Final group of Frigid Week Hot Drink Recipes is gluggs, syllabubs, wassails, and assorted punches. By the time you see this, the weather will probably have been driven you to drink. Most are alcoholic, though some–like this one–are not, or you could omit / substitute.

Get the punch bowl out!

Clementine is in Virginia…

Here I give you bountiful dishes offered from the Williamsburg Inn and the Travis House, a prize selection from thousands of old recipes culled from early-day cookbooks and home files. Things like the greengage pie and Albemarle County Possum Gravy were as necessary to the survival of the history of the period as holly hedges and the Governor’s Palace.

Virginia’s school children were asked to ask their mothers and grandmothers for the oldest recipes in the family cookbooks. Of course prizes were offered and the contributions rolled in. These recipes called for “butter the size of an egg,” a “generous goblet of sugar,” “as much saleratus as would lie on a penny” … They measured molasses by gulps, and spices by pinches. One famous sponge-cake recipe read, “as many eggs as you please, their weight in sugar and one-half their weight in flour.”
For three years the food historians dug into the age-worn cookbooks that Martha Washington and her contemporaries had studied with such devotion, “for a way to a man’s heart,” they told each other gravely. No idler’s job, adopting these old menus and recipes to modern appetites.

—Clementine Paddleford, How America Eats (1960)

CHOWNING’S HOT SPICED PUNCH

“Use at Yule Log Ceremony.”

Yield: 8 portions

“Pour 1 quart apple cider into a pan with 3 cinnamon sticks and the juice of 1 lemon. Allow to simmer gently for ½ hour. Make a cheesecloth bag and fill with 1 teaspoon nutmeg and 1 teaspoon cloves. Drop into apple cider and steep until punch is spicy enough to suit your taste.”