Home › Food Drinks and Fun Drinks › Bonfire Mulls
Bonfire Mulls
Part of the fun of outdoor drinking is the tinkle of a tin cup or dipper on the teeth; and one of the pleasantest bonfire customs we know is mulling a bottle of wine when there's a nip in the air to suggest that one good nip deserves another.
I QUART ANY WINE 2 TEASPOONS POWDERED CLOVES, CINNAMON AND NUTMEG, MIXED 2 CUPS WATER 4 SUGAR CUBES CITRUS FRUIT, ESPE- CIALLY THE PEEL Boil spices in water until steam smells pungent, then stir in sugar cubes, wine and a little lemon or orange juice with some of the grated skin, also grated peel of kumquat, if any. Heat just under boiling point and drink steaming hot; with buttered toast, if you like.
Some mullers tie the ground spices in a cloth, or use whole spices, in or out of a cloth. Others rub the oil out of lemons, oranges, limes, Persian limes, and/or kumquats with the flat faces of the hard sugar cubes before dropping them in and the amount of sugar depends on the sweetness of the wine. Use any wine or combination of wines-the best for mulling being claret, Madeira, sherry and port.
A loose formula rather than a fixed recipe: a quart of wine, a spiced water base, and sugar adjusted to taste. A few points make the difference between a fragrant mull and a dull one.
- Never let it boilOnce the wine goes in, hold it just under the boiling point, as the recipe says, and don't let it bubble. Boiling drives off both the alcohol and the volatile aromatics that make the drink smell like anything at all.
- YieldA quart of wine plus two cups of spiced water makes about six cups, or six to eight tin-cup servings. Over a fire it disappears faster than that.
- Powdered spice is aggressiveTwo teaspoons of mixed powdered clove, cinnamon and nutmeg in a quart will read as gritty and medicinal. The recipe's own alternative is better: use whole spices, roughly 8-10 cloves, two cinnamon sticks and a few gratings of nutmeg, simmered in the water for ten minutes and strained out.
- The sugar-cube trickRubbing hard sugar cubes over citrus skin until they are stained and oily extracts the peel oil directly into the sugar. This is the same principle as an oleo-saccharum, and it gives more citrus aroma than juice does.
- Sugar is a variable, not a measureFour cubes is roughly four teaspoons, which is almost nothing across a quart. Sweeten to taste at the end, and expect a dry claret to need considerably more than a port or a cream sherry, which may need none.
- Choosing the wineClaret here means red Bordeaux or any dry, moderately tannic red. Madeira, sherry and port are fortified and run roughly 15-20 percent alcohol; with those, the two cups of water are welcome dilution rather than optional.
- Pot and cupsUse stainless, enamelled or tinned metal. Hot acidic wine sitting in bare cast iron or unlined copper picks up a metallic taste, and copper is best avoided outright with anything acidic.
- KumquatsGrated kumquat peel is unusual and worth doing if you find them, since the whole fruit is sweet-skinned and sour-fleshed. If not, more orange zest covers the same ground.
Spiced, sweetened, warmed wine is one of the oldest surviving European drinks, generally traced back through medieval hippocras and piment, both of which were wine steeped with sugar and spices and strained through a cloth bag. The word mull in this sense appears in English by the seventeenth century, its origin uncertain. What dates this particular version is not the drink but the setting: it reads as a mid-century American outdoor-cooking book, written for people who built a bonfire on a beach or in a back field and carried the bottle out with them, in an era when the campfire meal was treated as a form of entertaining rather than survival. The mention of drinking from a tin cup, and the joke about a nip in the air deserving a nip, belong to that literature.