Mulled wine with a kick
You know it’s nearly Christmas when you go into a pub for a long, dry gin and tonic, and come away with a queasy stomach filled with warm, sweet mulled wine.
It is scientifically impossible to ignore the siren call of those heady spices, despite the fact that nearly everyone knows that mulled wine usually isn’t actually that nice.
The thin broth that sits sourly on the bar in many pubs is a sad comedown for a drink originally designed to show off the wealth and largesse of a medieval household.
Mulling is not just a cunning excuse to serve laughably cheap wine to your unfortunate guests — although it does have that as a fringe benefit. No, there’s a real art to it. Certainly the recipe given in The Forme of Cury, a cookery book published in about 1390, contains exotica not often found in those dreaded mulled wine ‘teabags’.
As well as cinnamon, ginger, cloves, nutmeg and cardamom, it calls for long pepper, marjoram and grains of paradise — although the ‘spykenard de Spayn’ eludes me. A little online research suggests using rosemary instead, but I’m not sure this substitution can be blamed for the flavour of the end result. I can see this stuff being deployed with some success against the plague.
Perhaps medieval tastes were different. Indeed Mrs Beeton, Delia’s Victorian predecessor, gives a recipe which, as well as sticking to fairly standard ingredients, produces something approximating to a modern, if rather bland mulled wine.
however, I would like to go on record with the fact that water has no place in a festive punch.
Delia, queen of the modern British Christmas, doesn’t disappoint with her citrus-heavy recipe for a kind of winter sangria — particularly if you take her up on the optional two tablespoons of Grand Marnier and then add a bit more for luck.
Jamie’s idea of making a spicy syrup base, rather than burning off all the alcohol while attempting to infuse the wine with flavour, is a stroke of genius, however. It also allows you to get most of the work done in advance, leaving you well prepared for unexpected guests. Dale DeGroff, whose book The Craft of The Cocktail says he is ‘widely acknowledged to be the world’s greatest living bartender’, gives a recipe for Scandinavian glogg, which has a rather fearsome reputation.
he takes his recipe from Los Angeles’ Scandia club, whose members included Marilyn Monroe and Marlene Dietrich, so what it lacks in authenticity it makes up for in celebrity endorsement.
The soggy almonds and liberal amounts of fiery vodka lead me to suspect that starlets are not discriminating drinkers.
Jamie urges readers to ‘feel free’ to add their own favourite spices to his mulling syrup, but I take the liberty of replacing the vanilla pod, which makes things too sickly, with fragrant cardamom, in a nod to the 14th-century recipe.
A dash of my beloved ginger wine gives the whole thing a kick, although you could substitute a generous pinch of ground ginger instead. I like the idea of using honey, but the flavour clashes with the wine, as does soft brown sugar — go for plain white caster sugar.