Clarrey


Clarrey on right, hippocras on left

205. Clarrey. Take kanel & galinga, greyns de paris, and a lytel peper, & make pouder, & temper hit wyt god wyte wyne & the þrid perte honey & ryne hit þorow a cloþ.

- Hieatt, Constance B. and Sharon Butler. Curye on Inglish: English Culinary Manuscripts of the Fourteenth-Century (Including the Forme of Cury). London: For the Early English Text Society by the Oxford University Press, 1985.

My main reference is the 14th C English recipe (above) and modern redaction found on the Gode Cookery web site. I was attracted to the recipe because I vastly prefer sweet white wine over any reds, and the limited number of spices made me feel more secure that I'd like the resulting flavor. I vastly understated how very much I would love the result!

The Gode Cookery recipe reads:

Bring the wine and honey to a boil; reduce heat & skim off the scum as it rises. Taste for sweetness; add honey as necessary. Remove from heat, stir in spices, and allow to sit covered for 24 hours. After sitting, the spices will create a thick residue which will settle to the bottom. Using a ladle, pass the wine into another container through a strainer lined with 2 or 3 layers of cheesecloth to remove the spices, being careful to leave as much of the spice residue in the pot as possible. Bottle. Make at least 1 month before serving. A good Clarrey aged for a year or more is exquisite!

For the base wine, I used an inexpensive (ie, under $10) bottle of sweet Riesling, a German wine with some wonderful fruity undertones. Unfortunately I can't remember how much honey I added, but I feel sure it was closer to 1 cup than to 2, seeing as the Riesling is sweet to begin with. I thought I didn't have galingale in the house (I should have checked! It was right there in the spice box!) so I used ginger. [Note: Riesling comes in dry and sweet varieties, so I suggest writing down the German words for 'dry' and 'sweet' before you go shopping.]  I used locally raised (Durham, NC) honey as I thought it would give more flavor (rather than just sweetness) than sugar.

The "thick residue" should really be called "wine snot," which thankfully smells wonderful even though it looks disgusting. I am not satisfied with using cheesecloth to strain the clarrey--I felt I might have gotten more liquid but less 'snot' into the bottle if I'd used a period style hippocras bag, particularly one made of wool. [I'm adding that to my 'to do' list of things to make]. I wouldn't have known to boil the bottle and cap before using, so Thank You to the A&S 50 list for clueing me in!  I don't think there could be much (if any) alcohol content left in the final beveridge, although being so thick and sweet you only drink small quantities at one time.  The bottle shown above is not what I stored the clarrey in (I reused the original wine bottle). I decanted the clarrey into this second bottle for display at Atlantia's Kingdom Arts Festival in March 2009 because it looks less jarringly modern than the Riesling bottle and screw top. (No comments needed on the tin foil and pink elastic!)

This wine goes wonderfully with the English cakes documented elsewhere on this site. I will definitely be making clarrey again!