Le Ménagier de Paris

299. Bochet.
To make 6 septiers of bochet, take 6 quarts of fine, mild honey and put it in a cauldron on the fire to boil. Keep stirring until it stops swelling and it has bubbles like small blisters that burst, giving off a little blackish steam. Then add 7 septiersof water and boil until it all reduces to six septiers, stirring constantly. Put it in a tub to cool to lukewarm, and strain through a cloth. Decant into a keg and add one pint of brewer's yeast, for that is what makes it piquant - although if you use bread leaven, the flavor is just as good, but the color will be paler. Cover well and warmly so that it ferments. And for an even better version, add an ounce of ginger, long pepper, grains of paradise, and cloves in equal amounts, except for the cloves of which there should be less; put them in a linen bag and toss into the keg. Two or three days later, when the bochet smells spicy and is tangy enough, remove the spice sachet, wring it out, and put it in another barrel you have underway. Thus you can reuse these spices up to 3 or 4 times.

Item, another bochet which keeps for 4 years, and you can make a whole queue [barrel or cask, also a unit of measure] or more or less at one time if you wish. Combine three parts water and a 4th part honey, boil and skim until reduced by a 10th, and then pour into a container. Refill the cauldron and do the same again, until you have the amount you want. Let it cool and then fill a queue. The bochet will then give off something like a must that will ferment. Keep the container full so that it keeps fermenting. After six weeks or seven months [?], you must draw out all the bochet, up to the lees, and put it in a vat or other vessel. Then break apart the first container and remove the lees. Scald it, wash it, reassemble it, and fill with the liquid you set aside, and store it. It does not matter if it is tapped. Crush four and a half ounces of clove and one grain of paradise, put in a linen bag, and hang inside the keg by a cord from the bung.

Nota For each pot of foam skimmed off, add twelve pots of water and boil together: this will make a nice bochet for the household staff. Item, using other honey rather than the skim, make it the same proportions.

317. Hippocras. To make hippocras powder, pound together a quartern of very fine cinnamon, selected by tasting it, half a quartern of choice cassia buds, an ounce of hand-picked, fine white Mecca ginger, and ounce of grains of paradise, and a sixth of an ounce of nutmeg and galingale together. When you want to make hippocras, take a generous half ounce of this powder and two quarterns of sugar, and mix them together with a quarte of wine as measured in Paris [circa one half gallon]. and nota that the powder and the sugar mixed together make "duke's powder".
    To make a quarte or quartern of hippocras by measure used in Beziers, Carcassonne, or Montpelier, pulverize 5 drams of choice cinnamon, hand selected and cleaned; 3 drams of white ginger, culled and prepared; one half and a fourth drams all together of clove, grains of paradise, mace, galingale, nutmeg, and nard - more of the first, and of the other less and less of each as you go down the list. Add to this powder a pound and a half a quartern, by the heavier measure, of rock sugar, ground and mixed with the above spices. Put some wine and the sugar to melt on a dish on the fire, add the powder, mix, then put through a straining cloth and strain as many times as needed until it comes out clear and red. Nota that the tastes of sugar and cinnamon should dominate.

319. To make red white wine red at the table, in the summer gather red flowers that grow amidst grains, called perseau [red poppies] or neelle [corncockle] or passe rose [hollyhock], and let them dry enough so that they can be made into a powder. Toss it secretly into a glass of wine, and the wine will turn red.

337. To remove water from wine, put water and wine in a cupt, and plunge one end of a cotton thread into the bottom of the cup, the other end hanging out over the edge, below and outside of the cup, and you will see the water dripping, colorless, from this end. When the water has all dripped out, the red wine will begin to drip out. It seems that the same can be done with a barrel of wine.

338. To make fortified wine. Take from the vat or barrel the "mother drop" [completely clear without lees] or the flower of wine -red or white- as much as you want, and put it in an earthenware vessel, and boil it gently and moderately over a fire of very dry wood with a clear flame, without the smallest puff of smoke, and skim with a pierced wooden ladle, not an iron one. If the grapes are green that year, boil until the wine reduces to a third; and if the grapes are ripe, to a fourth. Next, set it to cool in a cask or other clean wooden vessel. When it is cooled, put it in a barrel; it will be better in the third or fourth year and in the first. Store it in a temperate place, neither hot nor cold. Set aside in a small vessel some of this boiled wine, to refill the cask in perpetuity, for you know that wine always likes to stay full.

359. To make vinegar to store, empty out the old cask of vinegar, then rinse it thoroughly with very good vinegar and not with water, hot or cold. Next, put that vinegar used for the rinsing and any lees into a wooden or clay vessel, not brass or iron. Let this vinegar and lees settle. Then pour off the clear liquid and strain, and put the solids back [the mother] in the barrel, and fill with more good vinegar. Let it sit in the sun and the heat, the top pierced in 6 places. At night and in fog, plug up all the holes, and when the sun returns, unplug as before.

From The Good Wife's Guide "Le Menagier de Paris", translated by Gina L. Greco & Christine M. Rose. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009.