Restos serve mulsum!
Good to know it’s still around.
Fine grape melomel.
Melomel is a mead-like drink made by fermenting honey with a fruit juice rather than with water. I make a melomel with apple juice and some herbs and spices so strictly speaking it could also be classified as metheglyn (medicinal mead). Metheglyn was a way for people to take small regular doses of medicinal herbs for chronic diseases or for general body maintenance tonics, and I find the formula for the one I most often make, Queen Elizabeth’s Mead, quite fascinating, in that the herbs it contains taste pleasant and enhance the apple and clover honey flavours of the drink, but they are all also herbs used at the time to treat migraine headaches and painful menstruation. Mine is loosely based on the recipe called ‘Queen Elizabeth’s Mead’ from Sir Kenelm Digby’s book ‘The Knight’s Closet Open’d’, a compilation of recipes he collected from his fellow members of the court of Queen Elizabeth the First. A fascinating work!
I also often make the other recipe the queen contributed to his book, a rosehip sauce called Sauce Eglantine, which can be made sweet as a dessert sauce with pancakes, waffles, or nowadays with a good French vanilla icecream. It was said to be her favourite dessert sauce.
It can also be made in a savoury form as a sauce for meat, and goes very well with venison, pork, lamb or goat meat. I grow my own rosehips so some years I have enough to make both.
