Home › The Principles of Cookery › WASSAIL BOWL (another way) (Put into a bowl half a pound)
WASSAIL BOWL (another way) (Put into a bowl half a pound)
Put into a bowl half a pound of castor sugar, pour on it a pint of warm beer, grate a nutmeg and some ginger into it, add four glassfuls of sherry and five additional pints of beer; stir well, and sweeten to taste. Let the preparation stand covered up for two or three hours, then put into it three or four slices of bread cut thin and toasted brown. Sometimes two or three slices of lemon, and a few lumps of loaf sugar which have been rubbed on the peel of a lemon are introduced.
A cold-mixed wassail, unusual in that nothing is heated beyond the initial pint of warm beer used to dissolve the sugar. The long standing time is the whole point: it lets the nutmeg and ginger infuse before the toast goes in.
- Castor sugarSuperfine or caster sugar, finer than granulated and quicker to dissolve. Granulated works if you stir it into the warm beer until no grit remains.
- Imperial pintsCassell's pint is 20 fl oz, so six pints is about 3.4 litres, close to seven 500 ml bottles of beer. Expect roughly 15 to 20 cups.
- "Four glassfuls" of sherryGenuinely imprecise. A Victorian sherry glass held roughly 2 to 2.5 fl oz, so read this as about 8 to 10 fl oz, a third of a standard bottle. Adjust to taste rather than treating the number as fixed.
- Which beerThe recipe says only 'beer'; a malty, lightly hopped ale suits the sugar and spice best. A modern IPA turns the bowl bitter against the sugar; a brown ale, mild, or dark lager sits closer to the likely intended flavour.
- Grate the spices freshA whole nutmeg and a knob of root ginger, grated straight into the bowl, are what carry this drink. Pre-ground nutmeg has usually lost its volatile oils and the result tastes flat and dusty.
- The standing timeTwo or three hours covered, somewhere cool but not the refrigerator. The beer will lose most of its carbonation, which is expected and not a fault.
- Add the toast lastThin slices toasted dark, floated on the surface just before serving. Put them in at the start of the standing period and they disintegrate into sediment.
- Sugar rubbed on lemon peelLoaf sugar dragged across the zest picks up the citrus oil, the same trick as a modern oleo saccharum. Two or three sugar cubes rubbed over an unwaxed lemon does the job.
- ServingLadle from the bowl into cups or small glasses, giving each a piece of the toast if you are following the old form. Strength lands somewhere near a strong beer, so serve in modest measures.
Wassail takes its name from the Old English greeting wes hal, "be well" or "be in good health", and the word came to mean both the toast and the vessel it was drunk from. The bowl belongs to the twelve days of Christmas and, in the cider counties of the West Country, to the January custom of wassailing the orchards, where drink was poured at the roots of the apple trees. The floating toast is the older feature: sopped bread in spiced ale is recorded well before the Victorian period, and the practice of drinking someone's health is often said to be the origin of the word "toast" itself. Cassell's gives more than one version, this one being headed "another way", and this cold version leans on sherry rather than heat.