Egg Ale was a somewhat remarkable composition, and was doubtless highly nutritious. To twelve gallons of ale was added the gravy of eight pounds of beef. Twelve eggs, the gravy beef, a pound of raisins, oranges and spice, were then placed in a linen bag and left in the barrel until the ale had ceased fermenting. Even then an addition was made in the shape of two quarts of Malaga sack. After three weeks in cask the ale was bottled, a little sugar being added. A monstrously potent liquor truly! Can this have been one of the cups with which “our ancestors robust with liberal cups usher’d the morn”?
Coming now to beverages more familiar, a word or two as to Purl, once, and not so long ago either, the common morning draught of Londoners. Tom Hood, in The Epping Hunt, thus puns upon the word:—
Good lord, to see the riders now, Thrown off with sudden whirl, A score within the purling brook, Enjoy’d their “early purl.”
According to one receipt, common Purl contained the following ingredients:—Roman wormwood, gentian root, calamus aromaticus snake root, horse radish, dried orange peel, juniper berries, seeds or kernels of Seville oranges, all placed in beer, and allowed to stand for some months. The writer who gives this receipt says a pound or two of galingale improves it—as if anything could improve such a perfect combination! According to an anecdote told of George III., a somewhat simpler beverage in his day went by the name of Purl. One morning the King, when visiting his stables, heard one of his grooms say to another: “I don’t care what you say, Robert, but the man at the Three Tuns makes the best purl in Windsor.”
“Purl, purl,” said the King; “Robert, what’s Purl?”
The groom explaining that purl was hot beer with a dash of gin in it, in fact, the compound now known to ’bus conductors as “dogsnose,” the King remarked:—
“Yes, yes; I daresay very good drink; but too strong for the morning; never drink in the morning.” {388}
A mixture of warmed ale and spirits is called Hot-Pot in Norfolk and Suffolk, and a similar compound, to which is added sugar and lemon-peel, used to be called Ruddle.
A somewhat remote ancestor of Purl, Dogsnose, Ruddle and other mixtures of ale or beer and spirits, was Hum, to which Ben Jonson refers in The Devil is an Ass:—
—Carmen Are got into the yellow starch and chimney sweepers To their tobacco, and strong waters, hum, Meath and Obarni.