Home › Food Drinks and Fun Drinks › Another Old Oaken Bucket
Another Old Oaken Bucket
I QUART WATER 1/3 CUP SUGAR I TABLESPOON GROUND GINGER I CUP VINEGAR This is the minimum dose. In harvest time anyway three times as much is stirred up in the old oaken bucket and sent to the field with a chunk of ice and a tin dipper clinking in it. And you don't have to be a harvest-hand, either, to enjoy this grandmotherly classic.
This is switchel, also called haymaker's punch: a vinegar-and-ginger drink meant to be diluted, chilled and drunk in quantity. The proportions given make roughly a quart of fairly sharp concentrate-strength drink, and the note about tripling is about volume, not strength.
- The vinegar decides everythingCider vinegar is what a farm kitchen would have had, and it is what makes the drink taste like fruit rather than pickles. Distilled white vinegar gives a flat, harsh result; wine vinegars read as oddly savory.
- Start with less acidA full cup of vinegar to a quart of water is bracing by modern palates. Mix half that, taste, and add the rest by spoonfuls until it makes your jaw tighten slightly but pleasantly.
- Ground ginger will not dissolveA tablespoon of dried ground ginger stays in suspension and settles out within minutes. Either stir before each pour, or steep the ginger in a cup of boiling water for ten minutes, strain through a coffee filter, and use that liquid as part of the quart.
- Fresh ginger insteadAbout two tablespoons of grated fresh ginger, steeped and strained, gives a cleaner heat. It is not the period flavor, which is dustier and warmer, but it is the more pleasant of the two.
- SweetenerA third of a cup of white sugar is the plain version. Molasses and maple syrup are both long associated with the drink, and honey works the same way; used in the same volume they all make it taste older, and molasses is the most assertive.
- Dissolve while warmThe sugar dissolves far better if you mix it with a cup of hot water first, then top up with cold; hot water also draws more flavour out of the ground ginger, though the ginger solids will still settle. Cold-mixed switchel tends to leave grit at the bottom of the bucket.
- Rest itAn hour in the refrigerator does more for the flavor than any adjustment of proportions. The vinegar edge rounds off and the ginger comes forward.
- YieldAs written, about five cups -- four or five generous glasses over ice. Tripling it, as the recipe describes for harvest time, gives something closer to four quarts.
- The shared dipperCharming in its day, less so now. Send the jug out with cups if more than one household is drinking.