Wine, to Mull
INGREDIENTS. - To every pint of wine allow 1 large cupful of water, sugar and spice to taste.
In making preparations like the above, it is very difficult to give the exact proportions of ingredients like sugar and spice, as what quantity might suit one person would be to another quite distasteful. Boil the spice in the water until the flavour is extracted, then add the wine and sugar, and bring the whole to the boiling-point, when serve with strips of crisp dry toast, or with biscuits.
The spices usually used for mulled wine are cloves, grated nutmeg and cinnamon or mace. Any kind of wine may be mulled, but port and claret are those usually selected for MULL. the purpose; and the latter requires a very large proportion of sugar. The vessel that the wine is boiled in must be delicately clean, and should be kept exclusively for the purpose. Small tin warmers or mulls may be purchased for WOODCOCK. a trifle, which are more suitable than saucepans, as, if the latter are not scrupulously clean, they will spoil the wine, by imparting to it a very disagreeable flavour.
These warmers should be used for no other purpose.
A method rather than a fixed formula: spice-infused water, wine, sugar, brought just to the boil. The proportions are left to taste, so the only fixed ratio is a large cupful of water to each pint of wine.
- The ratioA pint here is the imperial pint, 20 fl oz, and a "large cupful" is roughly 8-10 fl oz. So a standard 750 ml bottle of wine takes about 300 ml of water, which is a substantial dilution by modern taste; halve it if you want a stronger drink.
- Infuse the spice firstThe instruction to boil the spices in water before the wine goes in is the hinge of the recipe. Whole cloves, cinnamon or mace give up their flavour slowly and want several minutes of simmering; boiling them in the wine itself drives off alcohol and aroma while the spice is still tight.
- "Bring to the boiling-point"Take this literally as the moment bubbles break the surface, not a rolling boil. Sustained boiling strips the alcohol and flattens the fruit, and modern practice generally keeps mulled wine well below a boil.
- Spice quantitiesFor a bottle, start with 6 cloves, a 3-inch cinnamon stick or two blades of mace, and a quarter nutmeg grated in at the end. Nutmeg is best added off the heat, as its aroma is volatile and fades with prolonged cooking.
- Sugar and the choice of winePort is fortified and already sweet, so it needs little; claret (dry red Bordeaux) needs a great deal, as noted. Reckon on 50-100 g sugar per bottle of dry red and taste before adding more.
- The vesselThe tin mulls sold for the purpose are long gone, and the warning against saucepans reflects unlined copper and tinned iron pans that reacted with the acid in wine. Any stainless steel or enamelled pan is inert and needs no dedicated use.
- ServingStrips of dry toast or plain biscuits were the standard accompaniment, closer to a rusk than anything sweet. A bottle mulled this way serves six to eight in small glasses.
Mulled wine belongs to a family of spiced and heated drinks often traced through medieval hippocras and Tudor bishop and negus, all of them ways of making rough or thin wine palatable and warming. By Mrs Beeton's day the practice had settled into the winter drawing-room and the sickroom alike, which is why the entry reads more like a household procedure than a recipe: quantities are left to the drinker, and most of the text is taken up with the cleanliness of the vessel. That anxiety was practical rather than fussy. Nineteenth-century kitchen pans were commonly tinned iron or copper, and hot acidic wine drew metallic flavours and worse out of a worn lining, hence the small tin mulls sold cheaply for this one job. The pairing with dry toast points to the drink's medicinal reputation, said to be offered to the chilled traveller and the convalescent rather than as an aperitif.