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WASSAIL BOWL (another way) (Mix half an ounce of grated)
Mix half an ounce of grated ginger, half a grated nutmeg, and a pinch of powdered cinnamon, with half a pound of Demerara sugar. Put it into a saucepan with a pint of ale, and let it boil; then stir in two additional pints of ale, half a bottle of sherry, Madeira, or raisin wine, and a large lump of sugar which has been rubbed upon a fresh lemon till the yellow part is taken off. Make the wine very hot, but do not allow it to boil; put it into the bowl. Throw into it six apples roasted as in the last recipe, and half a small lemon cut into slices and freed entirely from the white pith. Serve very hot.
A spiced ale-and-wine punch of the older English type, thickened and perfumed by roasted apples floating on top. Most of the work is in judging heat: the ale is boiled, the fortified wine is not.
- The hinge: never boil the wineThe recipe is explicit that the wine mixture must be made very hot but not boiled. In modern terms, hold the bowl below a simmer (roughly 160-170F is a convenient target, though the book gives no figure). Hard boiling drives off alcohol and the volatile aromatics that make the drink worth serving, and fortified wine tends to lose its character.
- Quantities in modern termsHalf an ounce of ginger is about 14 g, some 6 to 8 teaspoons of dried ground ginger, or a piece of fresh root of about the same weight; half a pound of Demerara is roughly 1 cup packed. Three pints of ale (imperial) is 60 fl oz, about 1.7 litres. Half a modern bottle of wine is 375 ml.
- The aleThe recipe does not specify a style. A mild or brown ale suits the drink better than a modern hoppy one, since bitterness can read harshly in a hot sweetened bowl; a brown ale, mild, or a soft English bitter is the safer choice.
- DemeraraStill sold under that name, a raw-cane sugar with some molasses character; modern versions are light and crystalline. If you want more molasses depth, light muscovado is closer in flavour.
- Raisin wineA homemade country wine made from dried grapes, effectively obsolete. Sherry (a medium oloroso or cream) or Madeira (Bual or Malmsey) is the practical choice, and both are more forgiving of heat than table wine.
- The rubbed sugar lumpDragging a lump of sugar over a lemon until it takes up the coloured zest was a common period way of getting the peel oil into a drink. A teaspoon of finely grated zest stirred in at the end does the same job.
- The roasted applesThe cross-reference is presumably to whole apples baked until they burst; small, tart cooking apples such as Bramley work. The book gives no oven setting, but a moderate oven for 40-50 minutes, until the flesh froths through the skin, answers; float them on the bowl so the pulp breaks into the drink.
- YieldAbout 2.1 litres of liquid, enough for 12 to 14 small cups. Serve in heatproof glasses or a warmed punch bowl, and ladle a little apple pulp into each.
The wassail bowl takes its name from the Old English greeting wes hāl, "be healthy", and by the medieval period the word had transferred from the toast to the drink and to the practice of carrying it door to door at Christmas and Twelfth Night. The version with roasted apples floating in hot spiced ale is the one usually called lambswool, generally traced to the woolly appearance of the burst apple pulp on the surface, though etymologies linking it to Irish festival names are also offered and are contested. Cassell's prints several wassail bowls together, among them a hot ale-and-sherry punch with baked apples, a drink both genuinely old and easy to put on a Victorian table.