Caudle, Hugmatee and Flip
A few recipes have survived from Renaissance times. A thick drink called “ale-brue” or “ale-berry” was ale boiled with spices, sugar and sops of bread, often with the addition of oatmeal. One ditty goes: “Ale brue thus make thou shall/With grotes [oats], safroun and good ale.” Such porridge-like drinks later came to be known as “caudle,” and were popular in the American colonies.
No less a figure than Sir Walter Raleigh had a personal recipe for “sack posset,” which actually sounds a lot like eggnog. “Boil a quart of cream with quantum sufficit of sugar, mace and nutmeg, take half a pint of sack [sweet sherry] and the same quantity of ale, and boil them together.” He suggests letting it all mull together in a covered pewter bowl by the fire for a couple of hours. I would estimate between half and a whole cup of sugar and 1/8 tsp each of nutmeg and mace as “sufficit.”
Seventeenth century England saw a craze for “buttered ale,” which was composed of unhopped ale (by then just about extinct) mixed with sugar and cinnamon, heated and topped off with a dollop of butter. Samuel Pepys mentions it in his famous diaries as a morning pick-me-up.
A century later, a wild profusion of “beer cups” were the rage. The particulars are lost now, but tantalizing names such as “Humpty Dumpty,” “clamber-down,” “hugmatee,” and “knock-me-down” offer clues to the nature—or at least the effect—of these drinks. Not far from the slightly racy names of cocktails today.
Flip, which was also known as “yard of flannel,” had a good long run in England, the Colonies and elsewhere, and featured several unique qualities. A contemporary recipe advises, “Place in a saucepan [over a burner] one quart of strong ale altogether with lumps of sugar well-rubbed over the rind of a lemon, and a small piece of cinnamon. Take off the fire, add a glass of cold ale. Have a jug with six egg yolks all beaten up with powdered sugar and grated nutmeg, stirring while doing so. Pour back and forth until nice and frothy.” A contemporary recipe suggests about half a pound of sugar for a similar quantity. A few ounces of rum was also a common stiffener.
This detailed recipe omits one of the most dramatic—and some would say essential—steps in the flip-making process. The warm beverage is further heated by the insertion of a glowing hot fireplace poker called a loggerhead. This causes the mixture to boil violently and creates a smoky, caramelized flavor much prized by flipophiles. The term “at loggerheads” refers to arguments escalated by the easy availability of these iron bars. I have been utterly unable to locate any antiques sold in modern times with that name or specified function, so it seems likely to me that the old-timers just wiped the ashes off the regular poker, got it nice and hot and proceeded to caramelize their flip.
Another flip tradition is a unique drinking glass associated with it. These are shaped like stubby shaker pint glasses, often decorated with molded or engraved designs, and range in size from less than a pint to wastebasket-size behemoths holding six quarts or more. These were passed around the party, and must have been a test of coordination and strength, and possibly sobriety as well. One I own, circa 1800 and decorated with stylized palm trees, weighs more than ten pounds when filled.
