May Drink
INGREDIENTS for sufficient for 4 persons. A bottle of any light wine, such as hock, half a large lemon, 6 black currant leaves, 6 oz. of sugar, a little woodruff, 1/4 pint of water, ice. AVERAGE COST, 2s.
Steep the leaves and woodruff with the rind of the lemon and the sugar in the water, until it is strongly flavoured. Pour in the wine, stir well, then strain into a glass jug, adding a few fresh leaves of woodruff and some broken ice before serving.
SEASONABLE in summer.
This is the German Maiwein in English dress: a bottle of Rhine wine infused with woodruff and sweetened. Almost all of the work is in the steeping, and the drink is only as good as the woodruff.
- The stray first word"Albumenoids" is not an ingredient. It appears to be a stray nutritional-class heading or marginal label that has drifted into the ingredient line in this printing. Ignore it.
- Woodruff, wilted not freshSweet woodruff (Galium odoratum) has almost no scent when picked; the hay-and-vanilla aroma develops as it wilts. Cut it a few hours ahead and let it dry limp before steeping. Use the leaves and stems only, before the plant flowers, and steep no longer than the recipe needs — long infusions turn bitter and grassy.
- Quantity of woodruff"A little" is genuinely vague. German practice is a small handful of stems to a bottle, and the plant is potent enough that more is not better. Woodruff contains coumarin, which is why Germany caps its use in flavoured drinks; a single bottle shared between four is well within traditional practice, but this is not something to drink by the jugful over a season.
- HockThe English name for white wine from the Rhine, most often Riesling, and in Victorian usage frequently off-dry rather than dry. Any crisp, low-oak white works; avoid anything heavily oaked or high in alcohol, which fights the woodruff.
- MeasuresA modern bottle is 750 ml, and Victorian wine bottles were roughly comparable. A quarter pint is 5 fl oz in imperial measure, about 140 ml. Six ounces of sugar is about 170 g, a scant cup -- sweet by modern taste, and worth halving on a first attempt, then adjusting.
- Blackcurrant leavesThese add a musky, faintly resinous note. Use unsprayed leaves from your own bush; they are not a shop item.
- Order of operationsSteep in the water and sugar only, never in the wine over heat, and let the syrup cool before it meets the bottle. The rind should be pared thin with no white pith.
- ServingSufficient for four, as stated. Add the ice and the garnish leaves at the table, since the drink dilutes quickly and the fresh woodruff is for scent rather than flavour.
May wine is the German Maiwein or Maitrank, drunk on the first of May and through the short weeks when woodruff is in leaf but not yet in flower; the custom is generally traced to the Rhineland and to monastic gardens, where the plant was grown for its scent as much as anything. Beeton's household books absorbed a great many such Continental drinks in the late Victorian decades, when hock was fashionable on English tables and German spas were a regular destination for the classes who bought the book. The "seasonable in summer" note undersells it: the whole point of the drink is that woodruff has a season of a few weeks, which is why bottled woodruff essence eventually took over the job in Germany itself.