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Wine Caudle
Beat with a whisk the white of one egg and the yolks of eight. Stir into it a bottle of white wine, a pint of water, the peel of a lemon, and half a pound of lump sugar. Set the mixture on the fire, and keep stirring it. Remove it as soon as it boils. Pour the caudle into a bowl or small glasses. It should be eaten with sweet biscuit.
A hot egg-and-wine drink, thickened only by the yolks, so the whole thing hangs on temperature control. Everything else is straightforward.
- The hinge: do not let it boilThe instruction to remove it "as soon as it boils" is the old way of saying take it to the edge and no further; at a true boil eight yolks will scramble into curds. Hold it at 170-180F, stirring constantly, until it coats the spoon, and pull it off the heat the moment you see steam and the first tremor of a bubble at the edge.
- Use a double boilerThe original says only to set the pan on the fire and keep stirring. Over a modern burner, a bowl set over simmering water, or a heavy-bottomed pan on the lowest setting, gives gentler control and far less risk.
- QuantitiesA modern bottle of white wine is 750 ml, though period bottles varied; a pint here is an imperial pint, 20 fl oz, so roughly 2 1/2 US cups. Half a pound of lump sugar is about 1 1/8 cups granulated - noticeably sweet, and worth cutting to 4-5 oz if your wine is not bone dry.
- Lump sugarLoaf or lump sugar was cut from a refined cone and was the cleanest sugar available; plain granulated is its direct descendant. Nothing is lost by substituting it.
- The single whiteThe recipe specifies one white to eight yolks; no reason is given for it. Follow the proportion as written rather than rounding up to whole eggs.
- Lemon peelPeel means pared zest in strips, no white pith, added whole and fished out before serving. A vegetable peeler gives the right thin sheets; grated zest will make the drink gritty and cannot be removed.
- Yield and servingThe wine and water alone come to more than 5 cups, so expect nearer 6 1/2 to 7 cups once the sugar and eggs are in - eight small glasses with some to spare. Serve hot, in warmed vessels, with a plain sweet biscuit - shortbread, a langue de chat, or a sponge finger.
- AlcoholThe heating is brief, so much of the wine's alcohol survives, though boiling drives off some and the pint of water dilutes the rest to well below wine strength. Still an alcoholic drink, not a nursery posset.
A caudle was a warm, sweetened, egg-thickened drink of wine or ale, given to invalids, to women lying in after childbirth, and to anyone out in the cold; the name is generally traced through Old French to Latin calidus, hot. Two-handled lidded caudle cups were standard silver and delftware forms in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, and the drink was so bound up with childbirth that it is often said to have gone by names such as the groaning drink, served with what was more usually called groaning cake, and with groaning malt or cheese. By the time Cassell's was compiled in the later nineteenth century the caudle had largely retreated to the sickroom chapters of household manuals, where it sat alongside beef tea, arrowroot and gruel as nourishment thought suitable for the weak. Its close relatives, posset and syllabub, survived better on the dessert table, and the modern zabaglione and eggnog work on the same principle of yolks whisked over gentle heat with wine or spirit.