HFF 6.24: Beverages

The Challenge: Beverages. Make something to drink.

The Recipe: Claret cup from Lady Elinor Fettisplace's Receipt Book

To Make Claret Wine Water
Take a Quarte of strong aquavitae, as much of goode Claret wine, a pound of the beste sugar, beat yr sugar small, then powre the wine and the aquavitae to the sugar and stir the sugar and the wine togather untill yr sugar be dissolved, then ad to it whigt pep, ginger, nuttmegg, large Mace, Red jylloflwers...put some bruised Cloves therein when you put in the other spices.

The Date/Year and Region: 1604 or later, English

 

How Did You Make It: I scaled this down to just a cup each of wine and brandy, using a merlot for the claret since I couldn't find anything closer at the store (claret can refer to any red wine from Bordeaux). Being on a 1/4 scale, I used 4 oz of granulated white sugar. The spices don't have specific quanitites involved, so I guessed: a generous dash of powdered mace, 3 white peppercorns, 3 cloves, a 1/2" piece of ginger, and about four gratings of nutmeg. I bruised the pepper and cloves in a mortar and coarsely chopped the ginger,

 

Time to Complete: About five minutes, though letting the spices steep for 1-2 days improved the flavor.

 

Total Cost: In the $5-$10 range. I don't recall the exact prices and was only using a small fraction of each ingredient.

 

How Successful Was It?: Better with time. On the first day, it mostly tasted like wine with a bit of burn from the brandy and some mixed spice flavor; after sitting two days, the ginger flavor came through better and the sugar cut a bit of the burning. 

I tried mixing this with hot water (like the Irish cordial), and while the beverage was nice warm, a 50-50 mixture with water made it taste thin and faint (though it still burned a bit). I'd be tempted in the future to add warmed wine instead of water for cutting this with (or just using a higher proportion of wine to brandy in the first place).

How Accurate Is It? I could have worked harder to find a bordeaux, but I think brandy was a reasonable approximation for aquavitae (which the editor's notes indicated to a "neat spirit" distilled from wine or beer). While I didn't notice any grittiness, I expect the texture could be improved by find whole mace and crushing rather than grating the nutmeg, but given the spices available to me, I don't expect I'll be able to try that.

Served in a cordial glass because that's fun.