Recipe - Hippocras

4 ounce Stick cinnamon
2 ounce Powdered cinnamon
One sixth (probably of a
pound2 2/3 ounces) of
nutmegs and galingale
together
1 ounce Ginger
1 ounce Grains of paradise

Meanwhile, I'll post this recipe for a kind of spiced wine they drank in
the Middle Ages. This is another one of those medieval recipes first
followed by modern instructions. I have tried this with red and white wine.
I like it with a good deep burgandy best, but it is also good with a nice
sweet white zin. I think it's all about what kind of wine you like. I skip
the sugar (maybe that's why I like it with sweet wine). I make it
unsweetened, and those who want sugar can add it.

Also, rather than boiling the spices in the stuff then straining it out, I
tie the spices up looseley in a few layers of cheese cloth & steep.

Grains of Paradise are hard to find, but they are out there. Folks in
Seattle can get them at Tenzing Momo (not the spice market) at the Pike
Place Market. For those of you not in Seattle, Tenzing Momo is like a
metaphysical/herbal/natural/incense/perfume type store. The "Spice" store
didn't carry them. I found them on a fluke. Was buying primo catnip for
my Hazel.

Galingale (or galingas) is supposed to be like a cross between a nutmeg and
a pepper. I have not been able to find it. If anybody knows where to get
some, please let me know.

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.

Grind them all together. To make hippocras add One half ounce of the powder and
One half pound (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).
Posted to EATL Digest 24 October 96

Date: Fri, 25 Oct 1996 00:56:48 0700

From: Matt Crapo olymatt@IX.NETCOM.COM