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WASSAIL BOWL (another way) (Following is an old recipe)
The following is an old recipe for making the wassail bowl. Simmer a small quantity of the following spices in a tea-cupful of water, viz., cardamoms, cloves, nutmeg, mace, ginger, cinnamon, and coriander. When done, put the spice to two, four, or six bottles of port, sherry, or Madeira, with a pound and a half of loaf sugar pounded (this quantity is for four bottles), and set all on the fire in a clean, bright saucepan; meanwhile, have the yolks of twelve eggs and the whites of six well whisked up in it. Then, when the spiced and sugared wine is a little warm, take from it at intervals three or four cupfuls and pour them into the bowl; after which, when it boils, add the whole of the remainder, pouring it in gradually, and stirring it briskly all the time so as to froth it. The moment a fine froth is obtained, toss in twelve fine soft roasted apples, and send it up hot. Spices for each bottle of wine: Ten grains of mace, forty-six grains of cloves, thirty-seven grains of cardamoms, twenty-eight grains of cinnamon, twelve grains of nutmeg, forty-eight grains of ginger, and forty-nine grains of coriander-seeds.
A Victorian party drink scaled for a crowd, with the spices weighed in apothecaries' grains. The whole thing hangs on tempering the eggs slowly enough that they froth rather than scramble.
- The hinge: temper, never boilOnce the hot wine meets the eggs, the mixture must not be allowed to boil or it will curdle into sweet spiced scrambled egg. The recipe's slow start — three or four cupfuls of merely warm wine first — exists for exactly this reason, and the brisk whisking through the final pour is what builds the froth.
- Grains into gramsA grain is 64.8 mg. Per bottle of wine that gives roughly 0.65 g mace, 3 g cloves, 2.4 g cardamom, 1.8 g cinnamon, 0.8 g nutmeg, 3.1 g ginger and 3.2 g coriander — about 15 g of whole spice in all. Use whole spices, bruised, and strain the infusion before it goes into the wine.
- Scale as written for four bottlesThe pound and a half of sugar is explicitly stated for four bottles, and the eggs (twelve yolks and six whites) are presumably pitched at the same quantity; the spice table is per bottle. If you make two bottles, halve the sugar and eggs and use the spice quantities twice.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined white sugar broken from a cone and pounded; ordinary granulated is the direct replacement. A pound and a half to four bottles is very sweet by modern taste, and half that amount is defensible, particularly with a sweet Madeira or an oloroso-style sherry.
- The winePort, sherry and Madeira are all fortified, so the finished bowl is strong even after some alcohol boils off. Four bottles is three litres and will serve twenty or more in small cups — this is a punch to be ladled, not poured into wine glasses.
- Roasted applesApples, cored and baked whole in a moderate oven until they burst and collapse. Their pulp breaking through the froth is the point; a similar frothy apple drink was known as lambswool, a name commonly explained by the fleecy look of the burst pulp, though that explanation is traditional rather than certain.
- Raw eggPoured-in boiling wine may or may not carry the mixture to a temperature that makes the eggs safe; there is no way to be sure without a thermometer. Treat the drink as containing lightly cooked or raw egg — worth knowing if you are serving anyone who should avoid that.
- The bowl and the saucepan"A clean, bright saucepan" asks only for a scrupulously scoured pan; use any nonreactive one. Warm the serving bowl thoroughly first, or three litres of hot punch will lose heat quickly.
Wassail takes its name from the Old English greeting wes hāl, "be whole" or "be in good health", a toast recorded in Anglo-Norman and early Middle English accounts of English drinking customs and long attached to Christmas and Twelfth Night. The spiced, sugared, egg-frothed version with roasted apples in it is close to the drink also called lambswool, a name usually explained by the fleecy appearance of the burst apple pulp, though that explanation is traditional rather than certain; a separate tradition of wassailing the orchards, in which cider was poured at the roots of apple trees in the West Country, is generally treated as a distinct custom that shares the word. The book prints this one as "an old recipe", and the spice table is given in apothecaries' grains — the weighing system of a chemist's shop rather than a kitchen. By the time it was reprinted here, wassail was largely a Christmas antiquity rather than an everyday drink.