Claret Cup
1 quart claret wine 2 tablespoons brandy 1/2 cup Curacoa Sugar 1 quart Apollinaris Mint leaves 1/3 cup orange juice Cucumber rind 12 strawberries Mix ingredients, except Apollinaris, using enough sugar to sweeten to taste. Stand on ice to chill, and add chilled Apollinaris just before serving.
A Victorian wine cup: red Bordeaux lengthened with mineral water and perfumed with fruit and herbs. The only real technique is temperature control, since the drink is never cooked and dilutes as it warms.
- ClaretIn American and British usage of this period, claret means red Bordeaux. A dry, medium-bodied Merlot- or Cabernet-based wine is what the recipe assumes; a heavy, high-alcohol modern red will overwhelm the fruit.
- CuracoaAn older spelling of curaçao, the bitter-orange liqueur. Half a cup is a generous 4 fl oz, which with the sugar makes a distinctly sweet cup; start with half that and taste.
- ApollinarisA German sparkling mineral water from the Ahr valley, heavily imported around 1900 and used generically for carbonated water. Any well-chilled sparkling mineral water or club soda serves.
- Sugar to tasteNo quantity is given because the sweetening depends on the wine and the strawberries. A couple of tablespoons per quart of wine is a safe starting point, added and tasted in stages; dissolving it in the orange juice before adding the wine keeps it from settling.
- Cucumber rindPare it thin, in long strips, with as little of the white flesh as possible, and lift it out once the flavour shows. Left in too long, it turns the cup vegetal and slightly bitter.
- MintBruise the leaves lightly rather than tearing or muddling them; aggressively crushed mint tends to taste grassy.
- Chilling"Stand on ice" means setting the covered pitcher or bowl in an ice bath, not adding ice to the liquid. Chilling the wine mixture and the water separately keeps the carbonation and avoids a watery cup.
- YieldA little over two quarts once the brandy, curaçao and juice are counted, enough for roughly a dozen cups. It does not keep; the mint and cucumber go dull within a few hours.
Wine cups of this kind were a common warm-weather drink of the Anglo-American middle-class household through the second half of the nineteenth century, poured at garden parties, regattas and afternoon receptions where spirits alone would have been thought immoderate. The formula varies little: a bottle of wine, a small measure of brandy, a liqueur for perfume, fruit, something green from the garden, and aerated water added at the last moment. Cucumber rind and mint place the drink in the same family as the English claret and Moselle cups, garnishes also associated with the later bottled Pimm's cup. The specification of Apollinaris rather than plain soda water is a period signal in itself: imported German table water was a fashionable grocery item in the 1890s and 1900s, and cookbooks named brands the way they now name types.