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Hot Peppermint Cream
Mix two teaspoonfuls of sugar with two tablespoonfuls of milk and flavor with ten drops of essence of mint. Fill up with hot water and add a spoonful of whipped cream.
Or a cream peppermint may be added to a cup of hot water.
A sickroom drink built in the cup, in the manner of a hot toddy with the spirits left out. The only real difficulty is the flavouring, which has changed strength since the book was written.
- Essence of mintThe old "essence of peppermint" was oil of peppermint dissolved in alcohol, and its strength varied by maker. Modern peppermint extract is the nearest thing; begin with two or three drops in a cup, taste, and build up rather than committing to ten.
- Not peppermint oilPure peppermint essential oil sold today is many times stronger than any drinking essence and is not a drop-for-drop substitute. If oil is all you have, the drink is better made by the second method with a sweet.
- Cream peppermintThe alternative version calls for a peppermint cream, a soft fondant-centred sweet. One or two dissolved in hot water give sugar and flavour at once; a hard peppermint disc will also work but needs stirring.
- Fill up with hot waterA teacup of the period was reckoned anywhere from about 4 to 6 oz, so judge by the cup you are using. Water just off the boil rather than fiercely boiling will let the whipped cream sit a little longer before it slackens.
- The milkTwo tablespoons of milk in a cup of water is a hint of richness, not a milk drink. The book does not specify a grade; whole milk makes the most of it.
- Cream on topLeave the whipped cream unsweetened and only softly beaten, so it slumps into the surface as it warms. Add it last, off the heat.
- YieldOne cup, for one person. These sickroom drinks were made singly and drunk at once; they do not hold or reheat.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the run of non-alcoholic drink books published in the years around national Prohibition, when a "water wagon" collection promised the sociability of the bar without its contents. The Invalid Drinks section is a survival of nineteenth-century invalid cookery, a recognised branch of household writing that supplied gruels, beef teas, barley waters and warm sweetened milks for people confined to bed. Peppermint earned its place there through a long-standing reputation as a settler of the stomach, and hot peppermint water was a common domestic remedy for indigestion and nausea well before it was written down as a beverage. The cream and sugar are doing a second job: invalid diet writing of the period worried constantly about tempting a poor appetite, and a drink that tasted like confectionery was more likely to be finished than plain mint infusion. The second, shorter method, a peppermint cream dropped into hot water, shows how thoroughly it overlaps with the sweet shop.