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Madeira
few gratings nutmeg Put two lumps of ice in glass; add sugar, milk and wine; shake, strain, and add nutmeg.
Mint Julep No. I 1 bunch mint 2 cups ice water juice 6 lemons 2 cups sugar 4 cups water Chop mint; add ice water; let stand over night. Boil sugar and water; chill; add lemon juice and mint water. Serve with crushed ice; garnish with mint leaves.
Mint Julep No. 2 Put three sprigs mint with one half teaspoon orange bitters in a glass; add one sherry glass Vermouth and one half cup whiskey; shake well; add one half cup crushed ice, stir to crush the mint. Add two slices orange, two or three strawberries, and a few sprigs of mint. Add more ice and serve when the outside of the glass is frosted.
Three drinks run one after another here: a shaken Madeira-and-milk flip, a mint syrup for a long julep, and a spirit-forward julep built in the glass. The measures belong to a bar of about 1907 and need translating before you pour.
- A sherry glassRoughly 2 fluid ounces, or 1/4 cup. It was a standard small stemmed glass, not a modern wine glass.
- The whiskey in No. 2Half a cup is 4 ounces of spirit in a single serving, which is two to three modern pours. Treat it as a drink for two glasses, or scale the whiskey to 2 ounces and keep the bitters and vermouth in proportion.
- Lumps of iceIce came off a block, so a "lump" is an irregular hand-broken chunk rather than a uniform cube. Two large cubes will do for the shaken Madeira drink; the juleps want ice crushed fine in a cloth or a bag so it packs and frosts the glass.
- Julep No. 1 has no spiritAs written it is a mint lemonade: mint steeped overnight in cold water, then a boiled sugar syrup and the juice of six lemons. Expect about six to eight servings from the quantities given.
- The mint infusionChopping the mint and steeping it overnight in cold water is the point of No. 1, and it should be cold-steeped, not boiled. Hot water pulls out a stewed, grassy note; the overnight cold infusion keeps the top notes.
- Boiled syrupTwo cups sugar to four cups water dissolves in a minute or two over heat. Do not reduce it: this is a thin syrup meant to sweeten a long drink, and the recipe wants it chilled before the juice goes in so the flavour is not cooked.
- Orange bittersOnce as common behind a bar as aromatic bitters and then nearly extinct for decades. Several brands are made again; half a teaspoon is roughly four dashes.
- VermouthThe recipe does not say whether it means sweet Italian or dry French; either was in use at the time. Vermouth is a fortified wine and oxidises, so keep an open bottle refrigerated and use it within a month or so.
- Bruising, not muddlingNo. 2 says to stir the mint with the crushed ice rather than mash it. Torn mint leaves turn bitter and shed dark flecks into the drink; the recipe serves the glass once the outside has frosted.
The word julep is generally traced through Arabic and Persian gulab, rosewater, and reached English as a general term for a sweetened medicinal draught before it settled in America on mint, sugar, ice and whiskey. Both patterns in this book were current in the early 1900s: the large pitcher version, essentially a mint-and-lemon syrup that the host could serve with or without spirit, and the single glass built with bitters and vermouth. That a candy company's cook book carried them at all is a reminder that Lowney's Cook Book (1907, compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney chocolate firm) was a full general household manual, not merely a promotional pamphlet.