Hippocras.
Here is an ancient recipe:—
Take of cardamoms, carpobalsamum, of each half an ounce, coriander-seeds prepared, nutmegs, ginger, of each two ounces, cloves two drachms; bruise and infuse them two days in two gallons of the richest sweetest cider, often stirring it together, then add {184} thereto of milk three pints, strain all through an hippocras bag, and sweeten it with a pound of sugar-candy.
D’you kna-ow—as the curate in The Private Secretary says—I am not taking any hippocras to-day.
“Wormwood imbib’d in cider,” says another writer, “produceth the effect that it doth in wine.” Evidently some nasty effect; only conceive an admixture of absinthe and cider!
That the ancients loved mixtures—and sweet mixtures—is pretty evident from the writings of Pliny and others. Were a man to invite me to drink apple juice in the which had been bottled dried juniper-berries, I should probably hit that man in the eye, or send for a policeman. But two or three hundred years ago “juniper-cider” appears to have been a popular drink, although we read that “the taste thereof is somewhat strange, which by use will be much abated.”
Ginger, cloves, cinnamon, currants, honey, rosemary, raspberries, blackberries, elderberries, and “clove-July-flowers,” all used to be put into cider, by way of flavouring; “but the best addition,” says the same writer, “that can be to it is that of the lees of Malaga Sack or Canary new and sweet, about a gallon to a hogshead; this is a great improver and a purifier of cider.”
Evidently in those days they had some crude sort of ideas on the subject of Cider Cup.