Champagne-Cup
2 bottles of Schweppe's soda-water. INGREDIENTS for cup for 4 persons. -1 quart bottle of champagne, 2 bottles of Schweppe's sodawater, 1 liqueur-glass of brandy or curaçoa, 2 tablespoonfuls of powdered sugar, 1 lb. of pounded ice, a sprig of green borage. AVERAGE COST, 6s.
Put all the ingredients into a silver cup or bowl; stir them together, and serve the same as claret-cup. Should the above proportion of sugar not be found sufficient to suit some tastes, increase the quantity.
When borage is not easily obtainable, substitute for it a few slices of cucumber. SEASONABLE. Suitable for pic-nics, balls, and other festive occasions.
A Victorian ball-supper cup, built in a bowl rather than a glass. The proportions are generous by any standard and the assembly takes two minutes, so everything depends on temperature and on adding the soda last.
- The quart bottleThe Victorian wine trade's "reputed quart" was about 26 fl oz, close to the modern 75 cl bottle, rather than a full imperial quart of 40 fl oz. One ordinary bottle is what is wanted.
- Schweppe's sodawaterThese were small stoppered bottles, much smaller than the litre bottles sold now, though capacities varied. Two of them come to considerably less than two modern bottles, so scale accordingly rather than tipping in two of the present-day size.
- Liqueur-glassAbout 1 fl oz, or 2 tablespoons. "Curaçoa" is curaçao, the bitter-orange liqueur; the orange version suits this better than the blue.
- Pounded iceA pound of ice cracked small, added to the bowl rather than to individual glasses. Crushed ice dilutes fast, so chill the wine and the soda thoroughly first and treat the ice as a chilling agent, not a bulking one.
- Order of assemblyDespite the instruction to put all the ingredients in together, dissolve the sugar in the brandy or curaçao first, then add wine, then soda. Sugar dropped into cold sparkling wine sits on the bottom and drives off the bubbles when stirred.
- BorageBorage leaf and its blue star flowers taste faintly of cucumber, which is why cucumber slices are the stated substitute. Use young leaves; older ones are bristly. The flowers are the traditional garnish, floated on top.
- Serve as claret-cupThe book does not spell out the service beyond that cross-reference; serve it very cold, poured or ladled from the bowl into glasses. Silver conducts cold well, but any well-chilled non-reactive bowl does the job.
- YieldA full bottle of champagne plus spirits between four people is well over a modern serving each. The same quantity comfortably fills eight to ten cup glasses.
Cups — wine lengthened with soda water, sugar, spirit and something green — were the standard drink of Victorian summer entertaining, and Mrs Beeton's book gives a run of them. They belong to the moment when artificially aerated water became a cheap commodity, and Schweppe's is named in the ingredient list. Borage is the older element. It had been steeped in wine cups since at least the Tudor period, valued for its cucumber-like coolness and, in earlier herbals, for supposedly cheering the drinker; by Beeton's day the reasoning had shrunk to flavour and the pretty blue flowers. The average cost of 6s. is worth noting — a substantial sum in the 1860s, which places this squarely among the drinks of households that gave balls.