HIPPOCRAS, by Jane Borodale

The first day of the holidays, and in celebration of the winter feast I thought I'd look at recipes for hippocras - that stalwart festive cordial wine popular since medieval times.

Taking its name from the conical bag shaped like the Sleeve of Hippocrates (used by apothecaries, vintners or housewives) to strain the spice from the liquor, hippocras (hypocras, ipocras) was drunk at the end of a high-status feast to balance the humours, as a sweet and efficacious digestive and carminative. It could be made with red or white wine, sugar and cinnamon being the main constituents, and often a variety of other ingredients.

I’d be the first to admit that mulled wine made badly can be truly horrible (am thinking of the sour, mouthcurdling addition of a carton of orange juice, which is surely one of the most vile culinary perversions ever to be concocted, and which resulting clouded and sickly purple looks exactly like the colour of painters’ turpentine when the brushes have been rinsed too much in it, and probably tastes worse). But these recipes sounded like a beautiful aromatic treat, and after reading quite a few, I experimented, trying to be fairly accurate but according mostly to the ingredients already in my cupboard (no spikenard...).

Here’s an example: ‘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 (gingembre de mesche), 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.

I’d always laboured under the impression that hippocras was more-or-less the same as mulled wine. But rolling up my (unHippocratic) sleeves has reminded me of the need to keep properly looking afresh at the past. In short – I was really surprised. Not just by the flavour, (unexpectedly, utterly fabulous and unlike anything else I’d had before) but that some of the recipes were not heated at all, neither in the making, nor the serving. Some ingredients included milk or cream. (I can also report on the relative merits of warming the wine in a saucepan ‘on the fire’ or with a hot poker plunged into the vessel itself. In order to heat a quantity of liquor, you need an exceedingly hot poker. The hiss, bubble and spit of it going in is exciting, and the caramelising scent, but it was hard to get it actually hot. You though may have more luck.)

'Circe Mulling Wine', Gioacchino Assereto

The Goodman of Paris tells us that after dessert of fruit and compotes came the ‘departure from the table’ – hippocras and wafers called mestier. ‘…Waffurs to ete, ypocras to drynke with delite. Now this fest is fynysched, voyd the table quyte.’  (1393) In his suggested menus for dinner for a Meat Day for great lords and others, one sixth course was hippocras with wafers (rich batter cooked between hot iron moulds on a chafing dish, and sweetened with honey and rosewater), pears and comfits, medlars and peeled nuts. Another includes sugared flawns and larded milk, cooked pears and hippocras.

He also mentions the purchase of ready-made hippocras from the spicer, buying 3 quarts at 10s. the quart (which surely seems very expensive?) Lump sugar could also come from the spicer, grocer or mercer, or would have been bought, along with dried fruit and other items for the banquet course, at fairs such as Lenton. Hippocras is not, apparently, to be confused with piment or clary, which were similar but made with honey instead of sugar, but there are very many differing methods and quantities to be found, according to personal taste and availability of spices. Sugar itself was considered a spice, and to have medicinal qualities. Lower orders, perhaps yeoman farmers, merchants and the like may have used honey in its stead.

John Russell’s 15^th-century Boke of Nurture gives a detailed, rhyming method for hippocras, you can read it here at Project Gutenberg.

'The Spice Shop', 1637, Paolo Antonio Barbieri

It wasn’t universally loved – William Harrison (1535-1593) gives it only a rather offhanded mention of ‘sundry sorts of artificial stuff, as hippocras and wormwood wine’. Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) is disapproving, saying that ‘overhot, compound, strong thick drinks,’ including ‘all those hot spiced strong drinks’ are to be neglected by those who suffer this malady, as ‘spices cause hot and head melancholy, and are for that cause forbidden by our physicians. Sweets turn into bile, they are obstructive.’ As a balancer of humours, whether it worked would clearly depend on your natural temperament; sanguine, melancholic, choleric or phlegmatic. I imagine this is also why it is a solely winter beverage, not drunk in the warm months of the year. The Goodman points out for a wedding feast in May, ‘apples and cheese without hippocras, because it is out of season.’

It is generally said to have fallen out of favour by the 18^th century, though James Boswell notes in his diary on the 19 Jan 1763 that he ‘went into a little public house and drank some warm white wine with aromatic spices, pepper and cinnamon’.

In case you fancy trying it out too; to save you time I’ve converted the pottles and quarts and drams etc, into two recipes. Don’t baulk at the amount of sugar, it’s weird but it does work. This isn’t a drink to consume by the gallon – it’s a dessert. I didn’t adjust quantities for modern tastes, and am very glad I didn’t because these were delicious as they were, and it really felt like drinking a little bit of something from the otherworld. If you do try either of these, I’d love to know what you think:

red Hippocras (after the Goodman of Paris, 1393).

1 pint red wine

2 sticks of cinnamon

piece of fresh root ginger (about the size of man’s big toe)

7 cloves

4-5 cardamom pods

large pinch of mace

quarter of a nutmeg, freshly grated

7 oz caster sugar

Peel and chop ginger, break cinnamon into pieces and grind as finely as possible with other spices in pestle and mortar until small, then add sugar and grind until thoroughly combined. Add red wine and heat gently in a pan for about 5 min then remove from heat, strain through jelly bag or muslin and serve in tiny glasses. Sipped hot straightaway, it has an extraordinarily warming hit. Cold the following day, it’s pungent, with the consistency of green ginger wine, but a much more complex flavour.

white Hippocras (after Hannah Woolley, 1675).

1 pint white wine

2 fat sticks cinnamon

piece of fresh root ginger (just a little less than above)

3 cloves

4 peppercorns

half a nutmeg, freshly grated

4cm stem fresh rosemary

6 oz caster sugar

half pint of single cream

Grind spices as above, then add and grind sugar, then rosemary. Stir into white wine and leave to steep for 12 hours or overnight. (NB – the mixture is not heated.) Strain, then stir in cream before serving in aforementioned tiny glasses. This one really is quite unlike anything else I’ve ever tasted – perhaps like a rich, exotic lassi? Very fine and scrumptious. If I could only use one adjective to describe it, I would say it was exquisite.

And if you needed any more persuasion, for anyone already set to feel guilty about their levels of consumption over the next Twelve Days, hippocras may be your answer, at least according to Samuel Pepys who, on 29 Oct 1663, protests:

‘It being Lord Mayor’s Day… at noon I went forth, and by coach to Guildhall and there was admitted… and there wine was offered and they drunk, I only drinking some hypocras, which doth not break my vowe, it being, to the best of my present judgement, only a mixed compound drink, and not any wine.’ (My italics)

Your good health!

Gifts by Imogen Robertson

I hope you’ll all forgive a not very Christmasy posting this month from me. It is about gifts though, how they are passed on generation to generation and the stories they carry, so I hope that’s close enough. 

My mother was sorting out her jewellery recently and came across this moonstone necklace. Mum kindly passed it on to me and it’s been making me look a great deal more classy than usual at various  parties this season. Mum was sent it by her Aunt, Hope Wicksteed, in 1991 after thieves had stolen most of her jewelry and Hope thought the necklace might be some comfort. 

Hope was a poet, and secretary to Compton MacKenzie among many other things during her life. She was also, thank goodness, a great chronicler of family stories. She wrote a letter to go with the necklace explaining that its story started in Japan with Hope’s Aunt Jessie who lived in Tokyo for some years. She met a Somerset man out there and married, but went to Japan as a single woman to teach English before women could even vote in this country. 

This comes from Hope’s letter: “She (Aunt Jessie Slater, née Rorke) used to send parcels to us, and I knew the ‘Japanese smell’ so well that once when a parcel came while I was at school and they tried to keep it secret from me, I came into the sitting room and said “There’s been a parcel from Japan!” I don’t know what the smell was - sandalwood perhaps - but I could recognise it again even now.  One day on a visit she handed my mother an envelope with some stones in it, saying, “I don’t think they are of any value - they pick them up off the river-beds.” Mother took them to a lady who did artistic jewellery and she made them into a necklet which was given to me on my 21st.” 

Hope was born in 1908.

Reading that letter reminded me of other family treasures that must have made their way here in those parcels. One I remember vividly from childhood is a copy of a folk story ‘The Old Woman who Lost her Dumplings’. I used to spend ages looking at the beautiful woodcut illustrations while Gran was looking after me. The book was printed on crepe paper which felt like cloth, and though you can’t have the feel of reading it, you can see all the text and illustrations here. Mum says that certainly was a present from Aunt Jessie and was sent to my grandfather, Hope’s brother, when he was young enough to enjoy such things. 

Now I’ve started to wonder about these figures which found a home with me after my grandmother moved into sheltered housing. The house / watch tower like thing has ‘Wyeda’ stamped on the base, and there is a stamp on the base of the cheery ivory fellow too. If there are any scholars of such things out there, do let me know. 

Whether I’m right or wrong about where these things came from, I’m very glad I have them and the necklace. They make me think of the people who made them, who picked out the stones from the river bed, and of Jessie Slater shopping for trinkets to entertain her nephew and niece while they were growing up in those uncertain times on the other side of the world. 

Sometimes when we give people presents we give them stories and histories too and those can become as important as the objects themselves, perhaps that’s worth remembering when you are looking for last minute gifts! Now back to the festival season with my very best wishes to all the History Girls and our readers for a Merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year.

'War and the Spirit of Christmas' by A L Berridge

It’s hard trying to think about Christmas when you write about war. My characters may be fiction but the war they fought is not, and it feels rather heartless to abandon them up to their knees in trench-mud in order to put tinsel on a Christmas tree. 

'Sentinel of the Zouaves' by William Simpson - Crimea

And mud, of course, is the least they had to contend with. My current novel follows the Siege of Sevastopol in the Crimean War, where our troops spent the winter of 1854 huddled in rags in freezing trenches, without fire, without rest or proper medical care, and often even without food. I’d planned to blog about it here, but apart from the fact it's been done definitively in this brilliant post by our December guest Helen Rappaport, it just didn’t seem right to regale you with horrors at the height of the festive season. It’s as if war and Christmas simply don’t mix.

Yet actually they have a relationship we don’t often imagine. Christmas isn’t just about celebration – it’s a time for love and hope and thoughts of family, a time of yearning for peace. It’s a truism to say that the ‘spirit of Christmas’ isn’t found in the tinsel, but it can and has been found amid the horror of war.

If anything, that’s when it’s most important. It’s a beacon of hope at the turn of the year, a time to let go of the tragedy of the past and look forward to brighter times ahead. Midshipman Wood quotes a ‘senior Regimental officer’ on Christmas in the Crimea:

‘Standing that day on Green Hill… caused many reflections – sad and solemn retrospection for the brave men who slept the sleep of death around us; joyful and glorious perspective picturing to myself the ultimate fate of the formidable fortress... Such was Christmas Day 1854; yet to that hour the Division to which I belong had not received an ounce of meat a man for dinner – in fact dinner we had none.’

Only hope. The men in the WW1 trenches actually fared better for food, but before their eyes was still this same image of hope for the future. There’s a terrible poignancy for us in this famous army Christmas card where the year blazing gloriously on the horizon is – 1915:

It seems such a cheap thing now, a glib printed card to cheer the troops. Standard issue cards for the men to send home typically gave space only for a ‘To’ and ‘From’ section to be personalized. But who’s to say what they meant to the people receiving them – a positive proof that their son, their husband or brother, was alive and thinking of them at Christmas? And what would be our emotion if we received something as personal and precious as this?

Christmas card from unidentified British soldier 1916

Even the little things matter. Holly, mistletoe, a Christmas card, something ‘better than usual’ for dinner. The ‘trimmings’ can serve as a reminder of happier days, and boost a determination not to allow war to destroy a much-loved tradition. Soldiers foraged for mistletoe in the fields of Flanders, and army messes for over a century have given the ‘feast’ an air of saturnalia by having NCOs wait on the men, and officers on the NCOs.

Soldiers collecting mistletoe on the Flanders front

Even in the starving Crimea officers struggled to produce something ‘special’ for Christmas. The young Garnet Wolseley actually attempted to make a plum pudding out of figs, biscuit, and some ‘very rancid suet or grease’. He used a Russian round shot and a section of 13” shell as pestle and mortar to pulverise the biscuit into flour, mixed the whole lot into a ‘horrible looking mess’, and wrapped it in his own towel to cook over the fire. Unfortunately he and his friend were unexpectedly called to trench duty and decided to eat the pudding half raw – with the predictable result that by 10pm he imagined ‘I could feel, if not actually hear, each piece I had swallowed of that infernal pudding’ and had to be helped back to his tent bent double with pain.

Wolseley’s memoirs laugh at this recollection, but there’s one casual line in his description that made me sit up straight. He always makes light of the actual fighting, which at this time was pretty constant, but on Christmas Day he records with surprise that there was ‘no firing going on anywhere.’ None.

German Christmas card 1915

Perhaps he should have expected it, since Christmas is about the bond of humanity which anyone can share. While the British were sending home loving Christmas cards in WWI, so were the Germans - and the messages are all but identical. If the British wanted a quiet Christmas and a break from killing, then it's only natural that the Germans should too.

And famously in 1914 they had one. The Christmas Truce of 1914 is no myth, but a reality testified to by countless letters from the trenches all telling the same story. There was no official truce, no one big single event, but all along the lines were little pockets of quiet as British and Germans exchanged first words and then carols, then rose from the trenches to meet each other in No Man’s Land. 

Christmas Truce 1914

Here, for instance, is Rifleman Reading in a letter to his wife in Chesham: ‘During the early part of the morning the Germans started singing and shouting, all in good English… At 4 p.m part of their Band played some Christmas carols and "God save the King", and "Home Sweet Home." You could guess our feelings. Later on in the day they came towards us, and our chaps went out to meet them... I shook hands with some of them, and they gave us cigarettes and cigars. We did not fire that day, and everything was so quiet that it seemed like a dream.’

Christmas Truce 1914

 Here’s another, from a soldier still unidentified: ‘There must be something in the spirit of Christmas as today we are all on top of our trenches running about. Whereas other days we have to keep our heads well down…. Just before dinner I had the pleasure of shaking hands with several Germans: a party of them came 1/2way over to us so several of us went out to them… After exchanging autographs and them wishing us a Happy New Year we departed and came back and had our dinner.... We can hardly believe that we’ve been firing at them for the last week or two—it all seems so strange'

Strange indeed. These are wonderful stories, yet for me there’s still a desperate sadness about them because the truces were only temporary.  Here’s Captain J C Dunn of the Royal Welch Fusiliers describing how hostilities re-started on his section of the front:

'At 8.30 I fired three shots in the air and put up a flag with "Merry Christmas" on it, and I climbed on the parapet.  He [a German] put up a sheet with "Thank you" on it, and the German Captain appeared on the parapet.  We both bowed and saluted and got down into our respective trenches, and he fired two shots in the air, and the War was on again.'

'The Khaki Chums' - Cross marking the site of a Christmas Truce 1914

Back to war – but with everything even worse, because now they knew the men they fired at. The Christmas Truce is a beautiful thing, but for me it simply screams with the whole futility of war. Recognizing the bond of humanity was something kept only for that one day of Christmas – and soon not even then. The War Office discouraged ‘fraternization’, the officers were made to forbid it, and while isolated incidents occurred in both 1915 and 1916, by 1917 they had disappeared completely.

British Christmas card 1917

To the Powers That Be, Christmas has no place in war except to whip up hate against the enemy. Here’s an official  British Christmas card for 1917, and if you can see the spirit of Christmas in it that’s more than I can do. 

We’re no better now. The war in Afghanistan may feature different religions, but I can’t see anything Christian about this gleeful report in the Daily Mail of British troops attacking the Taliban on Christmas Day and marching back to base in Santa hats. 

I don’t blame the soldiers. They do their job, and it is politicians who dictate what that is and how it should be conducted. Yet when everything else is burnt away, the men who fight come closer to understanding the bond of humanity than politicians ever can. The Truce of 1914 began with ordinary soldiers, and for them it isn’t just for Christmas.

I saw this first in the Crimea. From the letters and diaries of ordinary men I’ve learned that there were truces for the burial of the dead, and on these occasions British and Russians talked and laughed together, sharing wine and tobacco and stories of home. I’ve learned that ‘friendly’ contests were arranged, and that a secret artillery duel was played out between the rival 68-pounders of a Russian and a British battery until the Russians signalled defeat. One even more extraordinary challenge was issued, and for several nights after the burial truce of March 1855 a Russian and a French officer met secretly near the Inkerman ruins in order to determine which of them was better – at chess. 

Soldiers at war don’t have to lose their humanity. Some reviewers scoffed at the scene in ‘The War Horse’ when the Germans help the Allies free a terrified horse from the barbed wire, but to me this seems perfectly plausible. Even in the Crimea such things happened. Midshipman Wood describes how a drunken Frenchman reeled crazily about between the lines singing the Marseillaise, but the Russians showed fellow-feeling and never fired. Another time two wounded British lay groaning in the open on the edge of the Left Attack, but the Russian sharpshooters raised a white flag to show they would hold their fire to allow their friends to bring them in. These are events in April and May 1855, but to me they show the spirit of Christmas. 

So does this. After the Battle of Inkerman in November 1854, Captain Clifford of the Rifle Brigade was passing wounded Russian prisoners when ‘a man among them ran up and called out to me, and pointed to his shoulder bound up. It was the poor fellow whose arm I had cut off yesterday. He laughed, and said ‘Buono, Johnny!’  I took his hand and shook it heartily, and the tears came in my eyes. I had not a shilling in my pocket, but had I had a bag of gold he should have had it.’

Watercolour by Captain Clifford

It’s only one moment of bonding in a whole war of savage stupidity, but it reminds me of Wilfred Owen’s haunting poem ‘Strange Meeting’, where a soldier is greeted in death by a man who tells him, ‘I am the enemy you killed, my friend.’ It’s moving, uplifting, and utterly excoriating in what it says about the insanity of war.

So’s Christmas.  When I first read ‘A Christmas Carol’ I was puzzled by Scrooge’s line ‘I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year’, because it seemed ridiculous to eat turkey every day and live in a house perpetually full of tinsel. Now I understand it better, and its truth is plainest in the tragedy of war. For just one day we should stop killing each other? For just one day we long for ‘peace on earth and goodwill towards men’? For just one day?

I hope we can do better. I doubt any international statesmen are reading this blog, but that won’t stop me wishing that politicians the world over would shut up and listen not just to the angels, but to the humanity of their own soldiers. The message doesn’t have to be confined to a particular religion; it doesn’t have to be confined to religion at all. But once we recognize and celebrate our shared humanity, then the spirit of Christmas will be everywhere and always, and the horrors of the Crimea and the WWI trenches can be left where they belong – in history.

***

A.L. Berridge's website.

The Hierarchy of Hats and other scavengings: by Theresa Breslin

 

At times I think of myself as being more of a scavenger than a writer.

Maybe scavenger isn’t quite the right word. When I checked the dictionary it told me that ‘to scavenge’ was to search for anything useable among discarded material. But some of what I take hasn’t really been discarded and I don’t even know if the stuff I collect will ever be useable. Although my hoard does contain physical objects I’m not expecting a call from the constabulary as the objects are usually stones or driftwood or similar. More often it’s an impression, a photograph, a snatch of dialogue, a nugget of information, a shared experience. I gather each item up on my travels for no definite reason other than I found it interesting - most recently in Siberia with the Edinburgh World Writers’ Conference

 

The oldest part of Krasnoyarsk 

where a church was built  to look 

out over the vast and stunning  landscape,

                    

    The beauty of icons and imagery inside.

                                                         Sunset over the city 

                                              

              

                                 

In the local market birds peck seeds from hand made brooms and fish come ready frozen!.

And yes, there is a hierarchy of hats - from otter via mink, silver fox, racoon, red fox, rabbit to squirrel. 

( rats are kept for gloves!)  

I have no idea whether any of these will spark an idea, result in a story, or feed into a book yet to be born. But I do know that when I go to my hoard and pore over my treasures something will stir in that mysterious part of the brain wherein lies creativity.  

There’s another meaning for the verb ‘to scavenge’- to purify a molten metal by bubbling a suitable gas through it. The gas may be inert or may react…  

Take what you will from that as a metaphor.

Happy Holidays wherever you are!

More info: http://www.theresabreslin.co.uk/   http://www.facebook.com/Theresabreslinauthor

Twitter: @theresabreslin1 

Spy for the Queen of Scots is nominated for the Carnegie Medal and an Illustrated Treasury of Scottish Folk and Fairy Tales  illustrated by Kate Leiper is nominated for the Greenaway Medal.

In conjunction with the Citizens Theatre and South Lanarkshire schools the Divided City musical will be produced at Hamilton Town House Theatre in February 2013.     

TAGS / LABELS:  Theresa Breslin, EWWC, Krasnoyarsk, Siberia,

Christmas Past - Celia Rees

Christmas is a time of nostalgia, of looking back. It triggers memories of childhood, of the past, both recent and distant.  I was a child in the 1950s. It is odd to think that my own childhood is now history. 

I was talking to a friend recently about our shared passion for Rupert the Bear. Every year I would receive a Rupert Annual as part of my stocking (well, pillowcase to be accurate). It was just as much a stocking fixture as the tangerine wrapped in silver paper, the variety pack and the Compendium of Games with requisite number tiddlywinks and dice (last year's having become somewhat depleted). I loved Rupert and Christmas would not have been Christmas without him. It wasn't until I was much older that I thought about how very strange it was for a bear and his animal chums to be dressed in children's clothes from some undefined era and for them to wear shoes and have human hands (apart from Edward Trunk who has feet for hands and wears shoes - how did he tie his laces?). I knew that Rupert didn't live now, the clothes told me that much. He seemed to live in a lost rural idyll where it always snowed at Christmas and in the summer the beach was littered with star fish and there were dragons  and pagodas and all kinds of wonderful things, if you climbed high enough.

Rupert and his friends had the most exciting adventures and met the most exotic of creatures and I envied him. Even though I knew he wasn't real, part of me hoped he was and that, one day, I might meet elves and fairies and the beings that lived in his world. Rupert would now be regarded as fearfully unPC. There are golliwogs and natives with bones through their noses. What was unexceptional in a world that still clung to the remnants of Empire and unthinking assumptions of white superiority would be unacceptable now. Such things offer insights into time and place; insights into history.

As a child of the fifties, I was much freer to have adventures than children are now. I was talking to another friend (I told you that Christmas was a time for looking back) about the kinds of games we played and it was interesting to note how many were informed by history. I grew up in Warwickshire. We used to play out in the woods and fields, so we would play Robin Hood, Children of the New Forest, Ivanhoe, carrying home made swords and bows and arrows.  She lived by the sea, so her games involved playing pirates on old beached hulks and exploring caves and tunnels to discover evidence of smugglers. Reflecting on this, I realised how much my child's imagination was fired by history mediated through books, films and T.V.

I didn't write as a child. My creative imagination was developed and nurtured through playing games which could be very elaborate and go on for weeks, even months. I remember spending almost a year obsessed by Robin Hood. The games we played were porous. Robin Hood and his Merry Men could easily morph into Wyatt Earp or Jesse James but that didn't seem to matter. We didn't worry about strict factual accuracy. We were attracted to myth and romance. The West was just as much history as the Crusades. In an odd way they seemed to go together.

My lifelong interest in the past began with and was fostered by play and the child's imagination which, in turn, was fuelled by the stuff of a fifties childhood, including the rich mix of English Pastoral, folklore and fairytale that is Rupert.