Hippocras

1 Servings

Ingredients

Quantity Ingredient
4 ounces Stick cinnamon
2 ounces Powdered cinnamon
One sixth (probably of a pound-2 2/3 ounces) of nutmegs and galingale together
1 ounce Ginger
1 ounce Grains of paradise

Directions

Meanwhile, I'll post this recipe for a kind of spiced wine they drank in the Middle Ages. This is another one of those medieval recipes first followed by modern instructions. I have tried this with red and white wine.

I like it with a good deep burgandy best, but it is also good with a nice sweet white zin. I think it's all about what kind of wine you like. I skip the sugar (maybe that's why I like it with sweet wine). I make it unsweetened, and those who want sugar can add it.

Also, rather than boiling the spices in the stuff then straining it out, I tie the spices up looseley in a few layers of cheese cloth & steep.

Grains of Paradise are hard to find, but they are out there. Folks in Seattle can get them at Tenzing Momo (not the spice market) at the Pike Place Market. For those of you not in Seattle, Tenzing Momo is like a metaphysical/herbal/natural/incense/perfume type store. The "Spice" store didn't carry them. I found them on a fluke. Was buying primo catnip for my Hazel.

Galingale (or galingas) is supposed to be like a cross between a nutmeg and a pepper. I have not been able to find it. If anybody knows where to get some, please let me know.

To make powdered hippocras, take a quarter of very fine cinnamon selected by tasting it, and half a quarter of fine flour of cinnamon, an ounce of selected string ginger, fine and white, and an ounce of Grain of Paradise, a sixth of nutmegs and galingale together, and bray them all together. And when you would make your hippocras, take a good half ounce of this powder and two quarters of sugar and mix them with a quart of wine, by Paris measure. And note that the powder and the sugar mixed together is the Duke's powder.

Grind them all together. To make hippocras add ½ ounce of the powder and ½ lb (1 cup) of sugar to a 2 quarts of boiling wine (the quart used to measure wine in Paris c. 1393 was about 2 modern U.S. quarts, the pound and ounce about the same as ours). Strain through a sleeve of Hippocrates (a tube of cloth, closed at one end).

Posted to EAT-L Digest 24 October 96 Date: Fri, 25 Oct 1996 00:56:48 -0700 From: Matt Crapo <olymatt@...>

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