Lockdown Cocktails week 7: Victorian Pineapple Julep

This week we’re going back to our roots and delving through the family books for inspiration. This cocktail comes not from one of our hand-written books but from the 1893 edition of the famous Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management - one of two editions collected by the family. It’s a bit more complicated than our usual lockdown cocktails, which are designed to be straightforward, but it’s fun following a Victorian recipe and recreating the cocktails of our ancestors!

This is from Mrs Beeton’s collection of American cocktails and is very different to the mint-based Julep we’re used to. The recipe calls for a ripe pineapple, peeled and sliced (tinned pineapple is an easy substitute), the juice of two oranges (orange juice will do) and raspberry syrup, which we made by adding frozen raspberries to a standard simple syrup recipe and pushing it through a sieve. The alcohol required is sparkling Moselle - we assumed any sparkling wine would do, though Moselles tend to be sweet, so go for a Prosecco or something on the sweeter side; some maraschino (a cherry liqueur which we didn’t have, but on investigation we discovered that the kirsch we had at the back of the cupboard for fondues replicates the aromatic nutty flavour from the cherry stones but is much stronger and not sweet, so we mixed it 50/50 with additional sugar syrup). And of course gin - we feel our London Dry, with its heritage-inspired botanicals, is an appropriate choice! Finally, you add Wenham Lake ice (see our earlier blog post for an explanation of this - don’t tell anyone, but we used ice from the freezer!).

Mrs Beeton’s instructions: peel and slice the pineapple into a glass bowl. Put in the bottle of wine, juice of two oranges, 1 gill (142ml) of raspberry syrup, 1 gill of maraschino (or 50/50 kirsch and simple syrup), 1 gill of gin and 1 lb of Wenham Lake ice.

It’s surprisingly tasty! In our blog post on Wenham Lake ice you can see a picture of the original recipe.