Make it so large that, filled with Sack Up to the swelling brim, Vast toasts on the delicious lake, Like ships at sea, may swim.
A very ancient composition was ale-brue, called later ale-berry. It was composed of ale boiled with spice, sugar, and sops of bread. An old receipt (1420) for it is:—
Alebrue thus make thou schalle With grotes, safroune and good ale.
{384}
Ale-brue was perhaps originally merely a brew of ale, but the word soon came to mean a peculiar beverage. It is mentioned in The Becon against Swearing (1543): “They would taste nothing, no not so much as a poor ale-berry until they had slain Paul,” and in Boorde’s Dyetary, “Ale brues, caudelles and collesses” are recommended for “weke men and feble stomackes.” The word also occurs in The High and Mightie Commendation of the Vertue of a Pot of Good Ale:—
Their ale-berries, cawdles and possets each one, And sullabubs made at the milking pail, Although they be many, Beer comes not in any But all are composed with a Pot of Good Ale.
Taylor, in Drinke and Welscome, says: “Alesbury (or Aylesbury), in Buckinghamshire, where the making of Aleberries, so excellent against Hecticks, was first invented.” This is probably only a punning allusion.
All who have been at City festivities have tasted the Loving Cup, which, so it is stated in Cups and their Customs, is identical with the Grace Cup, a beverage the drinking of which has been from time immemorial a great feature at Corporation dinners both in London and elsewhere. Mr. Timbs, in Walks and Talks about London, says the Loving Cups are filled with “a delicious composition immemorially termed sack, consisting of sweetened and exquisitely flavoured white wine,” and Will of Malmsbury, describing the customs of Glastonbury soon after the Conquest, says that on certain occasions the monks had “mead in their cans, and wine in their Grace Cup.” The Oxford Grace Cup, however, according to Oxford Nightcaps (1835), contains ale. The receipt runs thus: “Extract the juice from the peeling of a lemon and cut the remainder into thin slices; put it into a jug or bowl, and pour on it three half pints of strong home-brewed beer and a bottle of mountain wine: grate a nutmeg into it; sweeten it to your taste; stir it till the sugar is dissolved, and then add three or four slices of bread toasted brown. Let it stand two hours, and then strain it off into the Grace Cup.”
Many of the cups drunk by our forefathers had medicinal qualities attributed to them, and did in fact, often contain drugs of various descriptions. The famous Hypocras, for instance, was flavoured with an infusion of brandy, pepper, ginger, cloves, grains of paradise, ambergris, and musk. A Duchess of St. Albans has left us a receipt for making “The Ale of health and strength,” which, it sufficeth to say, was a {385} decoction of nearly all the herbs in the garden (agreeable and otherwise) boiled up in small beer. Old worthies, when induced to give up their receipts for the public good, described these drinks under the head of “Kitchen physic.” “I allowed him medicated broths, Posset Ale and pearl julep,” writes Wiseman in his book on surgery.
The name of the unfortunate Sir Walter Raleigh is dear to Britons in connection with tobacco and potatoes. He has yet another claim on our sympathy as the inventor of an excellent receipt for Sack Posset, which a high authority has declared to show full well the propriety of taste in its compounder. It runs thus:—“Boil a quart of cream with quantum sufficit of sugar, mace and nutmeg; take half a pint of sack[72]” (sherry), “and the same quantity of ale, and boil them well together, adding sugar; these being boiled separately are now to be added. Heat a pewter dish very hot, and cover your basin with it, and let it stand by the fire for two or three hours.”