Buttered beere: Work in progress
"So to bed, drinking butter-ale", Samuel Pepys, diary entry, March 17, 1666
As I’ve mentioned before, being a writer means juggling innumerable idea balls so there’s constantly lots of bits and pieces which are semi-written but not yet out in the wild. Here’s something that is still searching for a home, part of a pitch for a book which hasn’t been greenlighted but I’m confident will see the light of day some day. It’s part of a project with Vincent Franklin, my co-author on Menus That Made History (which is due for republication in the next month or so), who is namechecked fairly early on. Cheers!
Buttered beere
Whatever your preferences when it comes to beer, few drinkers would argue that what would really improve their pint is to boil it up with a couple of eggs and a slab of butter. However, go back several centuries and you’d have found plenty of takers.
Buttered beere was one of the many variants of ‘caudel’, a kind of mulled wine with herbs and spices that was popular from the dark ages right up to the 20th century. It was often given to people who were a bit under the weather and particularly to women who had just given birth and needed a bit of a pick-me-up. While a non-alcoholic butterbeer has had a recent resurgence thanks to JK Rowling, my only previous encounter with a beer and egg dining combination was way back in my student days in a speed eating competition in 1989. An unwrapped egg of the Cadbury’s Crème variety was placed at the bottom of a pint of lager and the laurels of victory went to the gentleman – naturally no woman was stupid enough to take part – who downed his pint and egg the fastest.
Similarly, the medieval buttered beere recipes we investigated all involve more liquid dairy than most modern drinkers are usually looking for - long recipe short, take your beer, add spices, egg yolk and sugar, heat, add butter, drink. It’s quite an intimidating formula so we decided to take it slowly and carefully, taking a three-pronged approach to reproducing this historic drink.
In ye good olde days, the beer used for this concoction would have been made with little or no hops which only became part of the brewer’s armoury from about the 1520s onwards. Instead, beermakers used plenty of herbs and spices known collectively as ‘gruit’, an approach particularly popular among monks. It’s not easy to get hold of it in the 21st century but we tracked down a couple of contenders.
Stone Angel (5.2% ABV) is brewed in Bradford-upon-Avon by Kettlesmith specially to replicate this taste. It features yarrow, broom, heather, hyssop, bog myrtle, mint, sage, dandelion, rosemary, cubebs (a bit like allspice), coriander, cinnamon, and liquorice. Meanwhile, Alba (7.5% ABV) from William Bros in Scotland, apparently still popular in the north of Scotland up to the start of the 20th century, is spiced with pine and spruce sprigs. Finally, we tried something a little more modern, Timothy Taylors Landlord. Naturally, we had a little taste test first, although it was only 9.45am, a little early to get on the ale, even for Vince.
While Timothy Taylors is an old friend, neither of us is familiar with low/zero hop beers. The Stone Angel was certainly herbier than expected though we were hard pressed to identify any particular plant. The Alba’s strong aroma unfortunately reminded us both slightly of disinfectant and while it scored points for zinginess, we were a little nervous about how this might work for the final drink.
One test we did not feel able to carry out with any degree of proficiency was a strange way of assessing beer during this period in history by professional ‘ale-conners’. These fine gentlemen were a cross between officious trading standards officers and eager taste testers, regularly making sure that brewers and landladies were not cutting corners (the post still exists in the City of London though now is purely ceremonial). The story goes that one of the key checks involved the ale-conners pouring some beer onto a wooden bench and then sitting on it – if it stuck to their leather trousers then it got the thumbs down as being too sugary (interestingly, in some versions if it stuck to their trousers then it got the thumbs up). It’s a good story but, like the one about people only drinking beer because the water back then was unfit for human consumption, appears largely made up.
The oldest recipe for buttered beere appears in The Good Huswifes Handmaide for the Kitchin, written by Thomas Dawson and published in 1588. It calls for three pints of beer, but we felt that was a big ask before elevenses so scaled it down to just the one. Which proved to be a good call. We started strongly, pouring the beer into the pan without any spillage, but then hit our first snag. While Dawson was one of the earliest writers to actually include fairly exact quantities of each ingredient, his instruction for us to add to the beer “one penniworth” each of nutmeg, cloves, and ginger, left us scratching our heads. We went for the equally precise “a bit”, about an eighth of a teaspoon and pressed on.
While we warmed up this rather pleasant-smelling potion, we beat an egg yolk with about 70g of golden granulated sugar in a bowl. When the beer nearly came to a boil, we took it off the heat and stirred in the sweet stuff. Back onto the heat, fairly gently for a couple of minutes, and then the final triumphant ingredient, butter. To be exact, or rather not very exact, “a dish of butter”. We decided to work with rather than against our statin tablets and went for about 30g. In it went, one final whisk, a quick sieve (which happily removed the few bits of scrambled egg at the bottom of the pan), and then into a couple of water glasses, looking a bit like a really poor coffee that had escaped from a 1970s Wimpy. It was…
… really not too bad. A bit butterscotchy with a definite herby edge and a beery kick at the end, not wholly unlike what you can try at a Harry Potter theme park in fact. A pint would have been a bit much. Actually no, a pint would have been far too much, and even a glassful was a bit filling, but a large sherry glass of it at Christmas would be quite palatable. We wondered what it would be like chilled so we chilled it. It tasted just like it did when it was hot, only now it was cold. With a bit of a skin/film/crust.
We moved into round two with raised expectations.
The Alba was much livelier. It spurted out of the bottles and it really frothed up when we started cooking it. I mean, really frothed up. New beer, new recipe, this time from Robert May’s The Accomplisht Cook from 1664 which advised boiling the beer then removing the scum, but there was so much scum that we had to turn the heat off before the whole drink disappeared.
This recipe dispensed with the sugar and the warming herbs – the two elements that we’d enjoyed in Dawson’s brew – and replaced them slightly worryingly with liquorice root and anise seeds. It was harder than we’d expected to get hold of the liquorice sticks and it cost £5 for a bagful – it would be a shame to spoil the ending of this story, but we’re telling you right now that it was five pounds poorly spent, even though it brought back nostalgic memories of chewing on them as nippers. As with the 1588 recipe we then heated this up, adding it slowly to the beaten egg yolk to hopefully prevent a repeat of the mild scrambling episode. Then we added the butter, reheated, and strained. It was…
… absolutely disgusting. This is obviously not the Alba’s fault – I finished off a spare bottle of it the next day with my dinner and enjoyed it - but if you take only one thing away from this book it should be that you never make this version, certainly not without adding sugar. It made us both feel a bit sick, genuinely nauseous. It was a waste of decent beer and we had to have a cup of tea afterwards to calm ourselves down.
Third time lucky?
We followed the first liquorice-free recipe, this time adding a bit less sugar and a bit more egg, and it was the best of the bunch. Probably because we’re not used to hop-less beer, it simply tasted more… beery. Also we both like a pint of Landlord and the original taste was, fortunately, the final flavour left in the mouth rather than the tang of sweet buttery scrambled egg. However, a little went a long way even with this variant and we would recommend small glassfuls all round rather than tankards at your festive gathering.