Drinks that go with holidays have grown predictable and, thus, tiresome. St. Patrick’s Day is just behind us, with its obligatory green beer and/or Guinness; Cinco de Mayo looms just over the horizon, the time each year when 47.8% of Mexico’s annual no-name tequila product is consumed (and consumed in glasses rimmed with salt from the same plate of damp salt as the year before).
It’s time for a new and more civilized holiday/drink combination, and I think I have the very thing.
I was in the mood for a little light reading the other evening and pulled from an upper shelf a book I had been meaning to read for a few years, The Culture of Food in England, 1200-1500 by C.M. Woolgar. And no, that’s not a joke title contrived by Kingsley Amis. The book proved to be delightful, a window into a world in which just about everyone was a foodie, not a foodie in the frivolous modern sense of being a boorish gourmand: In medieval society, one cared about food not just for the pleasure it gave but mainly because it was how one was paid.
Take the master cook in a large monastery. He was paid, quite literally, piecemeal. If he did the heavy lifting of turning a huge slab of sizzling bacon over a roaring fire, come mealtime, the cook was rewarded with meat instead of the standard fish; taking the fat out of a carcass earned “a measure of the monks’ ale.”
Ale may have been the most common and easily available inebriant in 13th- and 14th-century England. But those with the means to do so regularly drank white wine imported from Portugal or robust red shipped to Southampton from Gascony. To hear professor Woolgar tell it, the craft cocktail crowd of today has nothing on the drinks craftsmen of yore. “Drink was a key element in conviviality, as well as in ritual,” he writes. “There are many [historical] references to cups that were special — and the drink that went in them was clearly distinctive as well.” Who knew there were Moscow Mules in the Middle Ages? “Drink was one of the areas where contemporaries expected to find the greatest variation in products and flavorings.”
On no occasion was this more true than on grand religious feast days at an abbey with the abbot playing host. St. Augustine monastery in Canterbury went all out each year for the feast of St. Augustine. “There was a special, spiced wine” called claratum or clary, and St. Augustine had its own house recipe: wine and skimmed honey (clear honey), with spices including measured amounts of ginger, cinnamon, pepper, galingale, spikenard, green fennel (possibly fenugreek) and cardamom.”
The spice list may sound daunting, and the idea of all that in a red wine may be, well, off-putting. But after a little streamlining — who needs, or has, galingale, spikenard, or fenugreek? — I found the old abbey recipe to be delicious and surprisingly easy to make.
Brew up a cup of ginger tea together with a stick of cinnamon, a tablespoon of peppercorns, and two cardamom pods. Let it steep until it is room temperature. Strain the tea into a small saucepan and add a cup of honey. Simmer and stir until the honey and tea have thoroughly combined into a syrup. Let cool. Add an ounce or two, to taste, of the spiced honey syrup to a glass of red wine (preferably from Gascony). It is also excellent over ice (this is America, after all). You will find that it is a sort of medieval English sangria.
The feast of St. Augustine, which comes on May 26, is an awfully long way off, and in any case, I suspect there aren’t that many who celebrate the day in the old monastery way. But Easter is just around the corner, and that greatest of all liturgical feast days deserves a drink of its own. What better than a modern take on the feast-day clary served by 14th-century monks?
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
