Clareit

Mulled wine is most often red wine with spices, served warm at Christmas. In the Netherlands we drink Bisschopswijn (‘bishop’s wine’), also a warm, spiced red wine, on Saint Nicholas Eve (5 December), and in Spain you can drink Sangria, cold red wine with spices and fruit. Actually Martini is also a spiced wine!

In the past mulled wine was a popular drink, and there were many recipes to prepare spiced wine at home. Below is a Dutch recipe for red or white wine with spices and sweetened with honey.

The Notabel boecxken van cokeryen

These recipes are taken from what is known as ‘the oldest printed cookbook in Dutch’, Een notabel boecxken van cokeryen (‘A remarkable booklet on cookery’). It was published in 1514 by printer Thomas vander Noot in Brussels, the author is unknown. There are 175 recipes, for meat, fish, pasties, sauces, pottages, pies and drinks. Recipes for vegetables or fruit are absent. Many of the recipes from this book originate from older cookery books, and the Notabel boecxken itself has been a source for the Nyeuwen coock boeck of Gheeraert Vorselman from 1556. The recipes for clareit on this page from the Notabel boecxken are also to be found there (Nyeuwen Coock boeck XVI 15 and 16, edition Cockx-Indestege p.226, see bibliography)

Don’t you mean ‘claret’?

There are three recipes for clareit, and four for hypocras in the Notabel boecxken. Clareit is NOT to be confused with the English ‘claret’, which is a red Bordeaux wine. The Dutch clareit means “a kind of […] clarified spiced wine” (according to the large Dutch lexicon WNT which considered the noun already obsolete in 1916, WNT III [2-3] kol.2051).

Mind you, despite the fact that the wine is sweetened with honey, this is not mead. Mead is made from fermented honey, not wine from grapes to which honey is added, even though such wines are sometimes sold as ‘mead’.
Here you’ll find two recipes for red and yellow clareit. In the Notabel boecxken these recipes are preceded by a recipe for white clareit, which is paradoxically made with brown sugar instead of honey, and the spices cinnamon, ginger, cardamom, long pepper, galanga, sweet flag (calamus) and coriander seeds. I very much doubt whether this ‘white’ clareit will be white.

Wine from all over Europe

The anonymous sixteenth-century author describes the best wines to be used for making ‘clareit’. These wines are from France (Poitou), Germany (Rhine wine), Spain (tenture) and either Greece or Spain (romenie was originally produced in Greece, but later also in Spain). Then there was Bastaard wine, comparable to Italian Vino Santo. These wines were mostly sweet, but what they really tasted like is hard to say. Even if you use wines from the same regions, different kinds of vines may have been cultivated, and vinification is modernized. Just choose a wine you like to make your clareit, because if you use dishwater wine, you’ll get dishwater clareit.

Elsewhere on this site you can find a French recipe for Hypocras (red spiced wine) from the fourteenth century, and another recipe from the Notabel boecxken, for Stuffed Eggs. There is also a recipe for Smoking Bishop from the nineteenth century and an excellent Divine Wine from seventeenth-century France.

The original recipes

The recipes are from the edition of Een notabel boecxken van cokeryen (1514 printed by Thomas vander Noot in Brussels) from 1994 (see bibliography below).

Modern adaptation of the recipe

The Notabel boecxken gives two separate recipes for red and yellow claret, but these are so alike that I combined them into one recipe.
For 1 bottle; preparation 10 minutes (tempering and straining) with 15 to 60 minutes in between.

The spices
1 tsp each of cinnamon and ginger
½ tsp each of cloves and grains of paradise
¼ tsp each of nutmeg and galangal
pinch of pepper (long pepper according to the recipe, but black is also ok)

Just for yellow clareit
¼ tsp crushed saffron

For the wine
1 bottle dry red or white wine
180 gr honey and 1 dl water for red wine
150 gr honey en ¾ dl water for white wine

Preparation

Combine honey and water in a pan and bring to the boil. Skim if necessary. Add spices and let cool. Add wine, cover directly on the surface of the wine with a sheet of plastic foil and leave for at least fifteen minutes. Then strain the spiced wine through a sieve with a fine cloth or paper towel in it. If the filter is clogged, change the paper towel or shift the cloth to a clean spot. Strain until the wine is clear, and pour the clareit back into the original bottle. Because of the added honey and water, the volume has increased, so pour the excess in a glass and cover the wine with plastic foil. There will always remain some dregs at the bottom of the bottle.
Let the wine rest (upright) in the refrigerator for at least one day. Handle the bottle with care, to keep the wine as clear as possible. Even placing the bottle with a thump on the table will cause the dregs to disperse again in the wine.

To serve

The yellow and red claret are both served cold.  Serve as an aperitive (like vermouth), or to accompany a dessert, like these medieval wafers.

Ingredients

All descriptions of ingredients

Galangal

Both Alpinia galanga (greater galanga) and Alpinia officinarum (lesser galanga) are from South China. The rhizome of lesser galanga has a stronger taste. In Indonesia this spice is called laos, and that is the name by which it is known in the netherlands. In the Middle Ages this was a popular spice. It resembles ginger in taste. Not surprisingly, galanga belongs to the same family.

Long pepper

Also known as Javanese pepper (Piper longum). The very small grains grow in flower spikes, and that is how you can buy them. If you can’t find it, simply use (more) black pepper.
Long pepper was already known to the ancient Greeks and Romans, and was not always differentiated from black pepper (Piper nigrum). Towards the end of the Middle Ages long pepper gradually dissappeared from the kitchen, but it was still used occasionally in the sixteenth century. Long pepper is hotter than black pepper, but not as hot as chilli peppers.

Grains of paradise

This spice was used in the European kitchen from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century, and was at the top of its popularity in fourteenth century France. The plant (Aframomum melegueta) is related to ginger, but it is the seeds that are used as spice. It is still in use as spice in the region of West Africa, where it is indigenous. Since it is not easy to come by, you can also use an alternative. Cardamom is often mentioned, but you get the best effect if you add a little black pepper to the cardamom.

Turnsole

In the recipe for red claret from the sixteenth century the wine is coloured even more red with turnsole. This is a vegetable dye from Chrozophora tinctoria that can give a red or blue colour, depending on the acidity of the dish, like litmus.
One method of applying turnsole was to steep a piece of cloth in the dye, then transfer it to red wine which could be heated. The colour of red wine was not as deep as it is now, red wine looked more like rosé. Because modern red wine already has a deep red colour, it would be superfluous to use turnsole.

Oude maten in de receptteksten

Dragina – Drachma, about 3,9 gram (a little less than 1 teaspoon, apothecary system)
Pint – About 6 deciliter (about the same as the modern pint)
Quaert – Two pints
Stoop – Four pints

Bibliography

The editions below were used by me. Links refer to available editions.

• E. Cockx-Indestege, Eenen nyeuwen coock boeck. Kookboek samengesteld door Gheeraert Vorselman en gedrukt te Antwerpen in 1560. (‘A new cookbook by Gheeraert Vorselman’) Wiesbaden, 1971.
• R. Jansen-Sieben and M. van der Molen Willebrands, Een notabel boecxken van cokeryen. Het eerste gedrukte Nederlandstalige kookboek circa 1514 uitgegeven te Brussel door Thomas Vander Noot. Bezorgd en van commentaar voorzien door […]. Amsterdam, 1994. (Internet edition)
• J.M. Verhoeff, De oude Nederlandse maten en gewichten. Amsterdam, 1983. An older publication from 1902 from W.C.H. Staring ([…] Maten, gewichten en munten […]) can be consulted online.

Clareit, spiced wine with honey
© Auteur Christianne Muusers