Home › The Principles of Cookery › Wine, Mulled, Claret
Wine, Mulled, Claret
Take a few cloves, a quarter of an ounce of cinnamon, the thin peel of half a lemon, two slices of lemon, four ounces of sifted sugar, and one pint of water; boil for a quarter of an hour in an enamelled saucepan, add a little grated nutmeg or powdered ginger, two bottles of claret, one small glass of brandy or Curacoa; when nearly boiling, strain.
A Victorian mulled claret built the old way: a spiced sugar syrup boiled first, the wine added only at the end. The method still gives the cleanest result.
- Never let it boilThe instruction to strain when it is nearly boiling is the hinge of the recipe: hold the pan just short of a boil, where steam rises but no bubbles break. Prolonged boiling drives off the alcohol and dulls the fruit. The book gives no temperature; the 70-75C (160-170F) often recommended today is in fact cooler than "nearly boiling" suggests.
- Why enamelledBare iron, aluminium and unlined copper react with the acid and tannin in red wine, giving a metallic taste and a dull colour. Enamelled cast iron, stainless steel or glass all serve.
- ClaretIn British usage claret means red Bordeaux. Any dry, medium-bodied red with moderate oak works; two bottles is 1.5 litres. Avoid heavily oaked or high-alcohol wines, which turn bitter when warmed.
- QuantitiesA quarter ounce of cinnamon is about 7 g, or two to three sticks. Four ounces of sifted sugar is roughly half a cup of caster sugar. The pint is an imperial one, 20 fl oz or 570 ml, so water makes up around a quarter of the finished drink; halve it for a stronger result.
- Sifted sugarNineteenth-century "sifted sugar" meant sugar broken from the loaf and passed through a sieve, roughly the fineness of what we now call caster. Granulated dissolves perfectly well in a syrup boiled fifteen minutes.
- CuracoaAn orange liqueur; Cointreau, triple sec or a good curaçao all stand in. A "small glass" was not a fixed measure, but something in the region of 1 1/2 to 2 fl oz is the usual reading.
- Lemon peelTake the peel in wide strips with a peeler and keep the white pith off it. Fifteen minutes of boiling extracts plenty of oil, and pith boiled that long turns the syrup bitter.
- Straining and yieldPour through a fine sieve or muslin to catch the cloves, grated nutmeg and cinnamon bark. Two bottles plus water and spirit gives roughly two litres, or twelve to sixteen servings in warmed glasses or cups.
Spiced, sweetened, warmed wine runs back through medieval hippocras and piment, drinks in which red wine was steeped with cinnamon, ginger, cloves and sugar and then strained through a conical cloth bag "Hippocrates' sleeve," which is generally given as the source of the name. By the time Cassell's was compiled, mulling is often said to have been a familiar feature of the British winter household: something set on the hob for carol singers, for a cold arrival, or for the sickroom, where warm wine was still regarded as restorative. The word claret comes through Anglo-Norman from clairet, a lighter-coloured red, and had long since become the standard English term for the wines of Bordeaux, shipped in enormous volume, though its price in Britain fluctuated sharply with duty.