This is part eleven of the “Twelve Posts of Christmas,” a series exploring twelve traditions of the Christmas season.
Believe it or not, dear reader, we are nearing the end of our Christmas journey. I am grateful to those who have stayed on board this festive train — we’ll roll into our final destination tomorrow.
For today’s post, I wanted to write about something warm (I’ve had to pause to warm up my fingers sporadically while typing this). As wintry nor’easters swoop in and temperatures drop, what better way to stay cozy than with a glass of warm, mulled wine?
There are many variations: glögg, wassail, sangria, lutendrank, hypocras, Smoking Bishop, glühwein, and — my personal favorite — conditum paradoxum, to name a few. (That last one is an ancient Roman recipe, as you may have guessed.)
Like many great things, mulled wine seems to have originated in ancient Rome. The drink — commonly known as calda (yes, as in “scalding”) — was quite popular in the city of antiquity, particularly among the plebeians. The warm beverage was often sold in the first kind of fast-food joints, a thermopolium, which literally means “hot shop.” Large terracotta pots served as warming vessels for pre-made food, which was kept hot by a heating system installed under the stone counter. Thermopolia lined busy streets — city-dwellers could pop in and take their lunch to go or grab a stool and sip some wine. (I would not mind it if Starbucks offered mulled wine.)
The Roman playwright Titus Maccius Plautus, who composed his works in the third and second centuries b.c., makes common reference to the hot drink in his plays. In The Braggart Captain, the characters Palaestrio and Lucrio have a comedic exchange about the latter’s overconsumption of his master’s wine. Lucrio asserts that he didn’t drink the wine, “because, in fact, I only sipped; for it was too hot; it burnt my throat.”
In another one of Plautus’s plays, The Weevil, the ever-hungry Curculio, sent by his friend on a crucial errand, grumbles against the low-life Athenians he has to encounter on the streets. “You may always see them enjoying themselves in the hot liquor-shops; when they have scraped up some trifle, with their covered heads they are drinking mulled wine, sad and maudlin they depart: if I stumble upon them here, from every single one of them I’ll squeeze out a belch.”
The Romans — just like you and your 1.5 L bottle of Barefoot Red Blend — mulled cheap wine to make it more palatable. Wine was almost always mixed with water or honey to cut the astringency, and such is the case for conditum paradoxum, or “surprise wine.”
Apicius, a Roman culinary archivist who collected recipes into something of a cookbook, begins his ten-book collection with the recipe for conditum paradoxum. As all Roman dinners were started with this sort of drink, so too his cookbook. The stuff is called “surprise wine” probably because of the peppercorn (or allspice) used to spice it up. The finished product has a clear, golden color, but the peppercorn adds a zing. Mastic, bay leaves, and saffron round out the flavor profile.
The recipe calls for approximately five liters of honey and 17 liters of white wine — the immense quantity reveals that the recipe is geared toward the hosting of a feast. Either that, or the beverage was consumed so regularly, that a standard household could cruise through five gallons of the stuff in a short time span. (If you are so inclined to make your own version of conditum paradoxum at home, please let me know how it turns out.)
Stay warm out there!