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Wassail Bowl
The wassail bowl used in ancient days to be served specially on Christmas Eve. It was brought into the banqueting hall with songs and carols, and crowned with garlands. To make it, grate half a nutmeg, and put it into a saucepan with one clove, a quarter of an ounce of grated ginger, half a small blade of mace, an inch of stick cinnamon, and two or three coriander and cardamom seeds. Pour upon these ingredients a tea-cupful of cold water, and let them boil. Then add two bottles of white wine, not sweet, and three-quarters of a pound of refined sugar. Pour the mixture into a large saucepan, and set it on the fire. Break the yolks of six eggs and the whites of three into the wassail bowl. When the wine is warm, mix a tea-cupful of it with the eggs in the bowl; when it is a little warmer, add another teacupful, and repeat until five tea-cupfuls have been used. Let the remaining wine boil, and pour it upon the eggs, stirring briskly all the time to froth the liquid. Core, but do not pare, six apples; fill the cavity with sugar, roast them, and throw them into the bowl. Serve very hot. Though sherry or Madeira ought properly to be used, good raisin wine will make an excellent wassail, especially if a tumblerful of brandy be added to it.
A hot spiced wine custard, closer to a thin eggnog than to mulled wine. The whole thing turns on the tempering: once the eggs are in, the mixture must never boil again.
- The hingeAdd the hot wine to the eggs in small stages, as written, and stir hard. If the mixture goes above about 170F after the eggs are in it will scramble, and no amount of whisking will bring it back.
- Tea-cupfulA Victorian tea-cup is roughly 5 fl oz, so a scant two-thirds of a US cup. Five tea-cupfuls of wine into the eggs is about 25 fl oz, which is most of one bottle.
- Two bottles of wineAbout 1.5 litres, giving 10 to 12 small cups. "Not sweet" matters: with three-quarters of a pound of sugar already going in, a dry wine is the only thing keeping this drinkable.
- SugarThree-quarters of a pound is about 1 3/4 cups of granulated sugar, and "refined sugar" means white sugar as against raw or moist brown. Modern palates usually want half that, tasted as you go before the eggs are added.
- Blade of maceOne blade is a single strip of the lacy husk around a nutmeg; half a blade is a scant pinch. Ground mace at roughly an eighth of a teaspoon stands in, though it clouds the bowl.
- Roasting the applesCored but unpeeled, filled with sugar, in a dish at 350F for 40 to 50 minutes until the skins split and the flesh is collapsing.
- Raisin wineA homemade country wine fermented from dried grapes, effectively gone from commerce. Sherry or Madeira, as the recipe prefers, are still on the shelf but are fortified to around 15 to 20 per cent, so a bowl built on them will be considerably stronger than one built on table wine.
- ServingWarm the bowl first and serve immediately in small cups; the froth collapses within a few minutes and the custard thickens and separates as it stands.
The name comes from the greeting wæs hæil, "be well" or "be in health" -- usually traced through Middle English to an Old Norse formula -- which by the later Middle Ages had attached itself to the shared drinking vessel passed round at Christmas and Twelfth Night. Two traditions run alongside each other: the ale-based bowl thickened with roasted apples, often called lamb's wool for the pulp floating on the surface, and the grander wine-and-egg version recorded here, which is essentially a hot spiced custard punch of the kind well-off eighteenth and nineteenth-century households served in quantity. Apple wassailing in the West Country cider orchards, where cider was poured on the roots and the trees toasted for the coming season, is generally traced to the same root and was still being practised in the nineteenth century.