Alcohol-Free Peppered Honey Grape Juice, after Apicius
Reader ratingsThe Roman traveler’s peppered honey stirred into chilled white grape juice in place of wine: an alcohol-free cup built on the Apicius recipe for four.
- Recipe makes
- About 530 ml, 4 small cups
- Prep
- Cook
- Total
Includes about 20 minutes for the peppered honey to cool before the juice goes in.
Peppered honey grape juice in four earthenware cups, with white grape juice, green grapes and a bowl of peppered honey.
The story behind the recipe
This is the Roman traveler’s peppered honey with grape juice in the cup instead of wine. Apicius, in the Roman cookbook that bears his name, has the cook keep ground pepper in skimmed honey in a small vessel and mix it with wine whenever a drink is wanted on the road. He gives no version without wine. Swapping in grape juice is our own change, and it makes this an alcohol-free cup in the Roman manner, not a Roman recipe.
Grape juice in a Roman kitchen
Unfermented grape juice was not foreign to the Romans. They drank fresh grape must, mustum, before it could turn to wine, as on our Mustum page, and boiled it down into the grape syrup behind the Defrutum Cooler. What they did not have was a pasteurized bottle of juice that stays unfermented, which is what makes this version easy.
The recipe behind it, and the Egyptian cup that sent us looking, are in What Did Ancient Egyptians Drink?, where the painted serving woman may have added “a dash of some spicy cordial,” in one Egyptologist’s guess. Apicius’s honey and pepper are a much later Roman comparison, not her recipe.
Read more about this recipe
Making it today
Grape juice is sweeter than dry wine, so we halve the honey of our Peppered Honey Wine to 15 g for four cups. The honey is warmed with a spoonful of water and skimmed, as Apicius’s “skimmed honey” asks, then peppered and cooled. Each cup takes a quarter of it and 125 ml of chilled white grape juice, stirred in just before drinking. Use a juice labeled 0.0% alcohol; nothing here ferments, so it stays at zero.
Recipe makes: About 530 ml, 4 small cups
Ingredients
My drinksFor About 530 ml, 4 small cups. Quantities are shown as written.
Quantities as written here, for About 530 ml, 4 small cups.
- Honey15 g
- Water15 ml
- Finely ground black pepper1/8 metric tsp (5 ml per tsp)
- White grape juice, chilled500 ml
Measurement notes
Ingredients as written here
- 15 g honey
- 15 ml water
- 1/8 tsp finely ground black pepper
- 500 ml white grape juice, chilled
Equipment
Small saucepan
Spoon
Small jar or bowl
4 small cups
Instructions
Put the honey and the water in the small saucepan and warm them gently, stirring, until the honey is runny.
Bring it just to a gentle simmer for about a minute and skim off any foam with the spoon.
Take it off the heat, stir in the finely ground black pepper and pour it into the small jar. Leave it to cool, about 20 minutes.
Divide the peppered honey between the cups. Pour a little of the white grape juice, chilled into each and stir to loosen the honey, then fill each cup with the rest of its quarter of the juice and stir again.
Serve it at once, stirring once more, since the pepper settles.
Nutrition
90calories per serving
- Recipe makes
- About 530 ml, 4 small cups
- Servings
- 4
Roughly estimated from USDA FoodData Central values for white grape juice and honey, for one 130 ml cup.
Recipe notes
When adjusting quantities
Keep about 4 g of honey and a small pinch of pepper to each 125 ml of grape juice.
Notes
Quantities mentioned in these notes don’t change when you adjust the batch.
Changes from the source: grape juice in place of wine, and every amount, are ours. Apicius gives no quantities and no alcohol-free version.
Make the peppered honey fresh for each batch, and keep the juice chilled until you use it.
Honey is not vegan. For a sharper cup, a squeeze of lemon in each is our suggestion, not Apicius’s.
Scaling changes the ingredients only; glassware, ice and timings need their own judgment. To adapt this recipe further, try the recipe tool at TuneMyRecipe (opens in a new tab), our sister site.
Sources and attribution
Our alcohol-free version of Apicius, De re coquinaria, Book I, recipe 2, “Conditum melizomum viatorium,” ed. C. Giarratano and F. Vollmer (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1922), p. 6
Recipe details
- Drink
- Alcohol-free
- Drink family
- Sodas & Soft Drinks
- Era
- Ancient Rome
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Occasion
- Dry January