Cocktail Hour: Spruce Beer

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Colonial Spruce Beer

If you’re into home-brewing, I’ve got a  recipe for you: Spruce Beer! This is a uniquely flavorful beer has been made in American since the 17th century; it would have been brewed at home with hops, spruce limbs, sugar, and no grain. I go in to its history more in depth in this Liqour.com article on drinking like a Pilgrim.

The Recipe

Spruce limbs.

The recipe for this beer would have already been old be the time it appear in the first American cookbook, American Cookery, published in 1796:

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“Essence of spruce,” or spruce essence, was a commercial product made by boiling spruce boughs, or spruce tips (the new green growths in the spring time) and reducing the resulting liquid into a condensed, highly flavored extract. You can still get it in brew shops today. I’ve made spruce beer from this recipe before, using both spruce essence and molasses, and I found the flavor of both ingredients to be completely overwhelming. So I wanted to making the beer this time around with real spruce limbs and maple syrup, ingredients more readily available around the time of the Puritans first settling Plymouth.

The maple syrup was no problem for me to source–my parents make their own. The spruce was a little more difficult. I first had to learn what a spruce tree looked like–I now know way too much about the difference between pines, firs, and spruce–and then I had to find a red spruce, the native species that would have been readily available to the Puritans in Massachusetts bay. Luckily, a friend was working in upstate New York, and Fed-Exed me a box of branches.

I tweaked my recipe with the help of an 1840 cookbook from author Eliza Leslie. She has a helpful recipe using real spruce limbs and another for a small quantity beer.

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You’re going to need some basic home-brewing knowledge to take this beer on. If you’re just getting started, I’d recommend purchasing a 1 gallon home brew kit, which it what this recipe is designed for.

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Spruce Beer
Based on a recipe from
 Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches. by Eliza Leslie, 1840

1 gallon water
1 gallon plastic bag full of spruce limbs (the tips and newer growth)
1 cup dark maple syrup
1/4 oz hops (I used Willamette and Centennial, because I thought their citrus qualities would pair nicely with the spruce. I also had difficulty finding out what types of hops would have been used historically. If you know, I’d love your input in the comments)
1 packet brewer’s yeast (a champagne yeast or an ale yeast)
6 raisins
5 cracked allspice and 1 teaspoon of ground ginger (optional)

1. Boil water, hops, and spices in a large pot for 20 minutes. Add the spruce limbs and boil 10 minutes more. If you’ve got a mesh brew bag, it helps; if not, strain the liquid. Let it stand until it is warm.

2. Sanitize a gallon glass jug–known as a fermenter. You can do this with a no rinse sanitizer, found at brewing stores. Pour the warm spruce liquid into the jug.

3. Add the yeast and the sugar. Cork the jug with a rubber stopper and an airlock. Allow it to ferment for 2-4 days, or until it stops bubbling.

4. Sanitize your bottles–I like to use 250 ml clip top stopper bottles, but you can bottle in traditional small beer bottles. I sanitize by boiling them for 30 minutes, and then letting them cool upside-down. Put three raisins in the bottom of each. Fill each bottle. Leslie says the raisins are to stop the fermentation process, but she’s mistaken; they’re to give the yeast one last meal which carbonates the beverage once it’s bottled.

5. Allow to sit another two days. Enjoy!

The Results

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When you’re done, you’ve got a nicely fizzy, milky, yellow-green beverage.

I assembled a group of historians and beer enthusiasts (and historic beer enthusiasts) to taste my early-American brew. The beer had an extremely fruity nose, some said like grapefruit. It was beautifully carbonated, like seltzer water, and had a lightness to it because of the lack of grain. With my first sip, I thought it tasted bitter. But the more I drank it, the more I realized it was quite sweet compared to most beers. I think the texture of it made me expect it to be sweet, like a soda.  It reminded some tasters of a saison or an IPA, but was not as bitter as a really hoppy IPA could be. The pine flavor definitely came through, but was not at all unpleasant. Because it’s not so heavy, you feel like you could drink it all day. But it is alcoholic–I suspect between 1%-3%, the longer it sat in the bottle.

I drank it all day, as it was intended, with a variety of 17th century puritan foods: Samp, a cooked corn porridge topped with maple sugar for breakfast; venison for lunch; and more corn and squash for dinner. It was great with all of it. I felt fine–although I did take a surprise nap in the afternoon and woke up with a headache. Over the course of a week, and it tasted progressively more tart. The colonial homebrews weren’t built to last long after the bottle was opened. They quickly soured.

I don’t know if you want to make this specific recipe; I don’t think it’s good enough for a revival. But let me put it this way: spruce trees aren’t poisonous. They are, in fact, delicious. If you’re making some winter homebrews this year, skip the spruce essence and snip a few limbs from a local tree. It’s a fun nod to America’s brewing past.

Witches, Bread and LSD: The Story of Ergot

ergotIllustration by Lisk Feng.

Some anthropologists theorize that the murderous mania of the Salem Witch Trials wasn’t caused by religious panic or hectic politics. They blame ergot, a grain fungus that causes paranoia, hallucinations and convulsions—the same symptoms that were thought to be caused by “bewitchment.”

Read the whole story–an interview with me!–on Hopes and Fears HERE.

History Dish: Burnt Cream, Grandaddy of Creme Brulee

IMG_8965We made a mess.

This spring, I led my annual “Campfire Cuisine Beyond Hotdogs: An Introduction to Hearth Cooking” classes in Brooklyn, to an enthusiastic and diverse group of students. I decided to try out a new/old recipe: Burnt Cream, the medieval ancestor of creme brulee, from the book Cooking with Fire: From Roasting on a Spit to Baking in a Tannur, Rediscovered Techniques and Recipes That Capture the Flavors of Wood-Fired Cooking.

The History

Left: A salamander, for sale from Jas Townsend and Son.

First a word on Cooking with Fire: if you like playing with fire, get this book. It starts with toasting marshmallows and progresses all the way to building a mud oven. It’s thorough and well written and I highly recommend it.

When paging through my copy, I came across a recipe I’ve wanted to try for a while: a 17th century English dessert, burnt cream. It’s an egg custard, flavored with a lemon peel and a stick of cinnamon (not vanilla, a new world fruit) and topped with a thick layer of sugar. The sugar was seared into a carmelized crust with a tool called a salamander, a flat disk made of iron on the end of a long handle, heated in the fire.

We know this dessert better as crème brûlée. How it a got a French name, no one is certain. Perhaps in one of England’s periods of Francophilia, the dish was rechristened. Perhaps it was the French, who reinvented the dish to incorporate their fanatical love of vanilla. In America, burnt custard appears as early as 1824 in Mary Randolph’s cookbook, but achieved astronomical success in the New York dining scene in the 1970s. In 1985, the New York Times wrote: “If there were a New York dessert of the year award, the 1985 ribbon would go to creme brulee, or burnt cream, which has appeared on countless menus in both French and American restaurants. I am not sure how a dish that has been consumed for centuries in Europe without great fanfare… has suddenly achieved such fame in America, but it has.”

The Recipe

IMG_8924Students Julie McMahon and CJ Knowles make the custard.

Brunt Cream
Adapted from Cooking with Fire: From Roasting on a Spit to Baking in a Tannur, Rediscovered Techniques and Recipes That Capture the Flavors of Wood-Fired Cooking

This recipe is intended to be prepared over an open fire, but is easily adapted for a modern kitchen.

2 cups whole milk
1 cup heavy cream
1 lemon peel (white pith excluded)
1 3-inch cinnamon stick
2 tablespoons flour
1/3 cup light brown sugar
3/4 cup demerara sugar
5 egg yolks

1. Slowly heat the milk, cream, lemon peel, and cinnamon in a heavy saucepan over low heat; do not boil. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour and 1/3 cup sugar. Whisk the yolks in until smooth.

2. When the milk mixture is steaming, discard lemon peel and cinnamon. Pour a steady, thin stream of hot milk into the eggs, while whisking the eggs constantly. Once the milk has been incorporated, return the mixture to the heating vessel, and cook over a low heat until the liquid thickens. If you dip a wooden spoon in the custard, it should create an even coating that holds a line when your draw your finger through it. Chill at least three hours.

3. Strew the top with the remaining sugar. Heat your salamander until it glows red; carefully touch the flat of the hot salamander to the sugar until molten. Or use your tiny kitchen blowtorch. Let cool just until the sugar hardens, and serve.

The Results

IMG_8937Thickening the custard.

I handed this recipe over to my students, and although I was there to offer direction, they had it under control. Making a custard over burning hot coals, 17th century style, is no easy thing. They totally nailed it, and the lemon-cinnamon custard was quite tasty. But we did have some technical difficulties, which were completely my fault.

See, I don’t actually have a salamander. I decided to try this recipe at the last minute, so I didn’t even have time to look for one. I figured we would find something to take its place.

IMG_8957A cream about to get burnt.

We first tried the lid to a dutch oven, covered in hot coals, but it was just a little too big to fit down in the custard tin. Then we tried an axe, which got nice and hot, but wasn’t big enough to be practical. Finally, we tried the bottom of a metal bowl, which was the right size, but would not get hot enough to sear the sugar. So, fail, on my part. We ate the custard anyway, and it tasted heavenly.

IMG_8961Creative, but not working.

When I give this recipe another whirl with a proper salamander, I’ll update this post!