Home › The Principles of Cookery › White-Wine Negus
White-Wine Negus
Extract the juice from the peel of a lemon by rubbing loaf sugar upon it, or cut the peel of a lemon very thin and pound it in a mortar; cut two lemons into thin slices, add four glassfuls of calf's foot jelly in a liquid state, and small quantities of cinnamon, mace, cloves, and all spice. Put the whole into a jug, pour one quart of boiling water upon it, cover the jug closely let it stand a quarter of an hour, and then add a bottle of boiling white wine; grate half a nutmeg into it, stir all well together, and sweeten to taste.
A hot spiced wine punch, thickened and enriched with jelly rather than served clear. Two things decide whether it works: the wine must not actually boil hard, and the calf's-foot jelly needs a modern stand-in.
- GlassfulsA "glassful" here is a wine glass, roughly 2 fl oz, so four glassfuls is about a cup of liquid jelly. Combined with a quart of water and a 750 ml bottle of wine this yields close to two quarts, enough for eight to ten small cups.
- Calf's foot jellyA homemade gelatin stock made by long-boiling split calf's feet, once a staple of the sickroom; it was often lightly sweetened and flavoured with lemon or wine. Substitute a cup of unflavoured gelatin dissolved at about half the strength of a dessert jelly, or leave it out; its job is body and a faint richness, not flavour.
- Loaf sugar on the peelRubbing a hard sugar lump over the zest draws out the peel oils, the same principle as an oleo saccharum. A large rough sugar cube or two works; if you use the mortar method instead, pound the pared zest with a spoonful of sugar to bruise the oils out.
- Boiling white wineThe recipe says boiling, but bring the wine only to the point of steaming, around 170F. A hard boil drives off alcohol and turns a dry white sharp and flat. A plain unoaked white suits it; the spices supply everything else.
- Spices"Small quantities" means a 2-inch cinnamon stick, a blade of mace, three or four cloves and three or four allspice berries. Use whole spice and strain; ground spice will cloud the drink and settle as grit.
- The steeping quarter hourFifteen minutes with the jug covered is the whole infusion. Longer and the lemon slices give up pith bitterness, which no amount of sugar covers.
- SweeteningSweeten at the end, after the wine goes in, since dry and off-dry whites vary widely. Start with two tablespoons of sugar for the full quantity and work up.
- ServingStrain into a warmed jug or bowl and serve in small heatproof glasses or punch cups. If you have used the jelly it may thicken slightly as it cools, so keep it hot over the lowest possible heat.
Negus is a wine-and-hot-water drink named, by long tradition, for Colonel Francis Negus, an English officer and courtier of the early eighteenth century who is said to have diluted the company's port to keep a political argument civil. Port negus was the standard version; a white-wine negus like this one is the lighter variant. Jelly boiled from calf's feet was a great nineteenth-century restorative, given to those weak from illness, and stirring it into hot spiced wine gave a drink that was thought nourishing as well as warming. The technique of rubbing sugar on citrus peel to capture the oils belongs to the same era's punch-making and survives in the cocktail bar today.