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Drink, Pleasant, for Warm Weather
INGREDIENTS. - To every pint of good ale allow 1 bottle of ginger beer.
For this beverage the ginger beer must be in an effervescing state, and the beer not in the least turned or sour. Mix them The together and drink immediately. draught is refreshing and wholesome, as the the ginger corrects the action of the beer.
It does not deteriorate by standing a little, but, of course, is better when taken fresh.
This is a shandygaff under a coy title: ale cut with ginger beer, mixed to order. The only technical demands are that both components be lively and the ale sound.
- The ratioA pint of ale to "1 bottle" of ginger beer. Victorian ginger-beer bottles were not standardised, but were commonly somewhere in the region of half a pint to a pint. Start at equal parts and adjust; two parts ale to one part ginger beer gives a drier result.
- Ginger beer, not ginger aleThe period drink was a fermented, cloudy, sharply gingery brew, considerably less sweet than modern pale ginger ale. Choose a strong cloudy ginger beer; if it is sweet, weight the mix toward the ale.
- "In an effervescing state"Both bottles should be freshly opened. The carbonation is the point of the drink, though the recipe itself concedes that it "does not deteriorate by standing a little".
- Ale "not in the least turned or sour"Before reliable pasteurisation and sealed bottles, cask ale went acetic quickly, and the caution reflects that. Any modern bitter, mild or brown ale in good condition works; the mixture flatters a plain, malty ale more than a heavily hopped one.
- Pour orderAle first, ginger beer poured down the side of the glass, which keeps the head manageable. The recipe itself says nothing about pouring.
- On the "wholesome" claimThe idea that ginger "corrects the action of the beer" is Victorian digestive folklore, not fact. The drink is simply a diluted beer, weaker than the ale alone in proportion to how much ginger beer goes in.
- YieldA pint of ale plus a bottle of ginger beer makes roughly two tall glasses.
The mixture of beer and ginger beer is the shandygaff, in print in England from the mid-nineteenth century and common enough by Dickens's day to need no explanation; the origin of the word itself is unrecorded and the various proposed derivations are guesswork. It survives as the shandy, though that is now usually made with lemonade rather than ginger beer. Its appeal in a household book of this kind was practical: it stretched a pint of ale into two long drinks, and the ginger gave it the bite of something medicinal. Beeton's collection is full of such temperate, diluted "summer draughts" - lemonades, shrubs, negus, ginger beers - intended for the family table rather than the public house.