Home › The Cook Book › Mint Julep
Mint Julep
1 quart water 1 cup orange juice 2 cups sugar Juice 8 lemons 1 pint claret wine 1 cup strawberry juice 1½ cups boiling water 12 sprigs fresh mint Make syrup by boiling quart of water and sugar twenty minutes. Separate mint in pieces, add to the boiling water, cover, and let stand in warm place five minutes, strain, and add to syrup; add fruit juices, and cool. Pour into punchbowl, add claret, and chill with a large piece of ice; dilute with water. Garnish with fresh mint leaves and whole strawberries. 1 quart cold water ½ cup raisins 2 cups sugar
This is a punch-bowl julep, not the bourbon drink of the same name — the alcohol is a pint of red wine spread across roughly a gallon of liquid. A few of the quantities need translating, and the last line of the text does not belong to this recipe.
- The stray final line"1 quart cold water, 1½ cup raisins, 2 cups sugar" -- belongs to an adjacent recipe and has been carried over in transcription. Ignore it; there are no raisins in this julep.
- The hinge: never boil the mintThe mint goes into 1½ cups of boiling water off the heat, covered, for five minutes only. Boiled or steeped much longer, mint turns grassy and faintly bitter, and the bright top note that the drink is built on is gone.
- Claret"Claret" meant a dry red Bordeaux. Any dry, medium-bodied, low-oak red works — a Bordeaux blend, a Loire cabernet franc, an inexpensive Chianti. Avoid anything jammy or heavily oaked.
- Strawberry juiceYou will most likely have to make it yourself. Crush about 1½ pints of ripe hulled strawberries with a little of the sugar, let them sit half an hour, and press through a sieve to get a cup of juice.
- LemonsEight modern lemons give roughly 1 to 1½ cups of juice, which may overwhelm the wine — measure as you go and hold some back if it does.
- The syrupTwenty minutes at a boil will reduce the quart of water somewhat. Cool it fully before the wine goes in so the alcohol and the fruit aromatics survive.
- Ice"A large piece of ice" means a single block, which chills without watering the punch down. Freeze water in a loaf pan or a plastic tub the day before. Cubes melt fast and, combined with the instruction to "dilute with water," will leave the drink thin.
- YieldRoughly 3 quarts before dilution. Add the extra water a cup at a time, tasting, rather than all at once.
Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book gathers its punches, lemonades and cups in a single chapter, where a filled bowl was the centrepiece and no one was mixing drinks to order. That context explains why a "mint julep" here bears so little resemblance to the Kentucky spirit drink: the julep name, which is generally traced through Arabic julāb and Persian gulāb, rose water, long meant simply a sweetened, aromatic medicinal or refreshing draught, and nineteenth-century American cookbooks applied it freely to anything mint-scented and sugared. Claret punch was mild enough to serve in a Boston parlour, and the strawberries and orange juice mark it as a late-spring recipe.