PREFACE.
The principal object of these pages is to furnish a collection of recipes for the brewing of compound drinks, technically called "Cups," all of which have been selected with the most scrupulous attention to the rules of gastronomy, and their virtues tested and approved by repeated trials. These we are inclined to put into type, from a belief that, if they were more generally adopted, it would be the means of getting rid of a great deal of that stereotyped drinking which at present holds sway at the festive boards of England. In doing this, we have endeavoured to simplify the matter as much as possible, adding such hints and remarks as may prove serviceable to the uninitiated, whilst we have discarded a goodly number of modern compounds as unpalatable and unscientific. As, in this age of progress, most things are raised to the position of a science, we see no reason why Bacchanology, if the term please our readers, should not hold a respectable place, and be entitled to its due mead of praise; so, by way of introduction, we have ventured to take a cursory glance at the customs which have been attached to drinking from the earliest periods to the present time. This, however, we set forth as no elaborate history, but only as an arrangement of such scraps as have from time to time fallen in our way, and have helped us to form ideas of the social manners of bygone times.
We have selected a sprig of Borage for our frontispiece, by reason of the usefulness of that pleasant herb in the flavouring of cups. Elsewhere than in England, plants for flavouring are accounted of rare virtue. So much are they esteemed in the East, that an anti-Brahminical writer, showing the worthlessness of Hindu superstitions, says, "They command you to cut down a living and sweet basil-plant, that you may crown a lifeless stone." Our use of flavouring-herbs is the reverse of this justly condemned one; for we crop them that hearts may be warmed and life lengthened.
And here we would remark that, although our endeavours are directed towards the resuscitation of better times than those we live in, times of heartier customs and of more genial ways, we raise no lamentation for the departure of the golden age, in the spirit of Hoffmann von Fallersleben, who sings:—
"Would our bottles but grow deeper,
Did our wine but once get cheaper,
Then on earth there might unfold
The golden times, the age of gold!
"But not for us; we are commanded