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Twelfth Night Cider
Put three quarts of cider in a porcelain-lined kettle, add one fourth cup of vanilla syrup, a bit of cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg tied in a muslin bag, and a piece of lemon peel. Let it simmer for fifteen minutes, remove spice bag and lemon peel, and pour into a punch bowl. Put in the bowl a few baked apples that have been baked with cinnamon and sugar. Serve very hot.
A hot spiced cider from a temperance-era drink book, so "cider" here means unfermented sweet cider rather than the alcoholic kind. Three quarts fills a small punch bowl and serves about twelve in cups.
- Which ciderUse fresh unpasteurized or cloudy pressed apple cider, not clear filtered apple juice, which turns thin and sugary when heated. In a British context this would be labelled cloudy apple juice; sweet cider is the likelier reading here, though the recipe itself does not specify.
- Porcelain-lined kettleThe instruction is about reactivity, not style: cider is acidic and bare cast iron, aluminium or unlined copper will give it a metallic taste and dull colour. Any enamelled, stainless or nonstick pot does the same job.
- Simmer, do not boilThe hinge of the drink. Cider held at a bare simmer for fifteen minutes concentrates and rounds out; at a rolling boil it cooks down, sharpens and loses aroma. Keep it just below bubbling.
- Vanilla syrupA quarter cup of the sweet vanilla-flavoured syrup that soda fountains kept on hand. A modern coffee-shop vanilla syrup works, or simmer 1/4 cup simple syrup with a split vanilla bean or half a teaspoon of extract stirred in at the end.
- "A bit of" spiceFor three quarts, a 3-inch cinnamon stick, six to eight whole cloves and a few gratings of nutmeg in the bag is in scale. Whole spices only; ground spice escapes muslin and clouds the bowl. A tea ball or a coffee filter tied with string substitutes for the bag.
- Lemon peelPare it in wide strips with no white pith, which turns bitter over fifteen minutes of heat. Remove it with the spices as directed.
- The baked applesThe recipe gives no oven setting; as a modern guide, bake small firm apples whole, cored, with sugar and cinnamon in the cavity at a moderate oven (about 350F) for roughly 45 minutes, until soft but still holding shape. Float them in the bowl; they will tend to burst slightly at the surface.
- Keeping it hotA punch bowl loses heat fast. Warm the bowl with hot water first and pour it out, or serve from a slow cooker on low and ladle into a bowl only when guests arrive.
Twelfth Night, the eve of Epiphany on January 5th, closed the Christmas season in the English tradition, and it was long associated with wassailing: hot spiced ale or cider carried out to the apple orchards, with toast dipped in it and set in the branches to bless the coming crop. The old wassail bowl was often called lambswool, a name generally traced to the fleecy look of roasted apples bursting their skins on the surface of the drink -- though other derivations have been proposed and none is settled. What is absent here is any alcohol, and the recipe belongs to the broad family of non-alcoholic punches popular with American temperance hosts, offering a punch bowl with the ceremony of the old one and none of the liquor. The vanilla syrup points to the soda fountain, where such syrups were a stock item.