Recipes for Butter Beer

G’day,

Hear ye, hear ye!

Let it be known that from this day forward, Wednesdays shall be historical recipe days.

In our last reader poll, we asked the community what you’d like to see more of. And one of the highest voted topics (by quite a large margin) was adding a bit of food history and historical recipes to the mix.

We are very happy that this was one thing that the everybody seemed to agree on, because we are history nerds over here.

Today we start with recipes for”butter beer.” Butter beer is a Tudor-era delicacy seems particularly well-suited to dealing with the last bit of the Canadian winter chill that most of us are just beginning to thaw out of.

A look at the ingredients

In Tudor times, fresh drinking water was widely considered unhealthy and unsafe to consume, as it was often contaminated by sewage. So beer or ale was one of the most important ways to hydrate, even for children. However, it should be noted that beer was usually brewed without hops in those days, which resulted in a less alcoholic product than what we are used to now.

When it comes to the sugar, it would have been an ingredient reserved only for the very wealthy during most of the middle ages. However, by the 16th and 17th centuries, new farming cultivation methods and sources from the New World, significantly increased its availability to all classes of society. So, the recipes we see for butter beer below, were likely also enjoyed by middle and even lower middle-class families.

The recipes

Like many historical recipes, there are measurements and instructions that will leave a modern reader scratching their heads a bit. But that’s fine. It’s part of the fun.

The first recipe is from 1588, while the second is from the 1660s. Enjoy:

Take three pintes of Beere, put five yolkes of Egges to it, straine them together, and set it in a pewter pot to the fyre, and put to it halfe a pound of Sugar, one penniworth of Nutmegs beaten, one penniworth of Cloves beaten, and a halfepenniworth of Ginger beaten, and when it is all in, take another pewter pot and brewe them together, and set it to the fire againe, and when it is readie to boyle, take it from the fire, and put a dish of sweet butter into it, and brewe them together out of one pot into an other. —The Good Huswifes Handmaide for the Kitchin, 1588

Take beer or ale and boil it, then scum it, and put to it some liquorish and anniseeds, boil them well together; then have in a clean flaggon or quart pot some yolks of eggs well beaten with some of the foresaid beer, and some good butter; strain your butter'd beer, put it in the flaggon, and brew it with the butter and eggs. —'The Accomplisht Cook' by Robert May, 1660