Bottling the Pamper Moose: Homemade Vin de Pamplemousse with Bergamot

This year's label

It's been said that San Diego's seasons can be divided roughly into four: Early Summer, Summer, Late Summer, and Next Summer. As local flowers start to bloom, nights remain chilly and one still does see young women wearing hot pants, scarves, and fleece-lined boots, but it's undeniable that Early Summer is on us once more. Summer can't be far off — and with it comes a craving for lighter and more bitter drinks. Whether that bitterness comes from hops, citrus peel, quinine, wormwood, or more esoteric bittering agents, count me in. This weekend I got a leg up on Summer by bottling a faintly bitter grapefruit aperitif for our yard drinks in the coming months.

The vin d'orange, a bitter orange wine I put up last month, is still maturing in big glass jars and will be for another several weeks, but a grapefruit version of essentially the same aperitif, vin de pamplemousse, only took a month to macerate. Yesterday I bottled six liters of the traditional before-dinner drink. The recipe isn't wholly traditional, however. Oh, the grapefruit (pamplemousse in French) is legit. Even the sweet oranges I sliced and threw in to soften the wine a bit wouldn't raise every eyebrow in France. However, I'd gotten my hands on a load of bergamot oranges and included one in the mix, an addition that may cause purists to sniff in disdain. Ah, well. Their loss.

Racked, clear, and bottled: grapefruit wine

Bergamot, tea fanciers know, is a type of sour orange that lends its distinctive, almost lavender-like aroma to Earl Grey tea. The fruit looks a bit like a lemon, but unlike a lemon's, the volatile oils in its skin are so potent that they easily overwhelm food and drink if not treated with care. The juice is mild enough and can be used much like lemon juice, but truly, a small amount of skin or zest goes a long, long way. Two common precautions against its dominance in cooking and preserves making are (a) to use small amounts relative to the other ingredients and (b) to blanch each fruit before use. I chose the former: only one bergamot to every six grapefruit and two oranges.

Even in southern California, bergamots can be hard to track down during their late-winter Early Summer season. If you have access, use one. If not, just toss in an extra sliced grapefruit.

Vin de Pamplemousse with Bergamot

2 white grapefruit
4 ruby red grapefruit
1 bergamot
2 navel oranges
1 2" piece of vanilla bean, split lengthwise and cut into thirds
4.5 L crisp white wine such as Sauvignon Blanc (e.g., Trader Joe's coastal)
750ml 80 proof (40% abv) vodka
1.75 cups/350 g sugar

Cut each piece of citrus into an upper and lower half. Slice each half into half-moon shapes, about 1/4"/6mm thick, saving any juice. Combine all the ingredients (including any juice from slicing) into a single two-gallon/8L nonreactive container with a sealable lid such as a jar or carboy.

Stir or shake it, then allow it to rest in a cool, dark place (a closet is fine: no need to refrigerate). Strain after one month into a similar large container. After one day, rack the cleared liquid off the  cloudy residue at the bottom of the container. Strain this through cheesecloth or other clean filter, and bottle in clean, sterilized wine bottles. Seal with new corks and label. Let rest a few months in a cool, dark place.

Makes about six liters.

Goes well with:

• That vin d'orange I mentioned. Good stuff. 
• Each year, I try to make a batch of creme de noyau using crushed peach pits and a recipe from an old, old Creole cookbook. I don't always get around to it, but when I do make some, here's the recipe I use. 
• If light wines aren't your speed, how about fifty oranges and a gallon of corn whiskey?
• Fany Gerson's recipe for pasita, a dark raisin cordial from Mexico.
• Finally, more old recipes: three separate recipes for syrup of violets spanning nearly 250 years. 

Making Vin d'Orange with the Last of the Seville Oranges

Now that winter has hit full stride, the citrus offerings could hardly be better. We’ve been making marmalades, lemon curds, desserts, and cocktails with the aromatic bounty. In the kitchen now, I’ve got 5 kilos of navel oranges, a box of Meyer lemons, a bowl of blood oranges, several dozens each of limes and Eureka lemons, a bowl of bergamots — and three Seville oranges.

Those last three bitter oranges may end up as the base for ice cream or a cake. Maybe syrup. Perhaps a tincture. Not entirely sure. I’ll have it figured out by dinner. The rest of them are soaking in wine.

Unlike relatively sweet Washington or Valencia oranges typical of American supermarkets, the rough-skinned Seville oranges are an older bitter/sour variety with limited availability in the US. Centuries ago, when members of the English and French aristocracies grew trees in their glass-enclosed orangeries, these were the fruits they grew. In Florida today, grocery stores and fruit stands may sell them as sour oranges or naranjas agrias — a core component of Cuban mojo, a ubiquitous (and delicious) marinade. In Spain, most of the bitter orange crop is exported to the UK where it is turned to classic orange marmalade. The dried peels of Caribbean harvests remain the building blocks of numerous famous orange liqueurs.

Lumpy-ass bitter oranges, freshly washed

But it is France, where bitter oranges are known as bigarades, that inspired me this weekend to convert a batch into a simple orange-infused aperitif called vin d’orange. The instructions below may seem proscriptive, but in truth, it’s a flexible recipe with room for adjustments. Do you prefer a drier result? Use less sugar and a drier wine. Like something more full-bodied? Try it with red wine rather than the rosé I used. If white wine is your thing, who’s to stop you from using white? Precedents exist for each. You could even ditch the bitter oranges entirely and make vin de pamplemousse with grapefruit.

By early summer, the wine will have taken on the ethereal taste of vanilla and bitter orange. Balanced with the sweetness of cane sugar, it will be just the thing for our pre-meal drinks outdoors. And, of course, if you want to play with it as an alternate to sweet vermouth or Lillet, you’d be on solid ground.

Vin d’Orange

8-10 Seville oranges (about 1 kilo or 2-2.5lbs) quartered lengthwise and sliced in smallish chunks — peel, pith, seeds, and all
2 entire lemons, sliced similarly
6 (750ml each for a total of 4.5 liters) bottles of cheap but decent rosé wine (see below)
1 liter vodka 80 proof/40% abv
2 vanilla beans, split lengthwise and cut into thirds
700g-1 kilo sugar (1.5-2.2 lbs)

If you have a container large enough to hold 2 gallons, put everything in it. If, like me, you use two smaller jugs, split the ingredients evenly between them.

I'll get to you when I return from Kentucky.

Put all the ingredients into one (or two) jars. Seal, shake. The sugar won't all dissolve at first. Patience; it will over time. Put the jars in a dark spot such as a cabinet, closet, or basement. Give it a shake or two every day for two weeks. Just to show it who's boss. Then every week or so do the same. So it doesn't forget.

After a rest of 30-60 days (I find better extraction at 60 days, but even an hour shows marked improvement on taste and some impatient souls simply can't wait two months), strain the mixture into a large clean bucket, carboy, fermentation tub or what have you. Cover it and let it settle a day, then line a funnel with several layers of cheesecloth and rack the heady wine into the clean bottles you saved, leaving any sediment behind in the bucket.

Done. Label it, date it, store it in a cool, dark place. One bottle should go into that cool, dark place known as the fridge.

Equipment note: You’ll need one or two large glass jars or stainless steel containers for the long infusion. Make sure they are airtight. I used 5-liter glass jugs with swing tops and gasket closures. When the time comes to bottle, you’ll also need clean glass wine bottles. My suggestion: wash and save the ones you emptied into the jugs.

Goes well with:

• The wine I used here was a 2010 Côtes du Rhône, Cuvée Abel Clément, about $5/750ml at the San Diego Wine Company. Use a wine you like and that doesn't break the bank. 
• We really do put citrus though the paces here. Try a blood orange marmalade sour with a dose of Brazilian cane spirits.
• My take on a solid preserves recipe book, The Blue Chair Jam Cookbook. It's especially useful for inspiration of what to do with the more unusual fruits cropping up in farmers' markets over the last few years. 
• A few notes on The River Cottage Preserves Book, including a recipe for an unusual homemade noyau (though not, it should be noted, my recipe for noyau).
• We like jam a lot around here. Try the hot pepper version and straight up bacon jam with apple cider.

Truffled Rum and (Fine) Champagne Punch

[Edit later that same morning: see Said's answer (a painfully obvious one) to my question in the comments section below. In this case, "fine" Champagne is not sparkling wine, but brandy.] 

At nearly 1,300 pages and weighing over six pounds, my copy of Ali-Bab’s Gastronomie Pratique is a beast. Despite the author’s name, it is not a Persian text; it’s French. Ali-Bab was the pseudonym of Henri Babinski (1855-1931), a French mining engineer who was an amateur avid cook as well. His culinary encyclopedia was first published in 1907 with a modest 314 pages, but was expanded over subsequent editions. My beastly edition is the 9th from 1981. Sometime between the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, a recipe for truffled rum and Champagne punch — punch truffé — slipped in.

The recipe is problematic and I’m giving it here partly as a curiosity. I use truffles when they are in season, but I’m not as lavish in my use of them as Babinski seems to have been. More to the point, I think the recipe is promising but doesn’t work as written; in particular, the order of adding rum and Champagne seems inverted. My French is self-taught and I’d like someone else to take a run at a translation.

The problem, as I see it, is that a mix of sugar, sparkling wine, and nutmeg won't catch fire. BUT — as anyone who's been around my house for Thanksgiving can attest — a mix of rum, sugar, and nutmeg will, when warmed, catch alight. I think the way to fix this is simply that: change the position of rum and Champagne, then proceed as directed.

Or am I missing something? Here’s the original followed by my translation. Anyone — francophiles, French bartenders, punch enthusiasts — want to have a go at it? [See comments section]

Punch truffé (Babinski)

Pour six à huit personnes, prenez:  

350 grammes de fine champagne,
350 grammes de vieux rhum,
250 grammes de sucre,
120 grammes de vin de Malaga,
1 belle trufle noire du Périgord,
1 citron,
¼ noix muscade. 

Mettez dans un bol à punch la fine champagne, la muscade et le sucre, faites flamber, mélangez bien. Lorsque le sucre sera dissous, ajoutez le rhum et le jus du citron ; activez la flamme. En meme temps, faites cuire la truffe dans le malaga, retirez-la, puis ajoutez le malaga au melange rhum et fine champagne.

Coupez la truffe en tranches minces, metiez une tranche dans chaque verre de punch et servez chaud.

 And mine:

Truffled Punch (Rowley)

For six to eight people, take:

350 grams of fine champagne,
350 grams of old rum,
250 grams of sugar, 120 grams of Malaga wine,
One beautiful black Périgord truffle,
1 lemon,
¼ nutmeg.

Put the fine champagne [see comments section], nutmeg, and sugar in a punch bowl, set alight, mix well. When the sugar has dissolved, add the rum and lemon juice; activate the flame. At the same time, cook the truffle in Malaga, remove it, then add the rum mixture to the Malaga and champagne.

Cut the truffle into thin slices, put a slice in each glass punch, and serve hot.

Goes well with: 

• More about Babinski and his book. An English version of Gastronomie Pratique was printed in 1974 as The Encyclopedia of Practical Gastronomy. Peter Herzmann has several copies of this book, but doesn’t care for that one.
• Another Henri — this one Henri Charpentier — gave a recipe for Eggs, William S. Burroughs in his privately published 1945 Food and Finesse: The Bride's Bible. Here's the recipe.
• Speaking of flames and punch, San Francisco barman Martin Cate made a hell of a show at Tiki Oasis a few years back with fire and rum. The tale of the punch so big it had to be made in a koi pond is here. 

Jesus Juice Sorbet

For decades, Spaniards have indulged in iced calimocha, a simple drink that is about as easy as an on-the-go drinker could want: equal parts red wine and Coca Cola. Nobody is about to win any bartending awards with this thing, but what it lacks in sophistication, it makes up for in tastiness — sweet, slightly bitter, and about 7% alcohol, but it's easy to take along to the beach, a picnic, or a fútbol game.

The drink is not unique to Spain and it travels under a number of names wherever one finds wine and soda. American wine coolers, for instance, clearly are in the same family. In fact, if you think of it as a sort of bare-bones, stripped-down, single-chromosome sangria, calimocha's flexibility becomes manifest.

Jake Godby and Sean Vahey, founders of Humphrey Slocombe ice cream shop in San Francisco, seem to have recognized this and have given the wine-and-cola combo a Neverland twist as a sorbet. "Michael Jackson died suddenly on the afternoon of Thursday, June 25, 2009," they write in Humphrey Slocombe Ice Cream Book. "Before his corpse was cold and the Botox wore off, we were working on a new flavor to pay tribute to the fallen icon." Jesus Juice — reports vary on the variety of wine and how, precisely, soda was incorporated — was Jackson's name for the concoction of wine and soda he favored around the ranch.

For the end of summer when nights are cool enough for blankets, but the days are hot as blazes, here's Godby and Vahey's recipe for Jesus Juice sorbet. The duo caution, however, that it may cause inappropriate touching.

Jesus Juice Sorbet

1 cup sugar 
1 cup water 
1 cinnamon stick 
2 cups cola [Mexican Coke]
1 cup good-quality dry red wine 
2 Tbl red wine vinegar 
1 tsp salt  

In a large, heavy-bottomed, nonreactive saucepan over medium heat, combine the sugar and water and stir to dissolve the sugar. Drop in the cinnamon stick and bring to a boil over medium-high heat.

Stir in the cola, wine, vinegar, and salt and remove from the heat. Let cool completely, then cover the bowl tightly and chill in the refrigerator for at least 1 hour or preferably overnight. When you are ready to freeze the mixture, take out the cinnamon stick, transfer the mixture to an ice cream maker, and spin according to the manufacturer's instructions. Finish freezing in freezer. Stare approvingly at the Man in the Mirror. Eat immediately, or transfer to an airtight container, cover, and freeze for up to 1 week.

Jake Godby and Sean Vahey (2012)
Humphrey Slocombe Ice Cream Book
144 pages (paperback)
Chronicle Books
ISBN: 1452104689
$19.95

Goes well with:

• Gift of the Negi. Wine-and-cola is not unlike the 19th-century port wine concoction known as the Negus. Recipes here include one for children's parties from Isabella Beeton (Jackson would approve, I'm sure), a 38-gallon Negus made for England's King George IV, and (no surprise) an effervescing Negus made with soda water. Some things never get old...

The Whiskey Litmus Test in Wineries

Last week, we spent several days in and around San Francisco, including the wine country north of the city. I enjoy wine, but I don't spend as much time mulling it over as I do spirits. So, while I've never given much thought to the cultural differences between various wineries, the question was foisted on me when conversations tilted from wine to whiskey.

In Napa, we started off one morning sampling sparkling wines. It's the kind of place where busloads of tourists disgorge during the season, but the setting was great and we had nowhere to be, so we looped back around after initially passing by. Once we were seated and were making our way through the samples, a winery employee asked what we usually drink. When we replied "whiskey," she  made a face. "Whiskey? That's weird. Who drinks whiskey? Is that like a Midwestern thing?" We were a bit frosted at the putdown, so we bought nothing.

Whiskey came up at another winery (they asked what I do). Out comes a chilled bottle of Brian Ellison's white whiskey from Death's Door — smack — right on the counter.  They weren't selling it; the stuff was there to fortify the staff. At that place, we did buy the wines, including a few bottles of pinot meunier, a variety better known for blending, but its rich, lush, and almost smoky notes may appeal to confirmed whiskey drinkers. Last year I didn't know it existed; this year, I hope to drink my weight in it.

The first winery was big, corporate, a name you'd probably recognize. The second was much smaller, lesser known, most of the grapes were grown right there at the vineyard, and the staff just oozed friendliness. Turns out that regardless of whether they're selling whiskey, wine, bacon, or grits, my sympathies are almost always with smaller producers who make what they sell.

Cheers to the artisans of this world.

Bookshelf: How to Drink

In all honesty, I gave Victoria Moore’s book short shrift when a copy landed on my desk. Plain jacket, presumptuous title. How to Drink? I’m Matthew Rowley, damn it. I’m a connoisseur of teas, have designed stills, own more bitters than shoes, have hauled endangered bottles across borders, hunted forgotten ingredients, and faced down violently paranoid moonshiners without incident. If I know how to do anything, I bloody well know how to drink, thank you.

I can only imagine I was in a monumentally Irish mood when the book arrived.

How to Drink is a delight. It works on two levels. First, there’s the design — an old fashioned, charming sensibility is at work that blends typeset with illustration and suggests at turns both Arts and Crafts Movement and Hatch Show Print fonts. With so much of our modern media reliant on videos and photos, it’s refreshing to find playfulness in something so simple as letters turned slightly askew to become something else entirely.

Second, and more to the point, Moore’s is an opinionated but commonsense and welcoming tone. She writes most frequently on wine in her columns — a genre I largely avoid — but the book also covers tea, coffee, juices, cocktails, cool weather drinks, hot weather drinks, glamorous sips, and homey quaffs. I’m especially taken with her concept of a “good” drink as the right drink poured at just the right moment. She writes: “It’s often said that life’s too short to drink bad wine, but I’d go further. Life’s also too short to drink good wine, or anything else for that matter, if it’s not what you feel like at the time. There’s no point in popping the cork on a bottle of vintage champagne if you really hanker after a squat tumbler of rough red wine.”

Although she has her own voice, I’d put Moore's writing on the same shelf with Nigel Slater’s, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s, and even — there at the end — H.E. Bates'. It is writing such as hers that lays the rationale of nostalgia: we take time to do things properly because doing so coaxes the very best out of us and what we do, eat, and drink. Moore is very much about the rituals of drinking, say, having a favorite tea cup that makes tea from any other less enjoyable or even a downright insult. She devotes four pages to the gin & tonic, then spends another nine pages on gin — what it is, which brands she prefers, and why. Very sensible. She is as exacting in her approach to an old fashioned as I am and I suspect we could each make the other a pot of tea and be happy with the results.

Yet as much as I know about the hows and whys of drinking, Moore offers surprises. I detest coffee, yet she brings as much attention to detail to bear on the subject that, despite myself, I read every word. I’m still not buying any, but if I had to do so for someone else, I’ve got a better grip than I did of how to go about doing it. Far from being a toss-off, How to Drink is exactly the kind of book with which I like to curl on the couch and mull over why we drink as much as what we drink. 

Since blood oranges are in season, I offer you what Moore calls her favorite drink (and her family calls “the Campari and blood-orange thing”). Simple, light, a solid balance of bitter and sweet. I’m putting it on the menu as our weather warms and my mind turns to lazy weekend brunches.

1 bottle sparkling white wine
2 cups blood orange juice
5 to 6 ounces Campari

Pour the ingredients into a jug. Serve in small champagne flutes or wineglasses.

Victoria Moore (2009)
How to Drink
344 pages (hardback)
Andrews McMeel Publishing
ISBN: 0740785745
$18.99

Goes well with:

• Moore may be familiar to British readers from her wine column in the Guardian.
• Hatch Show Print of Nashville, Tennessee, has for years put out fantastic posters. I don’t yet have one of their big woodblock prints on my wall, but one day…

An Excess of Port

I am inordinately fond of port wine. Tawny, ruby, vintage, late bottled vintage, Portuguese, Australian, even those of my own state, California. Whatever is at hand, I’m game. I was, nevertheless, taken aback that this weekend’s inventory revealed that fully 27% of our home wine stock is port. The numbers skew high because we’ve been drinking the other wines and not replenishing the supply. Plus, frankly, I’d lost track of how much port I’d laid down in the first place. But still. Damn.

I’m acquisitive, sure, but no hoarder. It’s time to reduce the stock. The inventory made me think, naturally, of grabbing a wedge of Stilton cheese, port’s classic postpriandal sidekick.

It also got me thinking of a fantastic little tome in the back library called But the Crackling Is Superb. The book is a collection of essays by members of The Royal Society (Britain’s long-standing academy of sciences) dealing broadly with the intersection of food, drinks, and science. If you read Harold McGee with pleasure, you’ll like this volume. In the collection, we see one of the earlier public displays of what’s now called molecular gastronomy and mixology. I’ve had it nearly twenty years and still find surprises in its pages.

Contributor John Postgate was Professor of Microbiology at the University of Sussex. His essay "Two Aperitifs" deals with concocting compounded drinks on a base of cheap British port. That’s the essay that popped into my mind as I mulled our port situation. Fresh out of cheap British port, I’m considering using his recipe for Corsican Aperitif, but deploying some of our stash of proper port — which he warns works less well. Hmm. We’ll see if Professor Postgate and I have similar tastes.

The recipe was developed with his father as the two of them sought to create something akin to French aperitifs such as Dubonnet, Byrrh, and Cap Corse. Postgate’s notes are included in brackets.

Corsican Aperitif
(John Postgate)

Take 1 bottle of British Ruby or Tawny Port wine, sometimes marketed ‘of Port character’ [1]. Add 2 to 4 drops of quinine bitters [2]. Insert a vanilla pod [3] and leave to steep in the bottle at room temperature for at least 3 weeks [4]. Decant from the pod (which can be re-used) and serve with ice, with a slice of lemon, or straight.

Notes

[1] Gratifyingly, the cheaper the British wine, the better. Real port and Cyprus port-type work less well.

[2] A thimble of Campari, not available at the time of our researches, is ideal.

[3] Nonsense, Use 2-3 drops of vanilla essence and skip the decanting. My parent was rather against essences.

[4] Chemists will find this difficult to believe, but 3 weeks at domestic room temperature transformed it from vanilla-flavoured port into a drink with its own character. I’ve kept it for six months longer without further improvement.

Postgate goes on to offer Solace, “a good cheap aperitif” that “goes down well for elevenses with cake.” It is nothing more than a bottle of (again, cheap British) white port flavored with a swath of orange peel (sans pith) and decanted after two days. Postgate warns not to use orange essence which would make the aperitif “surprisingly nasty.”

Well worth tracking down:

• Kurti, Nicholas and Giana (ed) (1988) But the Crackling Is Superb: An Anthology on Food and Drink by Fellows and Foreign Members of the Royal Society. Adam Hilger, Philadelphia.

Rowley’s Gift Guide for Drinkers: Parker’s Wine Bargains

The myth is that wines that cost $25 or less
are worth just what you pay for them
and are never terribly interesting.
This is totally untrue, and with work,
one can unearth these small treasures
that deliver seriously good wine
at remarkably fair prices.

~ Robert Parker

I’ll spend $80 on a nice whiskey, but once a bottle of wine creeps up to $30, I start to lose interest. This is not because I dislike wine: I like it quite a lot, but I’m deeply turned off by snobs of any stripe and the world of wine is lousy with them. There can be such pretense to the very vocabulary of wine, I’d just as soon not hang out with intense “wine people.” My loss: they could probably steer me to some great drinks.

And wine books? Feh. Except for those that give broad overviews, they grow out of date quickly. But Simon & Schuster just released an ephemeral buying guide I’m glad to have: Parker’s Wine Bargains: The World’s Best Wine Values Under $25.

Parker and his vinous staff list over 3,000 value wines by origin and winery, give succinct tasting notes, and include a “best of the best” index for each category.

For a wine piker like me, Parker’s guide is a handy little shopping tool. And it makes a fine gift for those those who—like me—enjoy great drinks but could use some advice of which bottle to pick up.

See the gift guide as it grows here.

See also MxMo XXVI: Hard Drinks for Hard Times.

Bittered Wine

Among bartenders and cocktail enthusiasts who make their own bitters, some recipes stand out for their uncommon ingredients—cocoa, chipotles, or mahleb, for instance. Others for their technique.

The usual method is to macerate seeds, bark, roots, leaves, and other aromatic and bittering agents in alcohol. Sometimes all the ingredients are put in a container all at once in a mass. Other methods call for a series of alcoholic tinctures (e.g., one jar of bitter orange peel, one of cardamom, one of gentian, one of cherry leaves or celery seeds, etc.) to be mixed once each has achieved a sufficient concentration.

M. E. Steedman falls under the "unusual technique" camp by calling for an actual fermentation of an aged bitter wine. Though related to cocktail bitters, bittered wines are older, less alcoholic, and more clearly intended to be tonic medicines. Here, his technique for a wormwood and gentian mash gets a dose of yeast to create a low-alcohol wash (probably around 6% abv), but not before boiling part of it. Finally, it’s cleared with isinglass and further fermentation stopped by adding brandy.

Slainte!

Bitter Wine

Boil 6 gallons of water, 15 lb. pure cane sugar and 3 oz. ginger together for half an hour, skimming when necessary, then pour into a large vessel containing 1½ pints of wormword, 3 pints each of red and green camomile, 3 oz. of camomile flowers, 1½ oz. of gentian root, and 2 handfuls of rosemary. Cover and infuse for five days, then boil part of the liquid and add it to the remainder to make the whole lukewarm. Stir in 6 table-spoonfuls of liquid yeast, and strain into a cask (reserving about a gallon to fill up the cask as the fermentation subsides), bung lightly til the hissing noise ceases, then add one and a half ounces of dissolved isinglass, and one and a half pints of good brandy. Stop the cask securely, and in 9 months bottle off and keep for six months longer.

~ Home-Made Beverages and American Drinks
M. E. Steedman (nd) The Food and Cookery Publishing Agency, London.

.

Gift of the Negi

Hogsheads of honey, kilderkins of mustard,
Muttons, and fatted beeves, and bacon swine;
Herons and bitterns, peacocks, swan, and bustard,
Teal, mallard, pigeons, widgeons, and in fine
Plum-puddings, pancakes, apple-pies, and custard:
And therewithal they drank good Gascon wine,
With mead, and ale, and cider of our own;
For porter, punch, and negus were not known.

John Hookham Frere (1817)
Prospectus and Specimen of an Intended National Work, by William and Robert Whistlecraft, of Stowmarket in Suffolk, Harness and Collar Makers

~ ~ ~

In 1817 when Frere gushed on about a Christmas feast set before King Arthur in his mock-heroic Prospectus and Specimen, porter, punch, and negus were all the rage among his English audience. Two hundred years on, you have your pick of porters at any well-stocked bottle shop while punch—whether milk, planter’s, or Hawaiian—is hardly in danger of extinction.

The preparation of negus, however, though not wholly unknown to savvy imbibers, has fallen into neglect. Like eggnog, the port wine-based tot is a seasonal affair, creeping out of its obscurity once the veil of winter has descended, letting us know that Christmas is on us.

With the nation vexed by inclement weather and even sunny San Diego beset with cold nights and biting showers, when bamboo freighted with rain arcs nearly to the ground, what’s called for is liquor. And why not a mug of hot wine to send warming tendrils of boozy nutmeg goodness throughout the body? A mug? Make a Thermos full if you’re feeling punchy.

Through my early drinking years, port was linked in my mind inextricably to the English who, especially in the works of Dickens, seemed to guzzle the Portuguese fortified wine with alarming frequency. As far as I was concerned, they could keep it. Too sweet, too strong, it called to mind overpriced Mad Dog.

I’ve since learned two things. First, I had been sampling crap port—less porto than wino. Second, it turns out that, just as sweet tea explains itself best in the complementary presence of vinegar-based barbecue sauces, port shines in the company of other things—England’s justly famed Stilton cheese, for instance, or mellow cigars. As the British lieutenant-colonel Francis Negus* (d. 1732) discovered, port marries handsomely with citrus and spices. For three hundred years, the drink bearing his name has been almost an exclusively British concern. According to Oxford University Press’s 1894 The Dictionary of National Biography,

It is related that on one occasion, when the bottle was passing rather more rapidly than good fellowship seemed to warrant over a hot political discussion, in which a number of prominent whigs and tories were taking part, Negus averted a fracas by recommending the dilution of the wine with hot water and sugar. Attention was diverted from the point at issue to a discussion of the merits of wine and water, which ended in the compound being nicknamed ' negus.'

There are other origin stories, but all surround this same Francis Negus. A majority of 19th-century texts, while allowing for variants, go on to concur that a proper negus calls for five ingredients;

• A large measure of port wine
• Lemon
• Sugar
• Boiling water
• Nutmeg

Lemon is occasionally supplemented with orange and nutmeg with cinnamon (or more exotic ambergris). Unlike glögg, Glühwein, or mulled wine—revitalizing hot nips from northern climes—negus is made hot by the addition of boiling water rather than heating the wine itself. Wouldn’t want to lose all that Brumalian ethanol to the open air, after all.

So there you have it—wine, lemon, and sugar mixed together, heated with the addition of boiling water, and dusted with nutmeg. As ancient a yuletide beverage as you’re likely to find—And its health benefits are not to be denied: in The Gentleman's Magazine (1822), John Sinclair recommended negus on sea voyages to lessen "the puking."

I offer you two personal negi here, and no puking: one in the style of Mrs. Isabella Beeton (who presented a weaker negus intended for drinking “at children’s parties”—way to go, Mrs. B.) and another after M.E. Steedman, writing for more manly constitutions. Though Beeton’s recipe is the more widely disseminated, Steedman’s is the better. Both are sweet by modern tastes, so feel free to ease your foot off the sugar pedal. Their original recipes and proportions follow.

Negus in the Style of Mrs. Beeton
for a Brace of Victorian Children
4 oz. port (Sandeman Founder’s Reserve)
a wide swath of lemon peel (no pith)
½ oz. lemon juice
1 oz. sugar (demerara if you’ve got it, white if not)
8 oz. boiling water (plus extra for heating the mug)
fresh nutmeg to taste*

Pre-heat a sixteen-ounce ceramic mug or other container by filling it with boiling water. Toss the water once the mug is warm to the touch. Add the lemon peel, lemon juice, and sugar and muddle together. Add the port, grate in a dusting of nutmeg, and top off with boiling water. Cover or close until slightly cooled, then dish out into separate smaller mugs.

Yield: 12 oz

Negus in the Style of Steedman
4 oz. port (Sandeman Ten Year Tawny)
a wide swath of lemon peel (no pith)
½ oz. sugar (demerara if you’ve got it, white if not)
4 oz. boiling water (plus extra for heating the mug)
fresh nutmeg to taste*
1-3 drops vanilla extract, optional
(alternately, one or two of essence of ambergris, if you’re feeling flush)

Yield: 8 oz

Pre-heat a ten-ounce ceramic mug by filling it with boiling water. Toss the water once the mug is warm to the touch. Add the lemon peel and sugar and muddle together with a splash of port if necessary. Add the remaining port, grate in a dusting of nutmeg, and top off with boiling water. If using the vanilla or ambergris, now’s the time to add it. Give it a stir and drink when it’s cool enough to down.

*Notes
Nutmeg: The prodigious amounts of nutmeg called for in older recipes don’t necessarily indicate a fanaticism for the taste (“Oh, them old-timey cooks spiced up everything really high ‘cause the meat was rotten.”). Consider another reason—We’re accustomed to fairly high turnover in spices, but in 1723, 1891, and even 1958, a nutmeg could be years old by the time it reached our ancestors. Quite simply, much of the aromatic oils had dissipated by the time they reached the kitchen or bar, so it was necessary to oomph up the volume to wrest much taste from old dry spice. Feel free to de-oomph it to your own preferences now that we have access to less vintage provisions.

Pronunciation: Everyone familiar with it is agreed that the port wine-based drink is pronounced nay-gus. Everyone except William Makepeace Thackeray who informs us, by way of Edwin Hewett and W.F. Axton in Convivial Dickens (1983), that it’s nee-gus. Nay-gus seems more likely, but given the British penchant for surprising pronunciations (even of my surname among blood relatives in those parts), I wouldn’t rule it out at this juncture.


Original Recipes

Isabella Beeton (1861) Beeton’s Book of Household Management.

To Make Negus

1835. To every pint of port wine allow one quart of boiling water, ¼ pound of sugar, one lemon, grated nutmeg to taste.

Mode. – As this beverage is more usually drunk at children’s parties than at any other, the wine need not be very old or expensive for the purpose, a new fruity wine answering very well for it. Put the wine into a jug, rub some lumps of sugar (equal to ¼ lb.) on the lemon-rind until all the yellow part of the skin is absorbed, then squeeze the juice, and strain it. Add the sugar in the lemon-juice to the port wine, with the grated nutmeg; pour over it the boiling water, cover the jug, and, when the beverage has cooled little, it will be fit to use. Negus may also be made of sherry, or any other sweet white wine, but it is more usually made of port than of any other beverage.

Sufficient. – Allow one pint of wine, with the other ingredients in proportion, for a party of nine or 10 children.

19th Century bon vivant Jerry Thomas—as near to a patron saint of cocktails as Americans come—steals his negus recipe verbatim from Beeton’s Book of Household Management (though, to be fair, so did dozens of writers: recipe plagiarism is an old and well-honed craft and poor Mrs. Beeton has been shamelessly plundered; she may, in fact, have done some negus plundering herself).

William “The Only William” Schmidt, however, gives a few takes on it in his 1891 bartending guide The Flowing Bowl, one with port and another with claret (the English term for red Bordeaux wines):

394. Negus.

This beverage is of English origin, and there very highly estimated; it derives its name from its inventor, the English Colonel Negus.

Put the rind of half a lemon or orange in a tureen, add eight ounces of sugar, one pint of port wine, the fourth part a small nutmeg–grated; infuse this for an hour; strain; add one quart of boiling water, and the drink is ready for use.

395. Another.

In other countries they are used to take lighter wines. The recipe follows: put two bottles of claret, two sticks cinnamon, six cloves, a little pulverized cardamom, a little grated nutmeg, and a half a pound of sugar, one which you have previously rubbed the rind of a lemon, on a slow fire; cover well, and heat to the boiling-point; strain through a hair-sieve; add one pint of boiling water, and the juice of one and a half lemons, and serve in strong glasses, that are first warmed. [all sic]

M.E. Steedman (n.d. c 1890’s) Home-made Beverages and American Drinks gives us a more fortified version:

Negus
Rub 3 oz. of loaf sugar on to the rind of a lemon, pound it, and add to it a pint of port, a quarter of a small nutmeg grated, a pint of boiling water, and if liked one or two drops of essence of ambergris or rather more of vanilla. Serve hot.

Jerry Thomas also offers bubbly version:

Soda Negus
A most refreshing and elegant beverage, particularly for those who do not take punch or grog after supper, is thus made:

Put half a pint of port wine, with four lumps of sugar, three cloves, and enough grated nutmeg to cover a shilling, into a saucepan; warm it well, but did not suffer it to boil; pour it into a bowl or jug, and upon the warm wine decant a bottle of soda water. You will have an effervescent and delicious negus by this means.

George IV’s Negus

Dr. Samuel Johnson's dictum regarding port comes to mind: “Claret is the liquor for boys, port for men; but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy.” And if one commingles port and brandy? Surely such a drinker must aspire to majestic heights of masculinity. From the premier issue of the The Portfolio of Entertaining & Instructive Varieties in History, Literature, Fine Arts, Etc. (1829) comes this blurb about a massive negus made for the Hanoverian King George IV.

HIS MAJESTY'S NEW WINE COOLER

ON Monday last the magnificent wine cooler manufactured for his Majesty by Messrs Rundell and Bridge, was, with his Majesty's approbation, filled with port negus at the manufactory in Dean-street that the workmen employed in its construction might toast his Majesty's health on the completion of their work.

This splendid vase weighs 6950 ounces, and contains 38 gallons. There were used in making the negus sixteen gallons of old port, one gallon of brandy, eight dozen lemons six dozen nutmegs, and 20 lbs of loaf sugar.

What's interesting to me about this one is the addition of the brandy—and the lack of any mention of boiling water. Perhaps it merely assumed, given the not quite double capacity of the vessel compared with the volume of the listed ingredients, but knowing a fair number of workmen myself—and the seeming absence of the king during the toasting—I wouldn't be shocked if it had been omitted entirely. Tuesday last might've been a painful day for those toasters...

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The Academy of Ancient Beverages
Negus isn’t the only venerable Christmas drink around. Short of milking a cow right into the syllabub bowl, here are some others to get your yuletide motor turning...

• Blair “TikiTrader” Reynolds cranks out a bowl of wassail over the The Mixolosem.
• Paul Clarke at The Cocktail Chronicles sets fires to a bowl of booze for a Christmas Rum Punch.
  
• The Boston chapter of LUPEC (Ladies United for the Preservation of Endangered Cocktails) pull out the stops with a boozy bowl, hot toddies, and sangaree. I have got to make it back to Boston…
• And, finally, there’s that lovely aged eggnog over at Chow I keep intending to make

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