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Mulled Grape Juice
1 Cup Water 1 Quart Unsweetened Grape Juice 1/4 Cup Cassia Buds 1/2 Cup of Yellow Corn Syrup Put in double boiler and cook one-half hour. Serve very hot in bouillon cups.
A five-minute assembly that then sits and steeps. The only real decisions are what to use in place of cassia buds and whether to strain before serving.
- Cassia budsThese are the dried immature fruit of the cassia tree, sold whole and looking a little like small cloves; they carry a cinnamon flavor of their own, usually described as more delicate than the bark. They are still sold in spice shops and online, but if you cannot find them, use 3 or 4 broken cinnamon sticks rather than ground cinnamon, which will cloud the drink.
- Strain itThe recipe never says to, but a quarter cup of whole buds left in the pot will keep extracting and turn the juice medicinal past the half hour. Pour through a fine sieve into the serving pitcher once the time is up.
- Yellow corn syrupCorn syrup was sold in lighter and darker grades, and a darker amber syrup is probably what is meant. Light corn syrup works; so does 1/3 cup honey or 1/2 cup packed brown sugar if you want a rounder sweetness.
- Unsweetened grape juiceConcord is the likeliest grape intended, and it is what much bottled American grape juice still is. Check the label anyway, since some products sold as grape juice have added sugar, in which case cut the syrup back.
- The double boilerIt is doing real work here. Grape juice scorches on direct heat and boiling drives off the fruit aroma you are trying to keep, so the water bath holds it below a simmer for the full half hour.
- Bouillon cups and yieldBouillon cups vary, roughly 6 to 8 ounces. The quart of juice plus water and syrup comes to about 44 ounces, so six to seven cups.
- ServingServe genuinely hot, not warm; the spice reads as thin and sour as it cools. It reheats without harm, again gently.
Mulled drinks are old, but a mulled drink made with unfermented grape juice is often said to be an American development of around the turn of the century. Commercial pasteurized grape juice was developed in 1869 by a Vineland, New Jersey dentist and Methodist communion steward, Thomas Welch, expressly so that temperance congregations could take communion without wine, and by the 1900s the bottled product was widely sold as a table beverage. That is why a recipe can offer something that looks like mulled wine, is served hot, and commits no offense against the dry household. Cassia buds appear in American cookery of the period, chiefly for pickling and spiced fruit.