeze upon it the juice of half a lemon. Mix a pint of mild ale with a table-spoonful of brandy, a table-spoonful of white wine, and a table-spoonful of capillaire. Pour the mixture over the toast, and it will be ready to serve. A spring of mint or borage may be put into the mixture for a minute, or not.
A cold ale cup of the old tankard type, closer to a punch than a beer. It stands or falls on the sweetening and on not letting the toast disintegrate into sludge.
- CapillaireA syrup once made from maidenhair fern and sold by the bottle; by the nineteenth century it was usually little more than sugar syrup scented with orange-flower water. A heavy sugar syrup with a few drops of orange-flower water stirred in gives the same effect.
- Mild ale"Mild" here means fresh, unaged ale as opposed to matured "old" ale, not weak ale; the dark, faintly sweet brown mild is a later development, and nineteenth-century milds were often pale. A modern English mild or a soft brown ale suits it; a bitter or an IPA will fight the lemon and nutmeg.
- The pintAn imperial pint, 20 fl oz, so about 2 1/2 US cups. The three tablespoons of brandy, wine and syrup and the lemon juice add only an ounce or two, so the finished cup is barely more than a pint — one large goblet, as the recipe directs.
- The toastDry toast, browned not burnt, and cut to fit the vessel. It is there to carry the nutmeg and lemon and to give a faint bready sweetness; leave it whole and drink around it rather than stirring it in.
- Nutmeg and lemon rindAn eighth of a whole nutmeg is a generous 1/4 teaspoon freshly grated. Pare the rind thin enough that no white pith comes with it, or the cup turns bitter as it stands.
- Mint or borage"For a minute, or not" is the operative instruction — a brief steep only. Borage leaves give a cucumber note and go slimy if left in; the blue flowers were the traditional garnish and can stay.
- TemperatureServe at once, cool but not iced. The recipe belongs to a family of cups meant to be mixed and drunk immediately, before the ale loses its condition and the toast breaks up.
Ale cups like this one sit at the end of a long English line of spiced and sweetened beer drinks — the cool tankard, the ale posset, the wassail bowl — in which toast was a standing ingredient rather than a garnish, and from which the modern sense of drinking a "toast" is generally traced. The odd item here is capillaire, a syrup originally made from maidenhair fern (Adiantum capillus-veneris), whose Latin name gives the word; it was a coffee-house and confectioner's staple in the eighteenth century and had largely dwindled to sugar syrup perfumed with orange-flower water. Borage, with its cucumber taste and blue star-shaped flowers, had been floated in cups and claret since the Tudor period.