HFF 5.23: Dessert

The Challenge: Dessert. 

I went a little off-task on this challenge: hypocras or ipocras is certainly sweet, and I like drinking it after dinner, it's but not exactly a dessert in its time period. As far as I can tell, hypocras is simply a drink (if you're rich enough for the ingredients), and/or may have medicinal purposes. It can certainly be used as a vehicle for consuming herbal medicines, per the different recipe books I was looking through.

The Recipe: To make Ipocras From The English House-wife (1631)

To make Ipocras, take a pottle of wine, two ounces of good cinamon, halfe an ounce of ginger, nine cloues & sixe pepper cornes and a nutmeg & bruise them and put them into the wine with some rosemary flowers and to let them stoepe all night and then put in sugar a pound at least & when it is well setled let it run through a woollen bag made for that purpose, thus if your wine be claret the Ipocras wil be red, if white, then of that color also.

The Date/Year and Region: 1631, English 

How Did You Make It: A pottle being a half-gallon, I decided to make a half-batch of the receipt, which is 1 quart. Conveniently, this is the exact volume of my Renaissance pitcher (from Reannag Teine). Scaled down, this calls for:

• 1 quart wine
• 1 oz cinnamon (sticks)
  
• 1/4 oz fresh ginger
  
• 5 whole cloves
• 3 whole peppercorns
• half of a nutmeg [I ended up skimping on this because I only had ~1/4 of a nutmeg available]
  
• rosemary flowers
• 1/2 lb sugar (1 generous cup of granulated sugar)

I measured out the wine, for which I used Barefoot's "buttery chardonnay", then cut the ginger into coarse pieces, and gave the cinnamon/cloves/peppercorns/nutmeg a few hits with the mortar and pestle to bruise/break them a little. I then added all the spices to the wine, and let it sit in the refrigerator for two days. I then added the sugar and a small handful of dried rosemary leaves (having no flowers). As the sugar did not readily dissolve, I let it sit overnight in the fridge before straining out the solids. Even after the extra time the sugar hadn't fully dissolved, so I ended up discarding some after decanting the wine.

Total Time: 10 minutes, over 2 days (intended) or 4 days (what I did here)

Total Cost: Depends on the wine.

How Successful Was It?: Too much cinnamon, but in the sense that it over-powered the other flavors a bit; it didn't burn or anything, it just tasted like cinnamon wine rather than having many different complex flavors combined. I found the receipt bit too sweet, but that's probably because I used a fairly sweet white wine and then added a lot of sugar. There was so much sugar sludge in the wine, even after lots of stirring, that I think the solution just got saturated. In the future, I would like to play with using a more dry or tart wine, reducing the amount of cinnamon (or increasing the other items), and using a bit less sugar. I'd also be tempted to try heating the wine before adding the sugar, to aid in dissolving it.

How Accurate Is It? I put the wine in the refrigerator mostly to keep it from attracting flies--which always seem to be a problem this time of year--though it should have been fine at room temperature. This may have make the sugar less soluble, so it's worth investigating further. I then proceeded to forget that I was only supposed to let it steep one day, so everything went a bit longer than it should have--except the rosemary, which I only remembered when I meant to go strain everything out after two days. I added the rosemary leaves with the sugar, and let it all sit overnight in hopes to make up for the missing time steeping the rosemary

I ended up skimping on the nutmeg, just because I had closer to 1/4 than 1/2 of a nutmeg left (and haven't been able to source whole nutmegs since before the pandemic started). I also wasn't able to source any rosemary flowers just now, but I did throw a few dried leaves in, albeit late. In total, the spices sat in the wine for 3 days instead of one, with the sugar and rosemary added the day before.. Some residual sugar and flecks of clove/pepper escaped repeated straining,which is my own fault for using a metal strainer instead of cloth.

 

Ingredients assembled.