Subject: Re: beverages

From: [email-masked] (david director friedman)
Date: Thu, 25 Aug 1994 05:02:47 GMT

Clarica Grove writes:

"My favorite non-alcoholic medeival bev is "ypocras", pronounce
hippocris.  It's spiced grape juice, using cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves;
I don't know what all.  They serve it at a local medieval festival,
and it's delicious."

It may be delicious, but I doubt it is medieval. All of the period
recipes I have seen for Hippocras use wine, not grape juice. The
following is the recipe from _Le Menagier_ (c. 1394), with my worked
out version.

Origional:

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.

My version:

4 oz stick cinnamon	1 oz of ginger
2 oz powdered cinnamon	1 oz of grains of paradise
RA sixthS (probably of a poundP2 2/3 ounces) of nutmegs and galingale
together

Grind them all together. To make hippocras add 1/2 ounce of the
powder and 1/2 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).

David Friedman